Excursioning to the Outer Hebrides with classmates from Scotland's stiff-upper-lip Gordonstoun School, bonnie Prince Charles, 14, stepped up to the bar of the Crown Hotel, Stornoway, manfully plunked down two and sixpence for a cherry brandy. It was grand fun until his royal bodyguard collared him, shooed him off to join the boys for dinner and a movie (It Happened in Athens, starring Jayne Mansfield). But since Scottish law sets 18 as the legal drinking age, that spot of brandy soon splashed into headlines, and Buckingham Palace--perhaps mindful that Britannia has waived the rules too often lately--left its heir apparent to the mercies of Gordonstoun Headmaster Robert Chew. Chew began chewing with: "The normal punishment for an offense of this kind is a beating or a demotion. The latter seems the likelier of the two."

Cleopatra, still afloat after taking the salvos of Manhattan critics, barged westward. "This lady," said Hollywood's Rosalind Russell at the film's Los Angeles premiere, "is one of the most remarkable fund raisers in the history of the world." It sounded like good news for 20th Century-Fox, but Roz, alas, wasn't talking about Cleo--she was talking about Mrs. Norman ("Buff") Chandler, 61, wife of the president of the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Co. To raise money for her pet project, a new L.A. Music Center, Buff peddled premiere tickets at $250 apiece, raised $1,094,403, bringing her virtuoso fund-raising performance to a queenly total of some $15 million.

"You never know what the next step will be," said former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, 50, describing his fling at flamenco dancing in Madrid. On a two-month tour abroad before plunging into his new job with a Manhattan law firm, Nixon squired his family around the Spanish landscape, then--gathering material for two Satevepost articles about international affairs--flew off to Barcelona for "a very pleasant interview" with Generalissimo Franco. At week's end the tourists were in Egypt for another round of business-with-pleasure, seeing Cairo, Aswan, Luxor, and President Nasser.

Together they founded the Newport Jazz Festival, but togetherness and all that jazz have gone up in smoke for Elaine Lorillard, divorced first wife of Tobacco Heir Louis Lorillard. In Middletown, R.I., Elaine and her two teen-aged children by Louis were evicted from their rented Paradise Farm home. Louis had let the lease lapse. Mrs. Lorillard further complains that her $700 monthly support payments have dwindled to a mere $100 a month, and she can't locate her husband, who at one point last year got the electricity turned off, plunging Paradise into darkness. "I don't think I will ever serve dinner by candlelight again," she said ruefully.

Healthy, wealthy, submersible Department Store Scion Peter R. Gimbel, 35, is wont to prowl around the ocean floor (he dived to the sunken Andrea Doria in 1956, again in 1957) when he is not busy with his career as an investment banker. Now rising above all that, young Gimbel joined a National Geographic Society expedition bound for the Peruvian Andes, early next month will parachute into the remote upper reaches (9,000-14,000 ft.) of the Vilcabamba range--an unmapped area never penetrated by outsiders and considered a possible site of early Inca civilization. Accompanying Gimbel on the three-month trip: Champion Parachutist Jacques Istel, 34.

She looked pretty enough in starched whites to be doing a guest shot in one of those TV dramasurgeries. But Kathryn Crosby, 29, Bing's second wife, was playing the part for real. With Der Bingle out front for a change, the missus took stage center to receive a diploma from the Queen of Angels Hospital Nursing School in Los Angeles. Already an actress, model, student pilot, and mother of three little latter Crosbys, busy Kathryn plans to continue her chores at Queen of Angels as a graduate nurse without fee. "I love it," says she, "and it's hard for hospitals to get nurses who will work as cheap as I."

Debuting as a contributing editor of Harper's Bazaar, Best-Dressed Beauty Mrs. Loel Guinness, 48, brightened the current issue with a piece titled "Gloria Guinness on Elegance." What's elegance all about? Well, her list of examples, reading like half a dozen extra choruses of Cole Porter's You're the Top, offers the palm to such persons and things as the philosophy of Plato, the Ferrari automobile, Tolstoy, the Place Vendome in Paris, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, the skyscraper, the model T Ford, and Gary Cooper. Noticeably absent was Mrs. Guinness herself--who is about as elegant as they come.

World War I Flying Ace Eddie Rickenbacker, 72, now board chairman of Eastern Air Lines, spoke to a conference of mutual casualty companies in Miami Beach, winged off with some jet-propelled gibes at: the U.N. ("The worst catastrophe that has hit the free world since World War II ... Let's sever relations with all those hypocritical blackmailers"); the Alliance for Progress ("In five years there will be a thousand more millionaires in South America, in ten years this will simmer down to a few hundred multimillionaires ... all of which is your money"). And finally: "Why do newspapers dignify Khrushchev with the title of Premier, Castro with the title of Premier or Doctor?

Why not call them by their right names --'rats,' 'pigs,' 'liars' and 'murderers'? "

Quite a sendoff, and nothing secret about it, was the Washington garden party given by CIA Director and Mrs. John McCone, one of many recent parties in honor of Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, 56, retiring soon to return to private law practice in Manhattan. Some 120 bigwigs came to dine and dance amidst the greenery, all members, said McCone, "of an exclusive club, the Gilpatric Club." Asked by his host what he and pretty wife Madelin will do with themselves when they've left the New Frontier behind, Gilpatric answered with an apt quote from King Lear: "We'll live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales . . . and hear poor rogues talk of court news."

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