When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died last year, he left most of his estate of $551,500 to his longtime buddy Clyde A. Tolson, 72, who was with the FBI from 1928 till the day after Hoover died. Washington rumor had it that Tolson intended to turn Hoover's $100,000 Georgetown house into a private museum. If so, it will be an empty one, because Tolson has been quietly selling Hoover's art objects and other belongings at auction. In one consignment were four pairs of binoculars. For work or for Hoover's long days at the race track?

At 25, Political Analyst Walter Lippmann wrote about life "not as something given but as something to be shaped." At 83 he is no longer so sure. "It's not possible by Government action or any other action I know to create a perfect environment that will make a perfect man," he told his biographer, Ronald Steel, in an interview for the Washington Post. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society "was beyond our power and beyond the nature of things." Richard Nixon has performed a historic service "to liquidate, defuse, deflate the exaggerations of the romantic period of American imperialism and American inflation."

Ever since Frank Sinatra fired off his public, two-bit four-letter blast at Washington Columnist Maxine Cheshire during the Inaugural festivities, he has suffered chilly relations with the White House. At a Manhattan dinner to receive the Thomas A. Dooley Foundation award for being a Splendid American of "forthrightness, honesty, integrity," Sinatra found the other Splendid American, Spiro T. Agnew, playing it cool. The two friends arrived separately, supped separately, departed separately. It was left to Judy Agnew to entertain her husband's old Palm Springs, Calif., host and golfing crony.

Typecasting? Playing an urbane and arrogant old nobleman, Sir Rudolf Bing, 71, the urbane and arrogant ex-general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, was making his debut in the New York City Opera's new production of Hans Werner Henze's The Young Lord. In his new role, Sir Rudolf was an absolute lamb: early to rehearsals, a dear at taking direction and patience itself while his flowing gray wig was being glued on his bald head. But all the divas he has put down must have loved Critic Harold Schonberg's New York Times review: "In future performances Sir Rudolf will doubtless know what to do with his hands and feet."

In a gargantuan 20,000-word interview in Rolling Stone, with Andy Warhol asking the questions, Truman Capote talks about a rambling array of subjects, including his half-finished, long-promised 800-page novel, Answered Prayers. It is, says Capote, about real people after World War II. One of them is a 19-year-old college girl who has an affair with her roommate's father. And the father is presidential timber. At least he thinks he is. Before four consecutive nominating conventions, he confidently expects to be the Republican candidate. Who is the character modeled after? Capote coyly refuses to say. "It's not somebody that anybody would automatically guess. Even playing Twenty Questions."

Retired New Jersey Investment Counselor John Templeton wants to do for religion what Alfred Nobel did for science and literature. For "progress in religion," the first Templeton Prize--a hefty $85,000--will go to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, 62. A Yugoslav peasant girl, Mother Teresa went to India as a teacher, later felt "a call within a call" and, penniless herself, moved to Calcutta's horrendous slums to minister to the sick and the poor. A few other nuns joined her and now their order has spread to Australia, Ceylon, Latin America, Tanzania, Jordan and Northern Ireland.

They were the grand old married couple of the Now Generation, the Scott and Zelda of peace and ecology. Their struggles were the stuff of a Consciousness III soap opera--David Harris, 27, serving 20 months for refusing to serve in the Army while his folksinger wife Joan Baez, 32, led antiwar demonstrations. Then, on their fifth anniversary, Joan filed for a divorce, which was hardly a shock to her fans. Shortly after David got out of prison, Joan said, she agreed with him that "living together is getting in the way of our relationship." It was a clean break: property settled out of court, no alimony and joint custody of their three-year-old son Gabriel.

Her taped interview about her former husband Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been tampered with, charged Natalya Reshetovskaya in Moscow. The harsh tone of her published statements ("He paraded his adultery at the trial") would have been considerably softer had certain passages not been excised by a Soviet press agency. For example, Natalya had explained that she resisted a divorce partly because she could not imagine her life apart from Solzhenitsyn, but had withdrawn her objection because of "sympathy for Svetlova"--the woman who is the mother of Solzhenitsyn's two sons.

Down from Kansas City for a visit to his "home country," Joplin, Mo., Thomas Hart Benton unveiled his new mural for the Joplin Municipal Building, Joplin at the Turn of the Century. But the 83-year-old had crusty advice for the townfolk: 'Try to get some satisfaction out of the mural now, for it is now that you're stuck with it and now that you're going to pay for it." Joey Heatherton may sing in Las Vegas casinos but she is hardly a showgirl. She even turns down film roles if they require her to undress. Last year she made an exception for Bluebeard, a murderous movie about marriage, starring Richard Burton. The studio assured her that all the publicity shots would be strictly legit--so imagine her surprise when she opened her Christmas copy of Playboy and found her picture as a "standard barer." Now it's Playboy's turn to be surprised. Joey is suing for $2,000,000. His famous older brother, President Lyndon Johnson, left an estate valued at approximately $20 million. But Sam Houston Johnson, 59, is broke. So broke that he filed voluntary bankruptcy proceedings in the Austin, Texas, federal court. Most of Sam's $53,108.60 debt is from medical and hospital bills resulting from a broken leg and osteomyelitis, about which he could not help getting in a political dig: "It demonstrates the need for a national health-insurance program like my brother favored. It will be worth it if it points out to Congress that many millions of Americans are forced into bankruptcy by medical costs."

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