Wet grass and gray skies failed to keep 70,000 of her ecstatic home-town fans from Manhattan's Central Park when the reclusive Queen of Rock gave one of her rare concerts, and a free one at that. Her face scrubbed shiny and her hair short and curly, Carole King, 30, wore blue jeans like most of her audience and sang old favorites from Tapestry, the best-selling LP in rock his tory, as well as her new song Fantasy: "Our reality will be as good as never-never land."

"Publish and be damned!" the Duke of Wellington scrawled across the letter of Harriette Wilson, a Mayfair call girl who threatened to blackmail him with her intimate memoirs. She published (in 1825) and he became Prime Minister (in 1828), recalls H. Montgomery Hyde, a former M.P. who studiously attempts in the Observer to place the current Lord Lambton-Lord Jellicoe sex scandals in historical per spective. Lloyd George was one of Britain's most notorious amorous Prime Ministers. But he was a man of stern principle, to wit: "Love is all right if you lose no time."

As she has so often proclaimed, Jacqueline Onassis values her privacy. But she did let Vogue take a photographic peek at Caroline's and John Kennedy Jr.'s "children-and-study room," the remodeled library of her Fifth Avenue Manhattan apartment. On the study table were some of Jackie's treasures: some black coral she found while diving near Yucatan, a mushroom on a twig from Angkor Wat, two bronze Egyptian cats and, perhaps revealingly, a string of blue Greek worry beads.

It is not unusual these days for priests and nuns to get married, but to get married three times? That was the case with the Rev. Philip Berrigan, 49, and Sister Elizabeth McAlister, 33. They first wed one another "in trust and gratitude" in the spring of 1969. They were married again in January 1972 by "formalizing" their vows in a Danbury, Conn., prison cell. When TIME reported last week that they were about to be wed, Berrigan wasted no time denying the story as "absurd and untrue" on the ground that they were already married. Nonetheless, two days after his denial, the couple were legally wed in Montclair, N.J., by the Rev. Paul Mayer, an ex-monk who is also married.

All the best contemporary painters are Spanish: Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, the late Pablo Picasso and the late Juan Gris. Of these, the greatest is Dali. At least those are his opinions, delivered during a speech entitled "Velasquez and I" at the Prado. Madrid's al ta sociedad was on hand--but museum authorities were not--for the vernissage of the only contemporary painting in the famous gallery: Dali's portrait of a lady riding a horse as in a surrealist dream. His subject: Franco's granddaughter Carmencita, Princess Alfonso de Borbon.

Before his expeditions to Iceland and Paris, Henry Kissinger tarried in Manhattan long enough to celebrate his 50th birthday. TV's Barbara Walters toasted his contribution to Women's Lib. He has, she said, "made careers for countless women." Peter Peterson, former Secretary of Commerce, claimed that he had seen Henry cross 1973 A.D. off an official document and write 50 A.K. Peterson's remark, replied Kissinger, "illustrated the closeness and warmth that has characterized the White House."

The new Broadway hit The Changing Room has an all-male cast and a sporting theme. The Women is quintessentially female and not sporting at all. When the two troupes faced each other on a sunny baseball diamond in Central Park, the women won 85-3. Somehow the men could not get to first base with the likes of Alexis Smith and Myrna Loy. The Changing Room captain, Tony Winner John Lithgow, seemed to be at a loss for words: "The women were very fast and above all swift."

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