"La-a-a-a-dies and gentillllmen: the Greatest Show on Earrth!" Charlton Heston, dressed in black boots, white pants, scarlet coat and top hat, was kicking off the celebrity-filled first night of Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey in Los Angeles. Walter Matthau turned up as one of the clowns. "I was raised in an orphanage, and I went to the circus for the first time when I was twelve," Matthau recalled. "It was one of the happiest times of my childhood." Matthau's son Charlie, 10, was crowned King of the Circus. Then came the grand parade of elephants with spangled riders led off by Sonny and Cher and their daughter Chastity, 4, who was crowned Queen of the Circus. Star after star --from Carol Burnett to Jimmy Stewart--rode once around the ring, helping to raise $25,000 for the S.S. Hope, a floating clinic full of doctors who sail the seas to teach medicine in underdeveloped countries.

"The music consisted of 100 firemen in 100 red shirts with 100 sledgehammers hammering all their might on a hundred anvils and artillery," wrote Painter Thomas Eakins to his sister Fanny about the Boston Jubilee in the summer of 1869. The letter, one of 20 recently given to the Archives of American Art, a part of the Smithsonian complex in Washington, D.C., went on to observe that "Bostonians have music on the brain." Added the proper Philadelphian: "God forbid they should get art there, or they will get some hundred firemen to copy a Jerome or Meissonier a thousand times bigger than the original to hang up in their coliseum."

Will Colinot Trousse Chemise be Brigitte Bardot's last picture? So she says. The French title is almost impossible to translate, but trousser means to hitch up a skirt, a shirt or whatever. Colinot, a 14th century peasant boy, does just that to the ladies. After finishing Colinot in Auvergne a few weeks ago, B.B., 38, is now cruising around Corsica with her boy friend Laurent Vergez, 28. Later on, she says, she intends to find herself a farm--unless someone talks her out of early retirement.

Seated among the few morning spectators in the London law court was a tall, familiar American figure. As the head of a select group of U.S. jurists observing British justice at work during a two-week Anglo-American exchange program, Chief Justice Warren Burger was on a busman's holiday. On a London street a senior British official was pleased to find Burger sufficiently briefed to congratulate him on a very recent appointment. The official, in turn, offered his congratulations to Burger as just about the only man in Washington who had not lost his job in the past six months. Burger, the official reported later, was not amused.

In Tunis, on the stage of an ancient Roman theater, African Folk Singer Miriam Makeba, 41, performed for the first Pan-African Youth Festival, 8,000 blacks and not-so-blacks from 38 countries, who got together to condemn imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism and Zionism. Between songs, Miriam hissed and spat out a highly personal chorus of revolutionary rhetoric: "In 1960 the U.S. Government revoked my passport. It was really a wonderful event. I became a citizen of Tanzania, Uganda, Guinea, Algeria, Sudan, Liberia and Cuba. Liberia, Guinea and Uganda gave me and my husband [Black Militant Stokely Carmichael] diplomatic passports. I can say I am truly African and proud of it."

The congressional hearings that led to the sudden national prominence of a young Congressman named Richard Nixon and the conviction for perjury of Alger Hiss began just 25 years ago. In a piece on the Op Ed page of the New York Times, the former State Department official tried unconvincingly to draw six parallels between his case and recent political trials, including Daniel Ellsberg's. "My hopes are for vindication," wrote Hiss. "I am not interested in seeing the Biter Bitten." Nevertheless Hiss, who now sells legal stationery in Manhattan, turned up at a fund-raising party in East Hampton, N.Y., for the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which is circulating a petition calling for the impeachment of his old adversary. The committee's general counsel: Leonard Boudin, who is also Ellsberg's lawyer.

Ungallantly, the French newsweekly L'Express recently reported that Novelist Franc,oise Sagan (Bonjour Tristesse, A Certain Smile) "as she nears 40, is perhaps reaching the age of booze." However that may be, Franc,oise has decided to leave France and move to Ireland with her eleven-year-old boy, the son of her second husband Robert Westhoff, an American sculptor. "Ireland is a country where they protect the rights of others," she explained. Her plan: to write "a very beautiful book, for up to now I have only written charming books."

William Masters, 57, and Virginia Johnson Masters, 48, have been talking constantly about sex for years to the couples they have counseled in their Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis, but they have rarely said anything about their own private lives. In a long interview with Myra MacPherson of the Washington Post, Virginia disclosed that before marrying William in 1971, she had been married three times but had simply outgrown those unions. "Sex was never a problem," she added. As for sex education, she was never told anything at all by her parents and, she regretted to say, she followed the same route with her children: Scott, 21, and Lisa, 18. William, more reserved than his wife, admitted that he did not have "the vaguest idea" what love is, but it sounded suspiciously as though he is in love with Virginia nevertheless. "I let down after work just by being with her, just by her mere physical presence," he explained. "Besides, it's unbelievable that she would put up with a bastard like me."

"We have created a man who is one single, large, complex computer terminal," says a doctor in Michael Crichton's bestselling chiller The Terminal Man. "The patient is a readout device for the new computer." Cast as that patient in the movie now being filmed, George Segal seems to have bought the fantasy whole. "I'm just passing through the picture," he declared after the movie doctors attached wires to his shaven skull. "What they do to my brain is up to them."

For a man so passionate about his motherland, Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 40, spends a lot of time outside the U.S.S.R. Wandering in the Far East to collect material for two new cycles of poems, he visited Singapore, where he gave a reading of "Cemetery of Whales" for a hastily assembled group of 20 university students. Apparently referring to recent criticism of him as a subsidized apologist for the Soviet regime, he declared: "I am a writer, never was and never will be an official representative of my country." The week before, the tall, skinny poet had paid a visit to the Philippines, where he was mistaken for an American tourist by two U.S. sailors who wanted to know what state he was from. Said he: "I'm from Russia. It isn't an American state yet."

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