By E. Graydon Carter

A hulking, gray floating village of some 1,200 souls, the British carrier Invincible returns to Portsmouth, England, this week. It will be 166 days since it first set out for the Falkland Islands--the longest continuous tour at sea of any British warship since the days of sail--and among those eager to join family and friends will be a helicopter pilot named Prince Andrew Albert Christian Edward, 22, a veteran of numerous dicey adventures during the conflict. "I was airborne at the time the Atlantic Conveyor was hit," he recalls. "I saw it being struck by the missile, and it was something I will never forget. It was horrific." No doubt the young prince had quite a different reaction to the arrival of a gaggle of chorines, dropped aboard for a U.S.O.-style performance. Two of the dancers, Carole St. James and Carol Hungerford, were introduced to Andrew afterward. "He told us to call him 'H' [for Highness]," says St. James. "I was singing You Made Me Love You, and he sang the second verse." The shipboard romance adjourned at 3 a.m., when H had to go on duty. "He said he wants to see us again when he gets back to London," says St. James. "He's certainly a flirt, and it's quite clear he likes being with the ladies."

Hi, this is Bob ("Tell Erik Estrada I'll meet him out on the blacktop") Hope, 79, here to tell you about my new special next month on NBC: Bob Hope's Star-Studded Spoof of the New TV Season--G-Rated with Glamour, Glitter and Gags. And how about NBC these days? The peacock has been taking such a beating in the ratings recently that I've seen better-looking birds served by Frank Perdue. This is my 33rd year on NBC, and for my new special I've got all the hot stars, except E.T.--the line was busy. But we did get two of TV's best: Tom (Magnum P.I.) Selleck, 37, and Linda (Dynasty) Evans, 39. We'll also have a couple of gals who are welcome on my set any day, Elizabeth Taylor, 50, and Brooke Shields, 17. Brookie will be joining me in a spoof of Happy Days moved ahead 50 years from now. She'll play the new girl in town, and I'll play the Fonz. (Eat your heart out, Winkler.) Brookie's been in seven of my last 15 specials. I don't want to say that we've been spending a lot of time together, but I think I saw less of Crosby.

Smooth of pen, wicked of wit, and controversial of strip, Pulitzer-Prizewinning Cartoonist Garry Trudeau has skewered politics and society for twelve years. And there lies the trouble. After guiding the lives of such outspoken, '60s-scarred characters as Joanie Caucus, B.D., Uncle Duke, and his own alter ego, Michael J. Doonesbury, through some 4,300 cartoon strips, Trudeau, 34, thinks it is time to refill the inkwell. "I need a breather," he confesses. "Investigative cartooning is a young man's game." Though the cartoonist will be off from the beginning of next year through the fall of 1984, he is not really abandoning the residents of the Walden Puddle Commune, just fiddling with them. "It's time to give them $20 haircuts and move them out into the larger world of grownup concerns," says Trudeau. "The trip from draft beer and mixers to cocaine and herpes is a long one, and it's time they got a start on it." The cartoonist would like to put some distance between the reasons for his hiatus and those of his Pulitzer-prizewinning colleague Jeff MacNelly, 34, who gave up his editorial-page turf in 1981, only to return earlier this year. "This is simply a lull in the action," says Trudeau. "It is not, repeat, not, a mid-life crisis."

Astaire and Rogers may have inspired Americans to dance, but Arthur Murray, 87, taught them. From touch dancing in a flyspecked, New York City dime-a-dance hall in 1913, to a nationwide chain of dance studios, to national prominence on television's The Arthur Murray Party, a ratings winner in the 1950s, to a seemingly choreographed game of doubles with his wife Kathryn on courts near their Hawaiian home below Diamond Head, the former Broadway hoofer has always kept both feet on the ground. His professional foxtrotting days behind him, although he still takes a turn on the dance floor, Murray may now be the oldest money manager in the U.S. Handling a $15 million portfolio for himself, relatives and friends, Murray has increased his fund by 32% a year, largely through canny investments in tax-free municipal bonds and by sidestepping the advice of his Eastern counterparts. "All the New York trust companies remind me of sheep in Brooks Brothers clothing," says Murray. "Whatever one does, the other does."

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