H.G. Wells was a genius at foretelling the future and recounting the past--but life with him in the present could be hell. In The Time Traveller, a biography of Wells just published in England, he comes off as so sex-driven that no one woman could have held on to him. Not quite, disagreed one of the reviewers. Dame Rebecca West should know. She was Wells' mistress from 1912 to 1922 and is the mother of one of his sons, Novelist Anthony West. "As a general rule, it was he who was discarded," she wrote in the London Sunday Telegraph. A balky new fountain pen could quickly plunge him into a temper tantrum. "Scenes like this, and not exceptional and shocking depravity, accounted for the number of women in Wells' life."

Easy come, easy go. "It's true--we are finished but it is not my wish. It was for Liza to say so," said Peter Sellers, 47, admitting that his sudden romance with Liza Minnelli, 27, had fizzled. He was staying behind in London while she prepared to solo in the U.S. "How can you regret anything that was so happy?" Liza gushed, already nostalgic over her month-long affair.

For more than 15 years, Chinese women, in their no-nonsense bobs and shapeless pantsuits, have been too busy to worry about how they looked. No woman leader has been seen wearing a dress in public since the cultural revolution. Heads snapped, therefore, when Chiang Ching, who is also Mrs. Mao Tse-tung and No. 3 in the Politburo, appeared at the floodlit Sino-U.S. basketball game in Peking wearing a well-tailored gray midi with white sandals and a white shoulder-strap bag. The Americans won 89 to 59. But Mrs. Mao, dazzling in her nonuniform and seated next to American Envoy David Bruce, had scored the most points.

"I looked in the mirror and I asked myself, 'What can I do with this face?' " said Veruschka, 30, one of the most widely photographed models in the world. What she decided to do was to paint her face to resemble "a beautiful stone." The 6-ft. 1-in. blonde soon went on to paint her whole body--mimicking the textures and patterns of nature. Usually Veruschka wears her highly decorative camouflage only at home on her farm near Munich. More conventionally attired, she has branched out into television and personal appearances, including one in Tokyo to peddle Swiss watches and the Japanese jewels that go in them. "Suddenly they wrapped me up in purple and started pointing all those Japanese cameras at me. They forget about the watches."

With the second match in a week, the show biz season was off to a walloping start. Marlon Brando's hand was no sooner on the mend after an encounter with a persistent Manhattan photographer than some of the staff of Designer Pierre Cardin's Paris theater took on a passel of paparazzi. They wanted to catch Marlene Dietrich, a camera-shy 68, during her curtain calls. When Dietrich said no, French fists flew. Critics remembered Dietrich's last appearance 11 years before--with some of the same songs.

New York Artist Robert Rauschenberg, 47, has long ago got away from paints, brushes and junk sculpture in favor of such chefs-doeuvre as a tank filled with 7 1/2 tons of bubbling mud (his Mud Muse). Chosen to improvise the daily "work of art" for the 1,000 artists, intellectuals and media folk assembled at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colo., Rauschenberg struck out in still new directions. His most cheerful effort involved 50 volunteers who gathered together onstage to alternately swill beer and blow across the mouths of their beer bottles. The demented symphony produced guffaws from the audience. Rauschenberg said: "The idea is to get people together doing something."

He was the only surviving leader of 1916's Easter Rising against British rule, and he had led Ireland for nearly half a century, first as Prime Minister, then as President. But when the time came to leave his official residence, Eamon de Valera, 90 and nearly blind, vanished totally without ceremony. "He just drove away with his wife," said an aide. "They wanted it kept absolutely silent until they were settled in." De Valera's retirement plans were perfectly in keeping with his quiet departure from the scenes of power: he and Wife Sinead, 92, will live in a Dublin old people's home operated by the Sisters of Charity.

Once Margot Fonteyn's age began to tell, the big question was: Would Rudolf Nureyev find another perfect partner? During five years of pirouetting from one top ballerina to another, Rudi has never seemed to discover anyone who could fill Margot's slippers. Natalia Makarova, 32, also a former member of the Kirov Ballet, may be the appointed one. Rudi and Natalia had danced some pas de deux together, but never a full-length ballet. After dancing The Sleeping Beauty and Romeo and Juliet with Natalia in London, Rudi sounded serious, although he hinted darkly that "a million compromises have to be made," but said no more. "It is not an easy partnership," elaborated Natalia. "I like a partner when he and she are as one." Even so, the combination may be too promising--and profitable--to abandon.

"It will be convenient for both parties," said Jorge Luis Borges, 73, explaining his political decision to step down as director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, a post the blind short-story writer and scholar cherished as "the maximum ideal of my life." In 1946, when former Dictator Juan Peron came to power, Borges was fired from a lesser library job and made a municipal inspector of open-air markets, where one of his duties was to check on the poultry. This time round, the poet is heading off such an appointment in favor of teaching Old English and Old Norse to friends.

In the primate world, it was the custody battle of the decade: a tug of war between two New York zoos for Patty Cake, the Shirley Temple of gorillas. When Patty Cake's arm was broken last March in Central Park, she was taken to the hospital at the Bronx Zoo. There she thrived, fell in with two other baby gorillas and was strongly urged to stay on in the more spacious uptown quarters. A $100-a-day mediator was called in--Dr. Ronald D. Nadler of the Yerkes Regional Primate Center in Atlanta.

In a 2,000-word report, Nadler declared that Patty Cake--for the sake of her emotional stability--and the perpetuation of her endangered species--should go home. Lulu, Patty Cake's mother, clearly agreed. When she saw her long lost baby, she shrieked and shrieked, then picked her up and gave her a big kiss.

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