Even for the most liberated of women, a man sometimes comes in handy. Actress Jane Fonda's handyman last week was Lawyer-Author Mark Lane (Rush to Judgment), who flew from New York to Cleveland to spring Jane from jail. Charged with importing some 2,000 tranquilizers and pep pills from Canada and roughing up a cop and a customs agent to boot, Jane, 32, said of her overnight stay in stir: "When you think that the best people in this country are now in jail, I didn't mind it at all." For Dewi Sukarno, 30, widow of the late President Sukarno of Indonesia, it was a helping hand at the pot-au-feu from Public Relations Man Jean-Claude Dauzonne in Paris. On a shopping spree in Rome, Dutch Actress Talitha Pol was glad to lean on the arm--not to mention the banknotes presumably stuffed in the shoulder bag--of Husband Eugene Paul Getty, son of the oil billionaire.

"Ripeness is all," said King Lear. Quite possibly. But not in a society based on the planned obsolescence of men as well as machines. Paul Weiss, retired Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale and one of the nation's foremost teachers, has been denied the Albert Schweitzer Chair at Fordham University because, at 69, he is considered too old. He has now sued, charging discrimination and asserting that he is as alert and vigorous as ever. Says he: "The idea of age has never occurred to me."

Rock Singer Grace Slick, the limpid-eyed beauty who is the air of Jefferson Airplane, reveals in Stereo Review that she once tried to turn on the President. Tricia Nixon had invited fellow alumnae of Manhattan's Finch College to a White House party, and Grace took along Abbie Hoffman as escort. She also brought 600 micro-milligrams of LSD for the tea. White House guards, Grace claims, threw her and Hoffman out. "Boy, were they right," said Grace. "I really would have done it. I figured the worst thing a little acid could do to Tricia is turn her into merely a delightful person instead of a grinning robot. But we were aiming for the Old Dad, hoping he might come to the party and have a cup of tea. Far out!"

George Washington University's most noted faculty member is Earl Warren, 79, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who will hold six seminars a term. Teacher Warren will accept no salary, but expects a large payoff in fun. "I like to visit with young people," he said enthusiastically after his first session last week. "But I don't intend to start an academic career at my advanced age, particularly when professors 15 years younger are being asked to retire."

As if it weren't already obvious to all the world that Hollywood is nothing but a sexist conspiracy, Washington's American Film Institute has gone to the trouble of collecting some glaring examples. Among them: Choreographer Busby Berkeley's Dames, with its kaleidoscopic chorines demonstrating "the woman as object"; Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, playing a liberated female journalist, only to fade out in the kitchen when Spencer Tracy calls her "unfeminine" because she can't cook; Bette Davis' surrender to Henry Fonda in Jezebel which, according to the program notes, is "an object of contempt to feminists rivaled only by Marlene Dietrich's trudge into the desert in Morocco."

Irreverent contemplators of modern art who mutter that they could do as well got a bit of a boost last week from none other than Pablo Picasso. A Spanish house painter broke into France's Vallauris Museum, used a roller to paint out part of a large Picasso called War and Peace and then substituted a design of his own. The 89-yearold master made one of his rare sorties from seclusion to inspect the damage. His comment: "Not bad at all."

Earl Mountbatten of Burma rode high in a lowly style between visits to a President and a King. In Washington for a dinner with President Nixon, Mountbatten found that the only plane that would get him home to London in time for an appointment with Sweden's King Gustav Adolf VI was a Pan American freighter. Undaunted, the former Viceroy of India and cousin of Britain's Queen flew the Atlantic in a bucket seat in the hold. Said the 70-year-old earl: "The best way to travel."

Rock and Blues Superstar Janis Joplin, who died of a drug overdose five weeks ago, gave an all-night bash in a San Anselmo, Calif., nightspot last week. "Pearl," as she liked her pals to call her, left $2,500 in her will "so my friends can have a ball after I'm gone." The invitations read "The drinks are on Pearl," and about 200 turned up to groove on the music of--among other groups--the Grateful Dead.

TV Talk-Showman David Frost unplugged his transatlantic commuting schedule last week to get gussied up in formal clothes and be invested in the Order of the British Empire ("for services to television") by Queen Elizabeth. "How unusual to see you in England in the middle of the week," she remarked, aware that Frost is ordinarily in Manhattan on weekdays, taping his show. Elizabeth herself was awarded a less formal accolade. "The Queen is a potential fatty," said the British magazine Slimming, holding her up to the weak-willed as a shining example of will power. "Very few people could go to the banquets she has to go to and not get fat." Elizabeth's secret, according to the magazine: a stringent 750-calorie, highprotein, no-carbohydrate diet.

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