"We had a big family meeting around our kitchen table with Mom, Dad and me," recalled Entertainer Ann-Margret, 33, last week. "We decided that I would drop my last name so they wouldn't be hurt. Sometimes things get printed that aren't very nice." Most of what has been written about the curvate star in recent times, at least, has been eminently printable. For her special this winter on NBC, the durable sex kitten is taking the step of readopting her full name: Ann-Margret Olsson. The highlights of the show will doubtless be her takeoffs on 1940s Pinup Queens like Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. "I am attracted to that era because everything then was so innocent, so happy," she explained sweetly.

"It's a weird feeling, knowing that you can lose the guts of your act at any time," lamented rubbery-faced Impressionist David Frye last week. The guts of Frye's act, of course, were his look-alike impressions of former President Nixon, whose departure from Washington has sent Frye scurrying for tapes of Gerald Ford. He has already introduced the Ford voice into his nightclub act, but worries about the face. Muses Frye, "He looks like the guy in a science fiction movie who is the first one to see The Creature."

Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood's well-rounded master of movie thrillers, stopped working on the script of his 54th film long enough to attend his 75th birthday party last week. On hand at Chasen's to toast the director of Psycho and Frenzy was a galactic gathering of 250 well-wishers, including Actors Cory Grant and Paul Newman and Director Franc,ois Truffaut. Despite the guest list and a cake adorned with 76 pastry tracings of the master's pudgy profile, Hitchcock was less interested in encomiums than work. "My new movie will involve kidnaping and the adventures of a medium," he explained. "The medium is actually a fake, and so is the victim who is actually the kidnaper. So we watch two stories go side by side until they go together," he concluded cryptically.

"The Pericles of Putney/ The Voltaire of Vermont/ He'll blush at titles like that/ But aptness they do not want." The man so honored by the maimed meter of Senator Edward Brooke last week was his Senate colleague, George Aiken of Vermont. It was a combination birthday (his 82nd) and farewell party given by former Texas Congressman Frank Ikard for the retiring dean of the U.S. Senate. Aiken admirers donned casual and Western clothes and gathered for an evening of corn on the cob and some country music. Among the guests: Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott (in a patchwork shirt), Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur Burns (yellow, blue and white sport jacket), Senators Abraham Ribicoff, J. William Fulbright and Herman Talmadge. In a pink pantsuit, former Presidential Secretary Rose Mary Woods forgot other matters and led a bipartisan hoedown.

He is known simply as Marty to his Capitol Hill friends, a name that just would not fit his famous father, the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Senate Page Martin Luther King III, 16, has been spending his days running errands in the upper chamber and his evenings running the base paths as a softball player on the teams of Georgia Congressman Andrew Young and Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy. At times, it seems, the action is brisker on the mound than on the Hill. "It's been a great learning experience," says King diplomatically. "But after a while, when the speeches cover the same things over and over," he adds, "you tune out."

In the midst of a recent radio interview by Liberal Columnist Nat Hentoff, William F. Buckley Jr., the elegantly acerbic conservative commentator, suddenly stopped short the colloquy, looked down, and testily muttered, "Shut up." Moments later he paused and clonked something below. Left-wing kibitzers in the studio audience? No, Buckley's target was his King Charles spaniel Rowley, which he had brought to the studio. Showing that he bore no ill will, Rowley then jumped into Buckley's .lap and planted a slurpy kiss on his cheek. All of which left Hentoff with somewhat more of an interview than he had expected. Said the show's producer later, "You can hear barking on the tape."

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