Is it some aspect of her acting that casts Twiggy, nee Lesley Hornby, in those Roaring Twenties roles? Or is it the same features that made her Britain's trendy fashion model a decade ago: her boyish charm? Twiggy was a kind of '20s bopper in The Boy Friend eight years ago. Now she is a genuine flapper in There Goes the Bride. Co-Star Tommy Smothers plays an addled adman who cracks his head on a door and hallucinates enough to dawdle with the Twiggy of the '20s, whose picture he was about to use in an advertising campaign. After another crack on the noggin, Smothers perambulates into the '40s. He becomes Fred Astaireical, while unflappable Twiggy turns Ginger Rogersish. Unpadded.

Imagine a Harvard grad ('35) and Washington bureaucrat named Walter Starbuck so scandalously long playing that he gets involved first in Hiss-Chambers and then three decades later in Watergate. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut did, turning the tale into Jailbird, his first book in three years, which will be published this fall. His next book may well take longer to write since Vonnegut, summering on Long Island, has taken to canoeing just as he did as a boy on an Indiana lake. "It is especially pleasant," he explains, resting on his literary oar, "not to paddle but to let the wind take you. It blows you into this bird and that bird."

Nary a tympanist, trombonist nor tuba player in the San Diego Youth Symphony complained of not being able to follow the leader. For the guest conductor wielding the baton in three Strauss pieces was 6-ft. 11-in. Bill Walton, who is supposed to be playing roundball crosstown with San Diego's Clippers. Though Walton once tootled an earnest baritone horn in junior high school, his symphony appearance signaled no switch in careers. It simply meant that the Youth Symphony, raising funds for appearances in Europe later this year, recognized that Walton on the podium is as crowd-pleasing as Walton in the key. The novice conductor appeared to be relieved when he laid down his baton. Said he of his youthful musicians: "I'm glad they knew what they were doing."

Who were those women sizing up one another like a couple of harridans glaring over a backyard fence? Incredibly they were Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne and Heather Bilandic, socialite wife of the former mayor with whom Byrne has been feuding before and after she knocked him off in a bitter and surprising primary last February. The confrontation took place when Byrne, who recently ordered an end to round-the-clock police protection for Michael Bilandic, his wife and their eight-month-old son, showed up at a block party in the Bilandic's Bridgeport neighborhood. Spotting her honor, whom Bilandic accuses of vindictiveness, Heather Bilandic rushed up to shake a fist in Byrne's face and scream "How dare you do this! What are you trying to do to my baby!" Byrne bristled, bit a normally sharp lip and moved away.

The movie Tess, the saga of that Hardy girl as seen through the eye of Director Roman Polanski, will not premier until October in Paris. Already, however, it seems to have created a new starlet: German-born Nastassja Kinski, 18, a dark and darting-eyed ingenue who plays Tess as "innocent, generous and pure." Kinski admits that people warned her about Polanski's reputation as a seducer of young girls, but, she says, "I have blind confidence in him. On the set, he opens himself to you completely. He can draw things out of you you didn't know were there."

On the Record

Robert Grey, State Department technology specialist, assuring Australians they can keep their Skylab pieces: "We are hardly in a position to be demanding."

Charles Foster, FAA associate administrator, on DC-10 maintenance: "Maybe you can run an old Ford in sloppy condition, but a big jet is more like a sophisticated Jaguar. If you have a Jaguar, you have to build it right and maintain it right."

Sandy Duncan, actress, on why she thinks Washingtonians will like Peter Pan, in which she plays the title role: "I think they deal highly in fantasy here."

Patrick Nugent, estranged husband of L.B.J.'s daughter Luci and former Johnson radio station executive, on his new gas station outside Austin: "I could stand more business."

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