People: May 10, 1963

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She adores Noel Coward, Princess Grace, and the Shah of Iran, but in her new book, The Celebrity Circus, Jet-Set Ringmaster Elsa Maxwell, 79, goes whip-cracking after party poopers and other peevish types: Author Cleveland Amory (''boring to look at, boring to listen to, boring to read"), ex-King Farouk ("surely one of the most repulsive creatures God ever made"), and Brigitte Bardot ("she's nude, she's horrible"). There are times, though, admits Elsa, when a girl's drop-dead list gets completely out of hand: "I've said so many nice things and so many mean things about so many famous people, I often have to read my book to find out who it is I don't like."

Bald, gross, and illiterate Emile a Tae, 64, half-caste Tahitian son of Painter Paul Gauguin, used to let tourists take his picture for a few francs, just enough to keep himself in beer. Now, at London's prestigious O'Hana Gallery, his own childlike oil-on-canvas pictures are bringing from $700 to $1,400 apiece, and he has learned to sign them Emile Gauguin. He has reformed too, says fortyish mentor, Madame Josette Giraud, a French writer who bailed him out of jail several times and put a paintbrush in his hand. When word gets back to the islands, the artist can be proud, for even the austere London Times called his 61 canvases "a life document of touching simplicity."

"I knew if I flew it right I couldn't miss," said durable Aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran, 57, looking at her Lockheed TF-104G Super Starfighter the way some women look at a gift-wrapped assortment of Cochran cosmetics. To take the women's 100-kilometer closed-course record away from her archrival, Jacqueline Auriol of France, the American Jackie whipped the knife-winged jet through its paces at 1,203.94 m.p.h., erasing Auriol's 1962 record of 1,149.65 m.p.h. And last month Jackie cracked her own mark in the 15-25-kilometer straightaway dash, boosting the Starfighter to 1,273.10 m.p.h., which, as every girl knows, is almost twice the speed of sound at 40,000 ft.

Star and starlet were shining up to each other: Maximilian Schell, 32, a highly touted Hamlet in Hamburg, and former Queen Soraya, 31, who adorned his opening night and who reportedly takes tips from Max about her new movie career. What's cosmically significant about that? Nothing, says Max. So why don't those lens-happy "reporters of the international scandal press" leave him alone? Soliloquizing in the West German daily Die Welt, onetime Journalist Schell added: "They squat like monkeys in trees, they hang like grape clusters from airliner stairways. Pitiless as wasps, they live off the blood of prominent personalities. In the private sphere, permission of the person photographed should be required."