There was Walter Matthau playing top banana on the set of Paramount's A New Leaf, clowning around between takes in a fright wig that combined the best of Geronimo with the worst of Phyllis Diller. But once the cameras start rolling, insists Walter, he is strictly supporting cast for the film's director, scriptwriter and female lead. And who might they be? "They," all rolled into one neat package, happen to be Writer-Comedienne Elaine May, who is now going into moviemaking in a big way. What's more, says Matthau, Elaine is "a tough little lady. Deviate by one single comma, and you find out who is in supreme authority." So how come he got into the movie in the first place? "A little fellow who may or may not have been a producer convinced me to do it," deadpanned Matthau. "I never saw him again. Maybe Elaine ate him."

"The other night I woke with a blissful feeling and discovered I had been dreaming that the whole goddam place had burned down," read the letter to President Kennedy in 1961. "I dozed off again, hoping for a headline saying no survivors." J.F.K.'s correspondent was John Kenneth Galbraith, U.S. Ambassador to India, and "the whole place," naturally enough, was the State Department in Washington. The diaries of the acerbic Harvard economist, to be published in the October issue of American Heritage, contain some other fascinating passages, notably an account of Jackie Kennedy's state visit to India ("The President had told me that the care and management of Mrs. Kennedy involved a good deal of attention, and he is quite right."). But the best parts involve his never-ending feud with his superiors in Foggy Bottom. Wrote Galbraith in 1961, as tensions were rising between India and Pakistan: "One of our carriers brought twelve supersonic jets to Karachi, where they were unloaded in all the secrecy that would attend mass sodomy on the BMT at rush hour." On Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "He is so firmly fixed in my mind as a cautious, self-constricted man that I delight in actions that will disturb him." Concludes Galbraith: "The State Department has a sense of tradition. It believes that because we had a poor foreign policy under Truman and Eisenhower, we should have a poor one under Kennedy. No one can complain about that."

His wife found him weak after an eight-day hunger strike but still eager for news of Paris' art and cinema circles and of the moon landing. "If I were with you in Paris," Regis Debray said to Wife Elizabeth, "we would have spent all night seeing this marvel." In his second year of imprisonment for guerrilla activities in Bolivia, the French intellectual says that he is in virtual solitary confinement and went on strike "because there is no possibility of breathing as I am locked up inside all day long." Elizabeth Debray was denied an audience with Bolivia's President Salinas to discuss better treatment for her husband. "I fear," Debray told his wife, "that we will all be transferred to a place in the middle of the jungle where conditions are inhuman."

It took one Italian housewife just a year to move from the kitchen to control of a successful leather-goods company. Now she's planning a recording session and thinking about her first movie--and who knows? Of course, Maria Scicolone Mussolini, 31-year-old mother of two, has a couple of uncommon advantages. Her husband is Jazz Pianist Romano Mussolini, Benito's son, and the familiar surname may have helped to make her shoes and handbags all the rage in Rome. In the same circular way, it may help sell records. The movie? Well, Maria is also Sophia Loren's kid sister, and Italian, French and American producers have not been slow to note the family resemblance.

A weather-beaten, century-old farmhouse overlooking the St. George River near Gushing, Me., is one of the most familiar structures in America. Called "the Olson farm," it stands bleak and solitary above a brown-grass hillside in Andrew Wyeth's acclaimed and much reproduced painting, Christina's World. Now the house belongs to Hollywood Producer Joe Levine (Two Women, Divorce--Italian Style), who owns 13 Wyeths and has just paid $30,000 so that the house can be preserved and restored as a Wyeth museum. The producer and his wife paid a visit to Gushing to sign the papers, and Wyeth was so delighted that he and his wife engaged the Levines in an impromptu dance on the front lawn. Inside, Wyeth tore off a piece of wallpaper bearing his design for a new studio and presented it to his admirer. Grinning, he said, "Now you have 14, Joe."

Ill lay: Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirlcsen, 73, "resting well" at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington after surgeons removed the tumorous upper lobe of his right lung (a biopsy proved the growth malignant, but surgeons think that they got it all, believe no further treatment will be necessary); James F. Byrnes, 90, former Secretary of State, Supreme Court Justice, Democratic Senator, from and Governor of South Carolina, at Baptist Hospital in Columbia, S C., recuperating and off the critical list after a near-fatal heart attack; Ford Motor Co. Vice President Benson Ford, 50, rushed from his office to Henry Ford Hospital by brother Henry II and under observation after a reported "angina attack."

Only last month Abe Fortas said that his forced resignation from the Supreme Court in May made him feel "as if an automobile hit me as I stepped off the curb." Now the ex-Justice seems to be recuperating. According to friends, he will resume practicing law early this fall with an impressive list of corporate clients in Boston and New York. None of the corporations said to be involved have ever been represented by Fortas' old law firm, Arnold & Porter, which decided against taking him back after the Supreme Court affair--though his wife Carolyn is still a partner. "He lined up some big, lucrative retainers," reports a friend, "and suddenly his whole emotional outlook had changed. He knew he didn't have to give up the law."

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