What was George Hamilton doing holding hands with that long, leggy Texas model, Alana Collins, and making all those fun Italian scenes from Rome to Capri? "Alana and I are just very good friends," George explained. As a matter of fact, he added, she was helping him scout the latest fashions for the string of boutiques he is being forced to open in New York, California and Europe. Forced? Well, it's either that or let Uncle Sam dip heavily into all that money that he's being paid for The Survivors, his new ABC-TV series that starts this fall.

Last April, the rites of spring at Manhattan's Barnard College centered around Linda LeClair, 20, and her loud fight for every girl's right to live off campus with the roommate of her choice. Linda won that argument, but now it seems that she has given up on stuffy old Barnard altogether, choosing to drop out this fall in favor of communal housekeeping on Manhattan's West Side. Barnard President Martha Peterson, says Linda, has her sympathy. "She is aware that recognizing sexual intercourse would cause embarrassment to the ladies that give money to the college."

Imperial Russian counts have never carried much clout in the Soviet Union. But Count Leo Tolstoy is somebody special. Last week marked the 140th birth day of the great author, whose deep sympathy for the restive peasants of his day has earned him the approval of the Kremlin. To honor the occasion there was a large party at Moscow's State Museum and a mass pilgrimage to his grave. For a change, party functionaries and intellectuals found something they could celebrate together.

When doomsayers are bemoaning the human condition, a refreshing breeze blew out of Missouri from famed Psychiatrist Karl Menninger, 75. "A hundred years ago, violence was much worse than it is today," the chairman of the board of trustees of the Menninger Foundation told a group of Park College students. "You say it isn't safe to walk down the streets today. It never was safe to walk down some streets." The world, insisted Menninger, "is getting better. We're getting better control of violence and of our own behavior than we've ever had before." Then he added: "But let's get the world just a little more civilized still."

"This is a letter of hate," Playwright John Osborne cried out in 1961 in an open letter to England written from France. "Damn you, England. You're rotting now and quite soon you'll disappear." Neither England, nor Osborne for that matter, disappeared, and today the Angry Young Man has taken to attacking new targets. In another open letter he complains, "I am exploited ruthlessly by the Iron Curtain countries, who steal my work" in comparison with the United States, where "the capitalist system has degenerated into a new era of squalor, ugliness, brutality and oppression." All these things considered, then, he admits that there "is some relief to be a worker, alive and well and living in London."

Back in the headlines again was Dr. Sam Sheppard, 44, the osteopathic surgeon convicted in 1954 of murdering his pregnant wife and acquitted two years ago after a retrial brought forth new evidence in his behalf. This time Sheppard has been hit with a $530,000 malpractice suit filed in Youngstown, Ohio, charging that while he was surgically removing a lumbar disc from a steelworker, Samuel Lopez, he "negligently and carelessly lacerated a major artery" and "failed to repair it," as a result of which Lopez died. The suit, filed by Mrs. Marcia Lopez, also names the Youngstown Osteopathic Hospital Association and charges that it failed to use reasonable care in the case, since it knew Sheppard had not "held a surgical staff position at an accredited hospital for more than ten years."

Champagne was the order of the day last year at Newport News, Va., when Caroline Kennedy christened the U.S. Navy's latest aircraft carrier, the John F. Kennedy. Caroline, her mother and brother John were on hand again last week when the 61,450-ton warship was commissioned. This time the celebration called for cake, a huge 4-ft. by 8-ft. by 4-ft. vanilla replica of the J.F.K., from which Caroline cut the first slice. As part of the ceremonies, the Kennedy family gave the ship a replica of the sword carried by George Washington in the Revolutionary War.

He was a chemistry professor at the University of California at Berkeley and later director of its nuclear chemical research at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. He was one of the key figures in the development of the atom bomb, co-discovered plutonium, and is currently chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Yet the AEC's Glenn Seaborg, 56, had never been down in a uranium mine, where it all starts. To remedy that small fissure in his dossier, he buckled himself into a pair of coveralls, rubber boots and a safety hat and took off last week for a tour of New Mexico uranium mines. "I didn't feel my experience was complete until I had actually been into a uranium mine," he said.

Back home in Beverly Hills, she is hostess to a constant party consisting of two peacocks, 30 fantail pigeons, countless canaries, three tanks of goldfish, a few finches, a whidah bird and nine Chinese hairless dogs. ("They're all naked. What kind of dogs would you expect me to have?") It seemed only right that Gypsy Rose Lee, 54, should be named a vice president of Voil`a, an outfit dealing in gourmet pet foods. So there was Gypsy, presiding at a party in Washington, watching such doggy delicacies as French beef burgundy (with just a touch of the grape to captivate the canine) and Irish kidney stew disappear under the combined assaults of an aggressive Chinese hairless, a beagle, a toy poodle wearing a bib, and a Yorkshire terrier. As for the ex-ecdysiast herself: "I have everything now I had 20 years ago," she said wistfully, "except it's all lower."

"No more Miss America!" announced the flyer from the Women's Liberation Force. The protest came from a group of angry ladies led by Robin Morgan, 27, poetess and housewife. As the Liberators see it, Miss America represents "racism with roses"; she is a "military death mascot" symbolizing "the living bra and the dead soldier." What's more, this "mindless boob girlie symbol" represents the "pop-culture obsolescent theme of spindle, mutilate and discard tomorrow." As the contest went on in Atlantic City's Convention Hall, the protesters outside rallied around a "Freedom Trash Can" into which they urged all good women to toss "bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs and representative issues of Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal and Family Circle."

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