"I'll be off radio for a while, but there is nothing in the rumor that I am retiring. Nothing." So saying, Lowell Thomas, 84, informed listeners that he was delivering his last regular broadcast for CBS radio. Since he launched the country's first network news show in 1930, his mellow baritone "Good evening, everybody" and sonorous "So long until tomorrow" reached a cumulative audience once estimated at more than 100 billion. When not at the mike, he found time to write more than 50 books and build a communications corporation--Capital Cities--that controls a coast-to-coast string of radio and TV stations, several newspapers and Fairchild Publications, Inc. Apart from mentioning a brief skiing vacation and continuing work on his TV series, Lowell Thomas Remembers, the unretiring newsman refused to comment on his future. The reason: "People hear what you're planning and steal your ideas."

When the band failed to begin Happy Birthday to You on cue, a nervous p.r. man standing too close to the microphone grumbled, "Why the hell aren't they playing?" Apart from that minor gaffe, the world premiere of That's Entertainment, Part 2, and an accompanying 77th birthday party for Dancer Fred Astaire came off without a missed step. The film, which like Part 1 is a patchwork of old MGM movie clips, made its debut at Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theater with the help of a chorus line of venerable hoofers (Donald O'Connor, 50, Cyd Charisse, 53, and Marge Champion, 52), one retired Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller, 71) and a true MGM golden-ager, Cory Grant, 72. But the stars of the evening were the narrators of the film: Actor-Dancer Gene Kelly, 63, and Astaire, who later adjourned to a lavish postscreening birthday party to which 900 had been invited. The festivities were vintage Hollywood hoopla, and the old footwork flash was in his milieu. Said Astaire: "At Metro we got used to it."

That big one with the moustache is Ben Davidson, former defensive end with the Oakland Raiders and bit-part actor (clothed, in the porn classic Behind the Green Door). The little one he's holding is Jim Bouton, the ex-New York Yankee pitcher who threw curves at the baseball establishment with Ball Four, his 1970 book about drinking, dallying and other big-league peccadilloes. The two are preparing a fall TV series (titled Ball Four) in which Bouton portrays a so-so relief pitcher and Davidson plays a catcher named Rhino. How did a 6-ft. 7-in., 275-lb. ex-football star get a job in a comedy series about baseball? "He came in to audition and said he wanted the part. We didn't have the courage to say no," claims Bouton. And how is Davidson's acting? "Terrific," says Jim. Then he adds: "I try to get along with people who can lift me off the ground."

On the streets of Rome, she rides in a chauffeured limousine. But on TV commercials in Japan these days, Actress Sophia Loren travels more breezily --on a Honda motorbike. "We needed a softer image to promote the idea that bikes like ours are for ladies also," says a Honda spokesman, explaining why Loren, 41, was hired as Honda's first foreign huckstress. Sophia, who spent five days putt-putting for the cameras outside her Italian villa, now joins some other well-known Westerners who advertise wares on the Japanese tube. Among them: Actors Charles Bronson (men's cosmetics), Orson Welles (whisky) and Peter Folk (clothes). Her own work as motorbike saleswoman will earn Loren $200,000 a year--surely enough to keep her chauffeured.

"The ladies who take pen in hand are not irresistibly attracted by the blue of my eyes," confessed Oil Tycoon Jean Paul Getty, who, after five wives, still receives marriage proposals by mail. "The magnetism I exert is of another color --green, the hue of my purported wealth." Small wonder. Getty, 83, in an introduction to his forthcoming autobiography, As I See It, estimates his net worth at well over $ 1 billion and that of his family at "about twice again as much." J.P. disclosed that to avoid the sort of inheritance scramble that followed the death of Fellow Billionaire Howard Hughes, he "long ago" drafted a will consigning the bulk of his riches to charity. "I suffer no guilt complexes or conscience pangs about my wealth," added Getty. "The Lord may have been disproportionate, but that is how He--or nature, if you like--operates."

Her acting career began with a stint as TV's Chiquita Banana lady. The next time Barbara Carrera is seen peeling anything, however, it will be the clothes off her back in a new sci-fi epic titled Embryo. "I had a lot of qualms about it," she says of her nude scene with Co-Star Rock Hudson, a physician-researcher who cultivates Barbara from birth, so to speak, in his basement laboratory. In her role, the Nicaraguan-born actress grows quickly into the good doctor's lovemate, then a dope addict and finally a 120-year-old hag. Though she bares all in the movie, the actress is far from revealing about her age. "I've lied about it so long, I'd just like to keep it that way," she says. It is not 120.

No cuffs, please--at least not on the suit being tailored for Hollywood's newest screen giant. He is, after all, a 40-ft. mechanical gorilla named King Kong, and after months of appalling technical problems, he is almost out of the woods and onto the sets of Producer Dino De Laurentiis' monster movie. While the $3 million Kong endured some final tinkering on his hydraulic hands last week, workers began fitting his horsehair covering onto a wood-and-Styrofoam standin. Once the suit is transferred to the star, the unnaked ape will team up with Actors Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange for the storied chase through Manhattan streets and a climb to the 110th floor of New York's World Trade Center. Because the cost of King Kong has escalated from $13 million to $22 million, De Laurentiis has already scheduled a sequel: King Kong in Africa. Who could afford to tell a $3 million leading man that he's through?

Since the Marines rescued his ship and 39-man crew from Cambodian gunboats a year ago, Mayaguez Captain Charles Miller has had rough sailing. Though President Ford feted him as a hero after his release, Miller has been sued by some Mayaguez crew members who charge that he endangered their lives. Then last month his ship was fined $3,000 for spilling bunker fuel into Hong Kong harbor. Last week, as the first anniversary of his capture neared, Miller, 63, had the Mayaguez headed for the Cambodian area once again. Just before he sailed from Bangkok, a terse cable from the U.S. State Department arrived. Citing the recent firing by shore batteries at an Italian freighter, the cable ordered Miller to stay 65 miles off Cambodia's mainland. "The way things are going," lamented Miller, "I ought to buy a farm and retire."

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