"I've been called for traveling and will be out of the game for a while," quipped Henry Kissinger as the Harlem Globetrotters made him an honorary member last week. The slapstick-basketball players presented the outgoing Secretary of State with a team uniform, playing shoes, warmup jacket and an autographed basketball. Standing on an eight-inch-high platform to measure up to his guests, Kissinger approvingly noted that his new uniform bore the number 1. Said Henry: "The numeral accords with my estimate of myself."

When British Colonialist Cecil Rhodes died in 1902, he left the world two legacies: a South African mining empire to keep the women of the world in diamonds and a bequest to use the profits therefrom to educate at Oxford University, "the best men for the world's fight." But times change. And this year, to conform with a 1975 act by the British Parliament, Rhodes scholarships are being awarded for the first time to women. Among the 32 American winners named last week, 13 are female. One, Yale's Sarah Deutsch, concedes her image of a Rhodes scholar is a man, Los Angeles Ram Quarterback Pat Haden, currently on leave from Oxford. But, adds Deutsch, "I can throw a spiral too."

After making a bad bet on the horses in the London of 1820, a reckless dandy named Scrope Berdmore Davies crammed his personal papers into a trunk, stashed it in a bank vault and skipped the country. Doing a spot of housecleaning at the Pall Mall branch of Barclays Bank the other day, officials opened the unclaimed trunk and turned up one of the literary finds of the century. Among the treasures: an original copy of the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, by Davies' pal Lord Byron; early manuscripts of Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc by Percy Bysshe Shelley; and two possibly unpublished poems by Shelley. Also scattered in the trunk were some 14 letters from Byron, including a complaint that he had picked up another dose of gonorrhea.

Never especially known for what covered her body, Brigitte Bardot, 42, is now into fashion. BB has lent her approval--and signature in shocking pink and black--to a spring collection of dresses, blouses, shirts and short shorts created by her friend, Designer Arlette Nastat. The threads, which go on sale next month in stores in Manhattan and Dallas, are clingy, transparent and decollete. The market for the collection, however, may be limited. The former sex kitten sees potential customers as "women who have my allure, my look."

That head in the sand waiting for a nouvelle vague belongs to Film Director Roman Polanski. Playing guest editor for the year-end issue of the French Vogue, Roman wanted the shot, taken by his friend Harry Benson, for the cover. But Vogue's regular editors overruled him. "They told me," he says, "that the ladies who buy Vogue would run away from my cover." But Polanski still managed to express himself inimitably across 53 pages. Among his features: an annotated gallery of his leading ladies (Faye Dunaway is "the grande dame of the screen") and six pages on his idols, Icelandic Painter Erro, the late Bertrand Russell and the late Kung Fu movie star Bruce Lee. All in all, Polanski was pleased: "There's a certain thrill to seeing my work on a page. It's the thrill of novelty, like having a new affair."

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