Cutting up with Beatles cutouts is fun for ex-teeny-bopper Susan Newman, 24, but she is a little concerned about her starring role in the film I Want to Hold Your Hand. "In my next role, I'd like to look a little more sophisticated, sexier, you know," says Paul Newman's daughter (by his first wife, former Actress Jacqueline Witte). Susan would like to leave Hollywood for New York, where she used to play off-off-off-Broadway. "Making movies has nothing to do with acting," she explains. She is serious about being an actress, "but I'm not sure I want to be a star the way my father is. That man is hassled to death." Says Susan: "If people ever recognize me the way they recognize him in the street, I'll go nuts." Hi, Susan.

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"It's wrong to say that the scripts are no longer being written for women," says Actress Catherine Deneuve, who is all fired up about her new role in the French thriller Listen Here. She plays a Bogart-like private eye who has gun, will travel. Her employer: a mysterious baron who has developed radio waves that can paralyze a whole town. Deneuve learned from the French flics how to shoot a revolver. She took to it quickly. Says she: "It's as exciting as a road show."

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It was the tenth anniversary of what Commander Lloyd Bucher calls his "footnote in history," but the former skipper of the U.S.S. Pueblo doesn't believe in brooding. "I'm not a morose type of person. The sharp edges of Korea have eroded," says Bucher, 50, who spent eleven months in a North Korean prison after the capture of his ship. Since his retirement from the Navy in 1973, Bucher has done a bit of writing and lecturing. His topic on the lecture circuit: "What's Right with America." He has also taken up an old hobby, painting with watercolors, and has enrolled as a full-time student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. "I have a lot of images of the romance of the sea that I would like to capture in paintings," he says. Among them, the Pueblo.

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The U.S. Senate had been without a Humphrey for only twelve days when Muriel Humphrey accepted the appointment to take her late husband's seat. "I believe I can help complete some of the very important legislative business that Hubert had hoped to finish," she said. To the throng of reporters questioning her, she added: "Hubert was always my guide. I hope he is guiding me today."

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He loved the game, and the game loved him, but warming the bench wasn't Broadway Joe Namath's style. After sitting out most of the last ten games of the Los Angeles Rams' season, the onetime hero of the New York Jets made up his mind: he had thrown his last N.F.L. pass. "It was no fun being second-string quarterback," said Namath, 34. But, he quickly added, "I have no regrets." He spoke briefly of the leg ailments that plagued him throughout his career. "I remember after my first knee operation, right after I signed with the Jets, my doctor told me I'd be lucky to play four seasons." He played 13. In Vince Lombardi's estimation Namath was "an almost perfect passer." In Joe's own words last week, he was "a helluva entertainer." He will take his time to decide on future commitments, but TV commercials, movies and sports reporting are all possibilities. Coaching? Probably not. Says Joe: "It takes up too many hours to do it right."

Hamlet is a "crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless work," complained the novelist. Man and Superman, he wrote to George Bernard Shaw, is not "sufficiently serious." The music of Beethoven, Schumann and Berlioz, he told Tchaikovsky, has "an artificial style--striving for the unexpected." The critic was Count Leo Tolstoy, and these and other remarks appear in two volumes of Tolstoy's Letters (Scribners; $35), the first comprehensive translation into English of the Russian writer's prolific correspondence. In notes to friends and fellow authors like I.S. Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, H.G. Wells and Rainer Maria Rilke, Tolstoy also takes a hard look at his own work. War and Peace, he concedes, is in some parts "long-winded and inaccurate."

On the Record

Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film director: "I'm not a writer. I'm just someone who writes plays and scripts for a single purpose --to serve as skeletons awaiting flesh and sinew."

Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General, urging young people to retain their idealism: "If you have to choose between being Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, for heaven's sake, be the Don."

Idi Amin Dada, Uganda's self-appointed President for Life, addressing a crowd of supporters and newsmen: "I wanted to assure you that whatever has been said about violations of so-called human rights doesn't exist here. Since you came, how many people have you found dead?"

Jean Rhys, octogenarian British novelist (Good Morning, Midnight), on living in France: "Paris sort of lifted you up. It did, it did, it did! You know, the light is quite pink, instead of being yellow or blue. I've never seen anything like it anywhere else."

Robert Morley, who advertises British Airways: "Commercials are the last things in life you can count on for a happy ending. The girl with the right hair spray gets the boy--or vice versa."

Life begins at 54 for Liza Minnelli and Shirley MacLaine and Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Supermodel Cheryl Tiegs. Oh yes, and for Bianca Jagger and Tennis Star Vitas Gerulaitis and even Bella Abzug. Inside Manhattan's hottest disco, Studio 54, the elite meet to gyrate to the beat, watch the light show, gape and be gaped at. Since the club opened nine months ago, Photographer Adam Scull, son of Art Buff Robert Scull and his estranged wife, Ethel, has been there almost' nightly to snap the customers because, he says, "it's something that won't last forever, so it is good to document it."

But Owner Steve Rubell, who light-show years away was a Wall Street broker, is striving for permanent chic. Most nights he stations himself at the doorway (with a few bouncers) to weed the throngs begging for entrance. "We only want fun people," he explains. "The wilder the clothes, the better the chance you have of getting in. We discourage the Bagel Nosh-polyester group."

And a lot of other folks besides. John F. Kennedy Jr., who neglected to drop his name, was turned away. Aspiring Starlet Sunny Leigh, who claims that club personnel kept her outside the inner sanctum "violently and with great force," is suing Studio 54 for a cool $13 million. Even Dallas Cowboy Defensive End Harvey Martin, the terror of the Super Bowl, was stopped at the door. Now that's selectivity. Or a death wish.

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