On the Appian Way the hollow woman with one of the world's most breathtaking shells determinedly pursued her whims.

Rome--and the rest of the world--burned with prurient curiosity. Last week, while unconcernedly directing her lawyer to terminate the services of hangdog Fourth Husband Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor, 30, tirelessly sought to turn a more prideful head. Liz's latest quarry, the Mark Antony to her Cleopatra. Richard Burton, seemed cheerfully prepared to indulge her exhibitionistic binges of togetherness on the Via Veneto and to relish his odd-hour neighborly access to her villa. But he was careful to keep the home fires burning with a weekend rendezvous in Paris with Wife Sybil. As the tasteless, tedious charade wore on, even some of the professional sensation seekers of the press began to feel sated. Rome's Lo Specchio yawned, "Basta con Liz (Enough of Liz),"and Milan's earnest Corriere della Sera austerely vowed to "try not to publish anything concerning the infernal Elizabeth for 24 hours.'' But with some $20 million already sunk in the seemingly bottomless Cleopatra, 20th Century-Fox had scant choice but to try to make a virtue of the peccadilloes of its irreplaceable star. Where Fox President Spyros Skouras last month jetted to Rome in a frantic effort to suppress Liz's infatuation for Burton, the studio now turned resignedly wry. Joining in the tastelessness, Cleopatra Director Joseph Mankiewicz, himself an often-reported Liz diversion, deadpanned: "The real truth is that I am in love with Burton and Miss Taylor is the cover-up for us." Fox flacks, who before the divorce announcement were dispensing nothing but tender claptrap about the enduring bond between Liz and Fisher, were finally displaying more characteristic cinemettle. "A little intramural lovemaking," declared one P.R. man cheerily, "never hurt the box office." A lot of people might be waiting to see the film; a lot more could hardly wait for the script to end.

Although the fashion trade is grateful to Jacqueline Kennedy for doing so much for style and business, unrestrained and sustained enthusiasm is apparently too much to ask of it. Last week a 34-year-old Manhattan couturier (among his clients: Marilyn Monroe) named John Moore rocked a Philadelphia fashion forum with the charge that the First Lady's frocks are "ill-fitted. Her skirts are much too short, her feet are too big for that type of shoe, and she has a big face with far too much hair." By contrast, Moore went on, Jackie's kid sister, Princess Radziwill, 29, was a paragon worthy of Seventh Avenue heaven: "Always immaculate, her clothes hang beautifully. Her hair is flatteringly styled for her face, and her shoes suit her legs." While the First Family took the bitter with the sweet in decorous silence, Manhattan's Oleg Cassini, who designs much of Jackie's wardrobe and knows how to wield a needle as well as the next garment worker, was "too sickened" to restrain himself, blasted rising Rival Moore's "bad manners" as "a discredit to the industry." About to wind up a two-year retooling of their nation's constitution, Yugoslavia's top jurists thoughtfully wrote in a clause decreeing that any elected officials legally recognized as "legendary personages of the Yugoslav people" could continue in office indefinitely without undergoing the inconvenience of running for reelection. Sole "legendary personage" designated so far: Yugoslavia's three-term President, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, 69.

After stealing the show with a 45-minute extemporaneous speech at the Interstate Commerce Commission's 75th anniversary ceremonies, the Supreme Court's unflagging Felix Frankfurter, 79, collapsed at his desk from a brief stoppage of blood flow to the brain. That night, at George Washington University Hospital, the latest great dissenter of the U.S. bench was once again "quite chipper," but probably in no position to dissent from his doctor's injunction to take a short period of rest.

Talking as tantalizingly as she has written in a lunch-table interview with a New York Herald Tribune critic, Novelist (Ship of Fools) Katherine Anne Porter, 71, briskly dispatched France's Jean Paul Sartre ("I despise him--first, because of his attempt to Germanize French thought, and second, because he doesn't seem to know anything about human beings"), disposed with equal deadliness of the favorite subject matter of Sartre's alter ego Author Simone de Beauvoir ("Being a woman is exciting, and I wouldn't know how to be anything else, but I just can't bear to read about it"), and keynoted the discourse with a Mexican toast. Her translation: "Health and money, more power to your elbow, many secret love affairs and time to enjoy them."

"Who's boss in a concerto--the conductor or the soloist?" rhetorically demanded the New York Philharmonic's Maestro Leonard Bernstein, 43, in his latest outburst of podium pedagogy. Answer: "Sometimes one, sometimes the other, but almost always the two manage to get together"--except in the case that prompted Lenny's musings: the latest Philharmonic appearance of intractable but talented Pianist Glenn Gould, 29. After explaining to the 2,800 in the audience that he disapproved of Gould's interpretation of Brahms's D Minor but would defend to the death an artist's right to experiment, Lenny democratically beckoned the intense Canadian to the stage. Gould--who considers his pinkies too precious for any more effusive greeting--gratefully touched Bernstein's fingertips and launched into his very special, barely audible and snail-like reading of the work. Snorted one New York critic: "All the whole thing proved is that Gould is not a good Brahms player, and that we might have discovered for ourselves."

By a split-level decision, the nation's loftiest heroes got the wall-to-wall carpeting pulled out from under them. A week after the seven U.S. astronauts received tacit NASA consent to accept fully furnished, $24,000 houses as a gift from the Houston Home Builders Association, Pathfinder John Glenn showed up in Washington for what was rumored to be White House-inspired reconsideration. The result: an announcement that the astronauts will pass up the gift houses out of a somewhat belated recognition that misunderstanding of their motives "would undercut the stature of the astronauts and of the space program."

Having already etched a redoubtable academic reputation for his monographs on marsupial embryology and anatomy, Australian-born Zoologist Theodore Thomson Flynn, 76, closeted himself at the English Channel resort of Hove to finish off a book designed to "set the record straight" on a more complex mammal: his late son Errol. While insisting that "the Errol the public knew--the hard-drinking, hell-raising womanizer--was a legend created by himself for publicity," the retired Belfast University professor (who recently celebrated his 54th wedding anniversary) conceded that his boy was not "perfect by any means. But neither was he wicked. Not our Errol. The point is this: he led the kind of life every man secretly longs to lead, but most men don't have the ability or the guts to do it ... On the whole, I think he used his talents and gifts in the best way he could. I was never disappointed in Errol."

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