Visiting Houston's Fiesta Week, Spain's Marquesa and Marques de Villaverde, the daughter and son-in-law of Francisco Franco, won themselves a place deep in the heart of Texans. The couple slipped into Western clothes for a society ball in their honor, where the marquesa delightedly hobnobbed with another dude, Astronaut Pete Conrad. It was not all play and no work. The marques, 44, a leading heart specialist, accepted an invitation from Dr. Michael DeBakey to observe him in a delicate--but ultimately successful--operation involving a ventricular bypass heart pump, one of DeBakey's pioneering devices.

For years the Paris mint has been hauling in a few extra francs by selling commemorative medals with the images of public personalities from popes to politicians. Now the mint has struck a coin that ought to make Frenchmen flip--a likeness of Brigitte Bardot in a tight-fitting, lowcut, short-skirted dress. Although, at 32, the aging sex kitten is not in strictly mint condition, officials of the venerable Hotel des Monnaies founded in 1765 by Louis XV, figure that the Bardot medal, available in bronze, silver or gold at prices up to $200, ought to gain enough currency to compete with the alltime bestsellers: De Gaulle, Pope John XXIII and Lenin.

As early as 5 a.m., schoolchildren and soldiers began thronging into Taipei's Presidential Square for the big blowout. MAY HE ENDURE AS LONG

AS THE MOUNTAINS, cheered the banners. It almost seemed that he had. Nationalist China's President Chiang Kai-shek was not on hand to celebrate his 79th birthday--reckoned his 80th by the Chinese count, which judges a child to be one year old at birth. Though still vigorous, Chiang obeyed tradition by staying at home to meditate and talk with his family, which for the first time in 14 months included Madame Chiang, just back from her long visit to the U.S. As the Taiwanese held their noisiest public party in years, with two days of parades and an uproar of firecrackers, it was doubtful that the Gimo got much meditating done.

A friend once told him: "You must choose. You can't be everything." But he could try. Leonard Bernstein, 48, has become everything he wanted to be: composer, pianist, author, TV personality, glamour boy, and dashingly creative music director of the New York Philharmonic. Now he has decided that everything is a bit much--and so, too, have some critics and members of the Philharmonic's old guard, who have become increasingly distressed with Lenny's flamboyant ways on and off the podium and his predilection for avant garde music. Confirming old rumors, he said he would resign from the Philharmonic when his contract expires early in 1969, though he will remain as "laureate conductor," leading the orchestra for a few weeks each season. "The time is arriving," said he, "when I must concentrate maximally on composing." His first project: "a very large commission" for the 1969 opening of Washington's Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Browsing around a Cuban bookshop, Premier Fidel Castro, 39, worked up the wrath of Achilles. "There's not a single book here on vocational improvement," he fumed. Instead, Fidel found the shelves cluttered with such bourgeois tomes as the Iliad and the Odyssey. "Literature must be written for the countryside," he said, instructing his proletarians to shun the classics and study more about how to raise cane. He had a point. Cuba's sugar production is down 25% from last year.

Shot down last February after a bombing run over North Viet Nam, U.S. Navy Pilot Dieter Dengler, 28, endured five months of torture by North Vietnamese captors before he escaped, then slogged through the jungle for 23 days, living on roots, until his rescue by an Air Force helicopter. The German-born flier will have something to show for it--four medals. For his "extraordinary heroism," the Navy last week awarded him one of its highest combat citations, the Navy Cross, along with a Distinguished Flying Cross, an Air Medal and a Purple Heart.

"When I was here five years ago," sighed Soviet Poet Evgeny Evtushenko, 33, "it was like entering a house with a wonderful supper spread out and being able to eat only a piece of pie. This time I would like to finish the dinner." On the menu for "Zhenya's" second trip: six weeks of poetry readings across the U.S. Arriving in New York with his wife Galina, the sometime bad boy of Soviet letters expressed a wish to visit many small towns "because that is where the soul of the people is more likely to be found." He also hopes to soak up enough soul to write a book of poems about the U.S. Perhaps remembering that the Kremlin called off his last planned U.S. journey after publication in 1963 of his politically sensitive Precocious Autobiography, he warned: "I have come without preconceived notions, but I don't intend to look at this country through rose-colored glasses."

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