When the ground began to heave beneath doomed Managua, Nicaragua (see THE WORLD), Howard Hughes was sound asleep in his hotel which promptly began to swoon. "Cool, so cool," as one aide put it, the phantom of high finance ducked out through falling debris and then spent his 67th birthday camping out in a nearby field. Looking for more comfortable surroundings, he summoned a private jet and flew off to London where he took over a whole floor of a hotel for $2,500 a day. A Hughes aide hinted, however, that the boss might soon emerge from this new hermitage. Said he: "I guess he thinks that life is passing him by a little. He is hoping to live more of a life if people will let him."

"Excited but not nervous" was the way Raquel Welch described her state of mind as she set out, with a midget and an array of animated puppets, to make her nightclub debut at the Las Vegas Hilton. Skeptics may have expected Raquel to provide little more than a few wiggles, but according to Variety's dazzled correspondent, she "terped with know-how and chirped with appealing huskiness." All in all, he concluded, it was "one of the most unique shows ever presented in Las Vegas."

Baseball is Fidel Castro's thing--along with guitar music and rhetoric. But the Cuban Premier seems willing to try just about anything. Homeward bound from the Soviet Union's 50th-anniversary celebrations in Moscow, Castro's plane stopped for refueling in Newfoundland, so Fidel set out to see the sights of Gander. He tossed a few snowballs, helped a pair of pretty nurses dig their car out of a snowbank, finally decided to try a little tobogganing. Unfortunately the toboggan tipped, sending el maximo lider sprawling into the snow. Everyone guffawed. Even Fidel.

Novelist-Journalist Rebecca West celebrated her 80th birthday by receiving an editor of the Sunday Telegraph, who asked her, predictably, about Women's Lib. "On the whole, I am with it," said Dame Rebecca. Nothing else that she said was in any way predictable. On women writers: "They seem hopelessly defeated by their domesticity. When I turn their pages, I see not just a pram in the hall but a whole house filled with prams, prams sideways up the stairs, prams in the back garden." On women at work: "The population is divided into people who like work and do it and people who hate work and don't do it--they are as distinct as wart hogs and race horses. And a lot of women turn out to be horses--some of them Percherons." On women in America: "Women have such a bad time there that they naturally feel bitterness. Thanks to Freud the whole of the United States is covered with millions of grown men grizzling about the way they were treated by their mothers."

"Well," ousted Secretary of Commerce Peter G. Peterson said to Washington Post Reporter Sally Quinn about his official sojourn in Washington, "the experience may have been costly, but it was also priceless." Before bidding farewell to the capital, Peterson went to a dinner party with some Democratic friends (Host Tom Braden, Senator J. William Fulbright, Former Ambassador David Bruce), where he regaled everyone with an imaginary version of his dismissal. He had been summoned to "Mount David," said Peterson, and subjected to a loyalty test. Had his wife Sally really voted for McGovern? Would he please give a one-word description of his friend Senator Charles ("Chuck") Percy of Illinois? (The "correct" answer: "Upchuck.") The final reason for Peterson's failure, he said, was a physical shortcoming: "My calves were too fat and I couldn't click my heels."

In addition to praying for peace on earth, Pope Paul VI carried his holiday message to those beneath the earth. He donned a miner's white helmet, climbed aboard a Jeep, and chugged off into the depths of a railway tunnel being constructed underneath Monte Soratte, 25 miles north of Rome. After saying a midnight Mass, the Pope inspected a huge tunnel-drilling machine and then embraced a foreman who read a welcoming speech. The Pope's venture was not without its critics, however. "A publicity gesture," grumbled Rome's main conservative newspaper, Il Tempo. "To show his solidarity with 150 workers His Holiness compelled at least 1,000 more persons to leave their families and go to work."

Martin Bormann alive and rich in Argentina? Not according to the latest word from Berlin. During some excavations, workmen found two skulls, one of which has been tentatively identified as that of Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's surgeon, who was scurrying down the street with Bormann when both men disappeared. As for the other skull, the teeth resemble those of the Nazi leader, and there is a deformation over the right eye, where Bormann had a scar. German officials promised to announce the results of their examinations in mid-January. Paramount Pictures, planning a movie on Bormann's alleged escape, said it would go ahead no matter whose skull those workers found.

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