At a banquet honoring the 70th birthday of the father who once wanted him to go into the beauty-parlor-supply business, the New York Philharmonic's Leonard Bernstein, 43, won bravos from 800 guests by re-creating a work he had played when he was 13 at his piano debut at Boston's Temple Mishkan Tefila. "At the time," recalled the protean composer conductor, "I played variations of the song in the manner of Chopin, Liszt and Gershwin. Now I will play it in the manner of Bernstein." Then, as a proud Samuel Bernstein ("You don't expect your child to be a Moses, a Maimonides, a Leonard Bernstein") listened misty-eyed, Lenny launched into his own expanded version of a fragment of Jewish liturgical music entitled Meditations on a Prayerful Theme My Father Sang in the Shower.

In Hollywood's latest inn-fighting, fading Love Goddess Rita Hayworth, 43, and dour Cinemactor Gary Merrill, 46, chose the celebrity-crowded Au Petit Jean to exchange dialogue that would make longtime California Neighbor Henry Miller blush and that did in fact bring hysterical tears from their dinner companion. Rita's daughter (by the late Aly Khan). Princess Yasmin, 12. Soon bounced from the restaurant, the fractious couple were carted off in separate cars. Next day Rita, who has been capering on two continents with Gary ever since her fifth divorce last September, proclaimed that the Thirty Minutes' War was over. What about the romance? "Well," appraised she, "there was nothing on, really."

Famed for his allergy to photographers (he once doused one with a glass of water), Japan's irascible ex-Premier Shigeru Yoshida was stalked by a nervous

Tokyo cameraman assigned to catch him at the beginning of the new Year of the Tiger (the sign of the Oriental zodiac under which Yoshida was born almost 84 years ago). Unpredictable as ever, Japan's most durable postwar statesman welcomed his tormentor graciously, even brushed aside a retainer's horrified protests to pose on an appropriate hunting trophy.

To a question that once titillated San Francisco gossipists--which twin would get the toniest bachelor on Telegraph Hill?--came the answer last week, when Land Developer John Fell Stevenson, 25, youngest son of the U.S.'s U.N. ambassador, reached the moment of troth with Occasional Interior Decorator Natalie Owings, 22, the less bohemian of the sloe-eyed twin daughters of Architect Nat

Owings. Said the prospective father-in-law, a co-founder of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architectural colossus: "I've never been either a Republican or a Democrat. But I've always been for Adlai."

Hard on the heels of Russia's promise of a nuclear reactor destined for the University of Ghana came the appointment of the school's first professor of nuclear physics: a Briton who has been 15 years away from the field. Recipient of the chair (among several earmarked for "distinguished scholars from all parts of the world"): Alan Nunn May, 51, who served six years and eight months for giving atomic secrets to the Russians.

Given two days to live when he was hospitalized just over a month ago with an ulcer and a heart attack, Britain's former Prime Minister Earl Attlee, 79, was well enough last week to return to his

Buckinghamshire home. Although it was doubtful he could ever again face up to the lecture tours that in recent years have carried him from New York to New Delhi, the indestructible old Labor war horse was already making plans to get back to the House of Lords.

The world's leading press lord, Fleet Street's Roy Thomson, 67, firmly grasped a nettle. Confessed the Canadian-born Presbyterian (who once remarked, "It's against my religious principles to lose money") in a British TV interview: "I don't say it is any easier for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but I certainly think it is very unfair to say that it is easier for the poor man."

Contemptuously declaring that "the best punch of 1961 was the one Marlon Brando's wife hit him," onetime Light Heavyweight Champion Billy Conn, 44, offered a dissenting opinion on the perennial campaign to clean up boxing. Snorted Conn, now a prosperous Pittsburgh candy manufacturer, to Hearst Columnist Jimmy Cannon: "A prizefighter isn't an altar boy. They were all hoodlums when I came around. The fighters were hoodlums. The managers were hoodlums. Hoodlums managed the managers. That's the way it's got to be if fighters are going to be any good."

As dutiful Red wheelhorses busily demolished Stalin icons all the way from the Berlin Wall to the Great Wall of China, the Communist bosses of Czechoslovakia faced a special problem: what to do about the world's biggest remaining monument to the late Soviet dictator, a 96-ft.-high statue that glowers out over the Moldau River. Their cautious but es sentially hep solution: appointment of a committee to consider suggestions for "a new arrangement of the Stalin square" from "Prague's working population."

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