No sooner had he arrived at Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge's Saigon residence, than Broadway Producer David Merrick, 52, was bristling. Only Mary Martin and three other principals of Hello, Dolly! were at the party. How come none of the other 68 troupers who had been perking up the troops in South Viet Nam were invited? By way of retaliation, snipped Merrick, "I cut the ambassador dead--left him a floating island of ice in his sea of protocol." Still, the ambassador did pretty well standing on his protocol floe. After Mary warbled through ditties from South Pacific, Lodge whooped into Minnie the Mermaid ("She forgot her morals down among the corals"). Later, the State Department reported that Merrick had made a slight mistake--it was Mary's husband, Richard Halliday, who had drawn up the guest list from Dolly. Producer Merrick sheepishly decided to recast the ambassador as a "charming, handsome man."

Electrifying! Breathtaking! Scary! Bravado Bullfighter Manuel Benitez (El Cordobes), was performing again. Had the bulls been good? No, but the hailstorm was terrific, gasped the flamboyant matador as his six-seater Piper Aztec landed at Cordoba airport after passing through gusts at 10,000 ft. "It was awful. I've never been so scared in my life," marveled El Cordobes. A good thing he's been taking flying lessons, Manolo said, because at one point, "a gust hit the plane and the pilot was hurt, and I had to take over the controls for a little while. I'd rather face all the bulls I've fought this season than go through those five minutes again."

Everything was bubbly as Funny Girl Barbra Streisand, 23, gave Husband Elliott Gould a loving buss backstage at Broadway's Martin Beck Theater after Elliott opened in a mock Sennett musical called Drat! The Cat! Then some of those cool New York cats--the critics--spoiled the party. They decided that, while Elliott was charming enough as a simple-souled cop who falls in love with a cat burglaress, they weren't so charmed by Librettist Ira Levin's pratfalling plot. As Mrs. Gould commiserated with her husband, the producers closed the play after a six-day run.

"You throw Her Majesty in," urged Prince Bernhard. It was midnight, and everyone was feeling pretty democratic, but the palace aide, for some curious reason, still demurred. So finally, the Prince himself sneaked over, seized The Netherlands' Queen Juliana, 56, clad in a cocktail dress and suavely heaved her into the swimming pool at the Hotel Caravanserai on St. Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles. Thus the Dutch royal couple, on a ten-day tour of the islands, regally put everyone at ease. Prince Bernhard had already been dunked in his tux, most of the other guests had followed him in like a pack of performing Kennedys at Hickory Hill, and now all the subjects lent a hand in fishing Her Majesty out of the drink. Next morning the management sent some divers down after some of the ladies' jewelry.

She kept the whole glittering Golconda--the 51-carat diamond ring, the Sarah Bernhardt bracelet, the seven-strand baroque pearls and all the rest --stashed in a Hattie Carnegie dress box camouflaged with old lingerie under the bed. When the horrified insurance company protested, nonagenarian Cosmetics Czarina Helena Rubinstein had the jumble of jewels packed up in manila envelopes and squirreled away under E for emeralds and R for rubies in a locked filing cabinet. No need for all the fuss, though. Three hoods tried to rob her a year before she died last spring, and elfin Helena angrily screamed them out of the bedroom of her Park Avenue triplex. The fabulously ill-kempt collection, amassed over 60 years and often valued at $1,000,000 survived until last week, when all but a dozen of the finest pieces willed to her sisters and niece were sold at auction in Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries for a total of $371,715.

Ill lay: Protestant Theologian Paul Tillich, 79, in Chicago's Billings Hospital after a mild heart attack; Italian Foreign Minister and U.N. General Assembly President Amintore Fanfani, 57, in Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital after he ruptured a quadriceps tendon in his right leg in a spill outside a friend's house; France's gossiping Existentialist Simonede Beauvoir, 57, fetched home by Old Comrade Jean-Paul Sartre to recover in Paris from badly bruised legs and chest after her car collided with a truck in Burgundy.

Because of the "power and integrity" of his epic, And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), the Swedish Academy awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature to Cossack Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, 60. In Moscow the Writers' Union called the award the "rehabilitation of the Nobel Prize." Western critics recalled what the prize was being "rehabilitated" from--the 1958 episode when the party bludgeoned the late Boris Pasternak into "voluntarily" refusing the prize. Sholokhov himself had got in some of the licks, denouncing the Swedes as "unobjective" and belittling the author of Doctor Zhivago as a "hermit crab." Now that the Academy had demonstrated its objectivity to his satisfaction, Sholokhov smiled and announced: "I gratefully accept the Nobel Prize."

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