At 89, ex-President Herbert Hoover was making an astonishing recovery from the gastrointestinal bleeding that brought him near death in June. He now spends some time every day at his desk in his Waldorf Towers apartment. But Hoover canceled his traditional birthday-eve press conference on doctors' orders, instead issued a written statement. "The longer I live and the more I see," it said, "the more confidence I have in the American system of constant good will and service to other nations, and of free enterprise and personal liberty. We have a great way of life--let's keep it that way."

For seven years the number of Broadway plays (not musicals) that had ever passed the 1,000-performance mark stood at an even dozen. Now Mary, Mary has come along to make it a baker's dozen--and to serve up a yeasty $1,000,000 for Playwright Jean Kerr, 40. But she is almost too busy to spend her dough. Wife of the New York Herald Tribune's Drama Critic Walter Kerr, she is expecting her sixth child in October, has just sold her best-selling novel Please Don't Eat the Daisies to NBCTV, is finishing up her next play, Poor Richard, due on Broadway next year.

The big stars said no. Even the little stars said no. But LuLu Porter said yes, and so the U.S. was assured that one of its own would be in there singing with representatives of 32 other nations at this week's International Song Festival at Sopot, Poland. Swell, but who's LuLu Porter? Well, explained White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, he had heard LuLu, fetching, brown-eyed and 23, belt out nine songs at Ye Little Club in Beverly Hills last spring, later met and congratulated her. Youngest of nine children of a music-loving Ohio farmer, LuLu (nee Marianne Wolford) began singing professionally only a year ago, says her first act was "a bomb." She does a mean belly dance as a sideline, but finds the bumps a grind, hopes to narrow her repertory to singing and acting.

When their case went to court last year, Actor-Director Jose Ferrer, 51, tried to talk Singer Rosemary Clooney, 35, out of divorcing him. Accused of carrying on with other women throughout the nine-year marriage, Jose seemed subdued and penitent, insisted he still loved Rosemary and wanted a reconciliation. "Not at this time," said Rosemary, and she made it sound as if what she really meant was never, never, never. But last week, when the two flew into Cincinnati together to visit their five children, they let it be known that they had made up, after all, canceling their California divorce just a few days before it was to have become final.

Good thing the man from restaurant-rating Michelin's wasn't there, or Maxim's might have lost one of its o o o. Side by side with wines of France stood an assortment of bottles with exotic labels: Sonoma Pinot Rouge '41 and '43, Cabernet Sauvignon '43, Inglemont Cabernet '45--all California reds. California's Governor Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown, in Paris on a European junket, was being honored at a dinner for 20, and the host, the California World Trade Authority's president, Adolph Schuman, loyally asked whether the restaurant had any California wines. To Schuman's surprise, Sommelier Edouard Pommier produced several dusty bottles from Maxim's "cave." Had Maxim's sagely foreseen the request? No, Owner Louis Vaudable had happened to pick up a sampling of California wines, "pour s'amuser," during a trip to the U.S. some years ago. "Of course, we drank the French wine too," reported Brown.

Signed to narrate a CBS-TV documentary marking the 20th anniversary of DDay, Dwight D. Eisenhower revisited scenes of the 1944 invasion. He stopped at his old command post in Portsmouth, England, toured Sainte Mere-Eglise, jumped across desolate Omaha Beach with CBS Commentator Walter Cronkite at his side. It was, said Ike, "an adventure into nostalgia," but at times it seemed more like a misadventure. Surveying the confusion of cameras, cables and cops during one recording session atop Pointe du Hoe, the rock escarpment between Omaha and Utah beaches, Ike shook his head and said: "This is not the job for me."

A drama as piquant as many of those performed in the 24 Shubert theaters had a short run in a Manhattan court last week. The antagonists: Kerttu Shubert, 48, former chorus girl whom the late Theater Magnate John Shubert wed in 1937, and Nancy Mae Eyerman, 28, a wealthy Pennsylvania contractor's daughter who became Shubert's mistress on a 1958 cruise, bore him a daughter in 1960, married him in Mexico the next year, then bore him a son. The estimated stake: Shubert's $600,000 estate, plus a prospective $15 million from the family theater empire. The outcome: Kerttu was recognized as Shubert's widow and heiress despite his Mexican divorce from her the year before his death, and Nancy Mae was denied the right to use the name Shubert or to claim to have been his wife. The court gave Nancy Mae some balm, however, by granting her children $12,500 apiece from the estate and--a far more valuable consolation--declaring them legitimate offspring of John Shubert.

The newest member of Italy's National Assembly is better known for his Capri pants than for his politics. Fashion Designer Emilio Pucci finished second on the Liberal ticket in last April's parliamentary elections in Florence, got the seat anyway when the front runner died last week. Deputy Pucci, who will doubtless be hearing a lot of talk about the apertura a sinistra (opening to the left), has an idea for a less political apertura--an opening at the top. "In ten years," he predicts, "women will have shed the tops of their bathing suits completely. Perhaps they may take to applying lipstick to their nipples as women did in ancient Egypt."

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