Last year stately, plump Queen Juliana of The Netherlands walked up for her annual Speech from the Throne with the heavy grace of a Wagnerian diva. Last week a trim, svelte (25 Ibs. lighter) Juliana delivered another royal oration, and the London Sunday Dispatch gleefully revealed what it claimed to be the slimming secret: a bland diet ordered by a fat, fiftyish hair-restorer salesman named Jos de Cock, who runs the "Enorga Institute" in The Hague. After an analysis of strips of litmus paper that a prospective weight loser licks after meals, went the story, De Cock devises a special diet for a low-calorie fee (sample: $37 for eight weeks' advice, plus $17 for the diet lists). Despite palace "No comments," Hollanders thought that De Cock might soon be paring a few more royal lines: at Juliana's side during the speech was Crown Princess Beatrix, hefty for her 20 years, and an estimated 10 Ibs. heavier than last year.

After seven bright years as NATO's elder statesman and tireless gadfly, the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, was retiring. One afternoon last week, after a round of farewell parties, doughty Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, 70, stepped out of SHAPE'S headquarters building near Paris, marched briskly past cheering troops (including a blue-grey contingent of the Germans he had fought so well in World War II). Then Monty shook hands with his boyish-looking boss, U.S. Air Force General Lauris Norstad, 51, and drove off. "Silly old boy," mused one British private soldier, "but we'll miss him."

In a rare moment of relaxing, the Air Force's Vice Chief of Staff, bluff, gruff General Curtis E. LeMay, who two weeks ago set a world record for a nonstop 7,100-mile flight from Japan to Washington (time: 12 hr. 28 min.) in a KC-135 jet tanker, critically checked out the stogie-lighting skill of daughter Patricia Jane, 19. The occasion: a father-daughter dinner at the capital's National Press Club, where pretty Pat won a door prize, but failed to coax her high-flying papa from his chair for even one dance.

The Los Angeles courtroom was smog-filled and torrid. Off went the judge's coat. Off went the lawyers' coats. On stayed the clothes of the shapely plaintiff, Actress June Havoc, 41, and for a change, those of a key witness, her stripping sister Gypsy Rose Lee, 45, demure in a blue polka-dot dress. Cool and calm, June and Gypsy waited for the hearing to begin on June's complaint that she had been bilked in a real estate deal. But the smog won out, and the court was recessed. "In this kind of weather," said Gypsy, surveying the shirtsleeved crowd, "I don't blame anyone for wanting to peel."

Loping off into the sunset--and temporary bachelorhood--square-jawed Cinemactor Guy Madison reckoned he'd soon be back on the ranch with his bride of four years, sometime Starlet Sheila Connolly, and the three little Madisons. "There is no thought of divorce," said he. "I think when a girl has had three babies in rapid succession, it leaves her a little tired and depressed."

Vacationing briefly in the Miami area, Vice President Richard Nixon squeezed in a movie (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and a song-filled lunch with local Kiwanians, unveiled a pair of trim if hairy limbs as he donned shorts for a round of golf with a friend, Miami Democrat C. G. ("Bebe") Rebozo.

Everest-Sealer Sir John Hunt recalled for friends last week a splendid Gallic tribute from France's Alpine Club following his return in 1953 from Nepal. After a dry series of appropriately dignified ceremonies, Hunt and his fellow climbers were whisked away to a Left Bank nightclub. As the lights dimmed, out trotted a pride of chorus girls "absolutely nude except for a climber's rope that bound them together and which was tied in a series of knots not immediately familiar to me." Struggling toward an imaginary summit, the girls suddenly yipped a victory cry. One of them hoisted a small British flag as the band brayed God Save the Queen. "It was all delightful," mused Hunt, "but what has perplexed me to this day is--where did that flag come from?"

In Saragossa, Spain, saturnine Cinemactor George Sanders, 52, onetime husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor, said that he and Old Friend Benita Hume Colman, 51, widow of Cinemactor Ronald Colman, would be wed "in about six months." Acknowledged his intended: "I'm enchanted with the whole thing, but there is no hurry about it."

In the Soviet Union, the omens read, sales would be low of the bestselling Inside Russia Today by Reporter John Gunther. One omen: a blistering review in the powerful Literary Gazette, official voice of the Soviet Writers' Union. Conceding that Gunther had some of his facts straight on Soviet industry and culture, the Gazette dismissed the latest Inside story as "ill-intentioned lies and malinformed assertion," containing analyses of Marxism and Soviet history that are "slanderous, libelous and inaccurate."

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