The Viet Cong were playing the Apaches this time, but Actor John Wayne, 59, saw very little action as he lumbered around South Viet Nam working on a Defense Department documentary that he is narrating to explain the U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia. The Duke saw plenty of the troopers, though. "I'm going around the hinterlands to give the boys something to break the monotony," he monotoned. Big John's visit was also a change of pace for the Saigon kids who'd seen some of his horse operas in dubbed versions. They ran after him whooping, "Hey, you! Numbah One Cowboy!"

India's greatest fakir, Laxman Sandra Rao, 77, demonstrated his powers first by taking a walk on hot coals. Then came time for the stunt that the crowd of 1,000 had paid up to $100 apiece to witness: a stroll across the water in a specially constructed tank in Bombay. While movie cameras whirred, Rao stepped off the edge--and sank like a stone to the bottom. The spectators felt they'd been soaked themselves. Rao retreated to a downtown office building, where he began returning rupees to all the rubes who came forward.

As his press release put it, "Mr. Graham is not going to Soho to condemn, but to show his concern for all people." Indeed, Billy Graham, 47, aroused considerable concern when he showed up in London's fleshpotty parish. Swinging through a third week of his crusade in Blighty, the evangelist had planned an hour's walk through Soho, but a mob of 2,000 zealots swarmed all over him just across the way from the Old Compton Street Cinema (current attraction: Orgy at Lil's Place). A stripper named Brigitte St. John screamed: "Billy, what do you think of my miniskirt?" and flung herself onto his car. As the reverend rode out of the bedlam, an aide was murmuring: "We're lucky to get away with our lives."

Nora Joyce sighed after wading through her husband's Ulysses: "I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, surely!" Indeed, James Joyce did have a lot of perdition swimming about in his head, much of which he poured into his great wild tome on Leopold Bloom's odyssey through Dublin on the day and night of June 16, 1904. James and his mind were laid to rest in Zurich's Fluntern Cemetery in 1941, the grave distinguished only by a small headstone. For years Manhattan Art Dealer Lee Nordness had thought that the grand man deserved a better monument, so at last he arranged for Sculptor Milton Hebald to do the job. Last week on "Bloomsday," they unveiled a bronze statue of the author as an old man meditating with his book over the graves of James and Nora Joyce.

It was quite a treasure for an art dealer to part with. Still, explained Zurich's David Koetser, 58, "I am getting on in age. So I thought I would like to make a gift during my lifetime." With that, he presented to London's National Gallery the Allegory of Prudence, a magnificent 30-in.-by-27-in. canvas by Titian. The gift is valued at $490,000.

The White House issued a cryptic statement indicating that Lynda Bird Johnson, 22, "has begun her summertime travel plans." Everybody thought that she would head straight for Spain to start off a European jaunt. But no, the itinerary veered off to Los Angeles, where Lynda got together with a furry-looking character named George Hamilton, 26, her beau, now bearded for a movie part. While they fox-trotted at a benefit ball, the U.S. Embassy staff in Madrid was scouting around to find a stand-in for George, to escort the young lady while she's there.

Futurist Marshall McLuhan, who has written books such as Understanding Media to explain that books are extinct, used the medium of his mouth at the International P.E.N. Congress in Manhattan to tell the 600 assembled novelists, poets and playwrights just where they will stand in the future. "We are about to see an age where the environment itself is arranged as a teaching machine," he lectured delphically. "The author is going to be engaged in programming the teaching machine." McLuhan unsettled the writers further with a slogan: "Artists should go to the control tower, not the ivory tower." But they all relaxed when Critic Norman Podhoretz cracked that he was having trouble getting his electronic earphones to work during translations. "Mr. McLuhan couldn't get his to work either," he gibed.

Scarcely three weeks after the show opened at Broadway's Winter Garden, Angela Lansbury, 40, who had spent most of her career typecast as a termagant, came forward in Manhattan's Rainbow Room and accepted the American Theater Wing's Tony Award as the best musical actress of the season. "Up to now, I've always been such a good nominee," the whacky Mame wept happily. Some of the other winners: Richard Kiley, 44, judged the best musical actor for his Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha; Rosemary Harris, 38, best dramatic actress, in The Lion in Winter; Hal Holbrook, 41, best dramatic actor, for Mark Twain Tonight; and sardonic Producer David Merriclc, 54, and German Playwright Peter Weiss, 49, for Marat/Sade.

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