"I feel for once like a businesswoman. Of all the things I've had a creative input in, it's going to mean something this time. It's one of my most favorite things that's happened." Well, yes. Thus Farrah Fawcett-Majors described the joys of her new career--as a perfume tycoon for Faberge. Corporate brass celebrated the deal with a Beverly Hills cocktail party last week, where among the guests was Faberge Director Cary Grant, who had never before met the lionized lady. Besides making ads for TV commercials, Farrah will endorse her own line of cosmetics and has been promised a hand in everything, from choosing fragrances and hair-care ingredients to package designing. Said she happily: "After all these years when I've thought, 'Gee, it would be nice to say something,' now I can." How much will she be paid for her "creative input"? No one was saying. But maybe it will keep her busy while she is barred from TV films and the movies under the court injunction obtained by Spelling-Goldberg Productions after her defection from Charlie's Angels.

Pity Prince Saud al-Faisal, Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia and a possible future king. One among several Arab potentates who have been eying the U.S. real estate market lately, he wanted to have a Manhattan pied-a-terre. Saud's choice was a twelve-room, $600,000 coop apartment on Park Avenue owned by Bruce A. Norris, president of the Detroit Red Wings. Alas, it was not to be. After months of meetings, the other tenants decided not to accept Saud as a co-owner--because of their fear of possible political violence if he moved in. Said one:

"There's considerable tension in the Middle East, and, who knows, we might have had pickets out front of the building, maybe bombs, bullets, fire bombs, poison in our water."

Saud, 37, travels to New York City sometimes on business of his own and sometimes to head his country's delegation to the General Assembly of the United Nations. For a while at least he will presumably have to make do, as he has in the past, with a humble suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

It was far from business as ; usual in the oak-paneled Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room on Capitol Hill. From behind the potted palms, the U.S. Navy Commanders' Trio plinked out Indiana, while congressional movers and shakers wreaked havoc on mounds of shrimp, deviled eggs and sliced beef. The occasion: a retirement fete honoring Frances Knight, 72, for 22 years absolute ruler--some said Dragon Lady--of the U.S. Passport Office. A legend of efficiency, she was also a scrappy defender against a large assortment of enemies, including liberals who opposed her militant conservatism and State Department bureaucrats who chafed at her independence. Admits Knight: "I'm not a team player. If you don't have some individual ideas, the Government is in trouble." Her battles, she claimed, stemmed from her protectiveness toward the passport as "a document that stands for something." She is even now incensed at the practice of "courtesy" diplomatic passports for former ambassadors. Says Knight: "They are passing them out like lollipops."

America's most lovable orphan could do with more work on her breaking stuff. That was the inescapable conclusion last week in Manhattan's Central Park after Andrea MeArdle, 13, star of the Broadway musical Annie, led her pint-size cast onto the Softball diamond against the peewees of Paramount Pictures' forthcoming kiddy sequel, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. Not even Daddy Warbucks could have saved the day. Pitcher MeArdle was shellacked for--leapin' lizards!--six runs in the first inning, and Annie went back to Broadway on the short end of a 6-2 score. Andrea's excuse: "Our fielders weren't very good." Her own pitching lapses were forgivable. Back in her home town of Philadelphia, Andrea played shortstop and first base.

Like a Muslim on an obligatory hadj Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal paid his first visit to the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Ky. --and came away impressed, sort of The onetime $40-a-week bank clerk, later chairman of the Bendix Corp.' inspected two vaults, containing some $800 million in bullion, hefted a gold brick and rested for a spell on a $386 -482,010.40 auric hassock. What Blumenthal found memorable was "how orderly everything is, and how well guarded." Then he opined that "the real strength of our economy is our people and our factories and our technology. The gold doesn't do as much for us as some people think." Presumably, those deluded people are the very folk that Fort Knox is so well guarded against.

The question of repertory was a touchy one. Bombay-born Zubin Mehta was conducting the 80-piece Israel Philharmonic Orchestra near Dovev on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Needless to say, martial music was out. A particular no-no was Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, with its artillery crescendo-all too possibly, nonmusicians might reply fortissimo. Mehta settled for Ra vel's Bolero Haydn's Trumpet Concerto and Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld. The results were clearly joyous to a crowd including Israeli border police and flag-bearing Lebanese Christian Phalangist soldiers allowed on Israeli territory for the occasion. Said Mehta: "We musicians believe that we've been able to reach out across boundaries where politicians have been unable to."

Peter Pan would not grow up, but Mary Martin cannot be kept down. Back on the boards in her first stage play since 1966, Mary, 63, plays a dizzy onetime circus performer who falls in love with her doctor (Anthony Quayle) during a stint in a sanatorium. The play, Do You Turn Somersaults?--a freshly translated 1975 comedy by Soviet Playwright Aleksei Arbuzov--opens Aug. 18 at Washington's Kennedy Center. Yes, she gamely turns somersaults--and loves it Says she: "This is just the type of thing I was looking for."

Brother Jimmy hugs and kisses his friends in public, and so, on occasion does his sister Baptist Faith Healer Ruth Carter Stapleton. At Manhattan's New York New York discotheque, she showed up for the 35th birthday party of Freelance Writer Dotson Rader who is researching an article about her for the New York Times Magazine. Stapleton; 46, danced a bit and inspired some affectionate smooching from the guest of honor, who finds her "one of the most beautiful women I've ever met." Stapleton also spent part of the evening in the disco vestibule with Rader's father Paul a Southern Baptist evangelist. The whole attair, she said, "was very enjoyable and very enlightening."

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