"Balenciaga is the only designer I admire. You say Saint-Laurent is staying small . . . good. Cardin has talent, but he makes too many shocks." It was Paris' irrepressible High Fashion Doyenne Gabrielle ("Coco") Chanel, 80, so-soing this and high-hatting that, while Women's Wear Daily took notes. But Coco saved the sharpest needle for her high-class clientele. "They're all so famous and well dressed and they never pay their bills--never. It's a form of stealing. And the princesses, some of them, they're the worst of the lot. When they write asking the price of something, I give orders to set a price a little extravagant and then we never hear from them again. . . . In what looked like a New Frontier version of the Queen's List, the White House announced the names of 31 winners of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, highest peacetime U.S. civilian honor, awarded to only 24 persons since 1945. Hidden away among such names as Ralph Bunche, Pablo Casals, Felix Frankfurter, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, George Meany and Thornton Wilder were a few less well-known, though no less deserving. Among them: Genevieve Caulfield, 73, "a one-woman Peace Corps," blind since birth, who has founded and tirelessly run a much-needed school for the blind, first in Thailand and now in Viet Nam; Robert J. Kiphuth, 72, Yale's retired swimming coach whose devotion to physical fitness has made him one of its leading spokesmen; Annie D. Wauneka, 53, a Navajo Indian who has spent her life teaching her people hygiene and helping them to overcome tuberculosis, dysentery and glaucoma. . . . "My fireworks are built in," Comedian Danny Kaye, 50, told a questioner at a July 4 party in Moscow. His Russian hosts were beginning to get the message. On hand for a Moscow film festival, the perennial pixy was soon romping and rolling his way into youngsters' hearts at the Moscow Children's Clinic and a ballet school. And at a Pioneer Camp, he left everyone limp with happy exhaustion: first, he took two kids by the hand and started slowly walking, while the others trailed dubiously behind. Then he was whooping and laughing and fast-stepping, next trotting, and finally he broke into a full gallop across the field with the whole camp of 600 streaming along in joyful pursuit. Mused one observer: "A regular Pied Piper." . . . For a year now, Somerset Maugham, 89, growing ever more crotchety with age, has been trying to disavow Lady John Hope, 47, the daughter with whom he has been feuding, and to disinherit her in favor of his longtime secretary-companion Alan Searle. Last week a Paris court, operating under both British and French law,* declared Maugham's attempts illegal. "I am overjoyed," said Lady Hope. "Most important, I am glad for the sake of my children, whose whole future and name really rested on the outcome of this case. I never wanted this trouble." . . . Wasn't it a cute idea to buy a $2.80 Irish Sweepstakes ticket in the name of Met Jing, her dog? But then Met Jing died, and Mary Boyle, for many years aide to Presidential Adviser and Financier Bernard Baruch, 92, gave the ticket to her butler. For safekeeping, she quickly said when it came up a $140,-000 winner at the Irish Derby two weeks ago. For keeps, said the butler just as firmly. Did not! Did too! And suddenly one night last week, she found herself out on Manhattan's fashionable East 64th Street in her negligee, with the butler inside and the door locked.

By the time she got back in with the cops, the butler was finished packing, and as he imperiously made his way to the door, he announced that he had flushed the whole crude argument down the toilet. . . . Down the runway in evening dresses, then bathing suits, came 89 ft. 2 1/2 in of vertical femininity that measured 514-358-526 horizontally. The 14 girls who made up that heap of frail were contestants in the "Miss Tall U.S.A." contest, held in conjunction with the San Francisco convention of the American Affiliation of Tall Clubs. The shortest in the lot measured 5 ft. 10 in., but no one topped Milwaukee's 6-ft. 1-in. Carol Dettmann, 20. And the judges liked the way the rest of her (36-26-39) stacked up too. . . . It was the U.S. v. Ferdinand Demara, 41--and Robert French, college dean of philosophy; Martin Godgart, high school teacher; Brother John, Roman Catholic monk; Cecil Hamman, law student; Surgeon Lieut. Joseph Cyr of the Royal Canadian Navy; Benjamin Jones, Texas prison guard. All of them were fictional identities and professions used by Demara, "the Great Impostor." In a California court last week, the U.S. Government won a verdict of guilty on charges that in getting a teaching job in Boston he had used the mails to defraud. But the judge suspended the one-year sentence and the $1,000 fine because of Mittygating circumstances, and the genial Ferdinand went back to his legitimate job (under his own name) as evangelist in a Los Angeles "skid row" mission. . . . Last year his father died, and the title of second Baron Milford fell to Wogan Philipps, 61. But, oh woe, Wogan was a Communist. Nevertheless, he decided to take his seat in the House of Lords, thus becoming the first Red lord in British history. Did all this mean that he had softened his proletarian ideals? Not bloody likely. In his maiden speech, he was boring from within: "The House of Lords can play only the part of a constitutional obstacle to progressive legislation. I and my party are for complete abolition of this chamber."

* Since all involved are British subjects, the court ruled on the basis of British law that a child born out of wedlock to a couple who later marry is not illegitimate; since Maugham lives in France, the court then applied the French law, which holds that a legitimate child cannot be disinherited.

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