By E. Graydon Carter

Just nine days after the cab she was riding in was hit broadside by a van, Mary Martin, 68, with a plucky smile and the help of a walker, left San Francisco General Hospital. Though her longtime friend Actress Janet Gaynor remains in stable condition from the accident, Martin was adamant that the show go on--in this case, Over Easy, the PBS-TV program for older Americans that she co-hosts with Jim Hartz. With her two broken ribs and fractured pelvis on a slow mend, she taped her first postaccident show (which began airing last week). "I have to walk two blocks a day," says Martin. "Right now, though, I just can't lift my darned foot. I go up and down stairs backward."

Virtually waist deep in a field of 1,100 child violinists, cellists and pianists who were all taught by his learning-through-imitation method, Shinichi Suzuki waved his bow. Thousands of fingers tensed, and the second annual Chicagoland Suzuki Music Festival began on a note by Veracini (his Sonata in E Minor). Though hundreds of thousands of students have been taught by the Suzuki method since he introduced it more than three decades ago (including Rosalynn and Amy Carter, who took joint lessons in the White House), the 83-year-old master modestly professes to not playing as well as he might. "But I hope," he says, "to be an accomplished violinist by the time I'm 120."

It may have been fortunate that former Astronaut Jack Swigert, 51, has once before survived the icy chill of near tragedy. On his 1970 Apollo 13 journey to the moon, an oxygen tank exploded, prompting a harrowing 3 1/2-day journey back to earth. Now Swigert is undertaking another tense battle. He has learned he has bone-marrow cancer. The Republican candidate in next month's election for a newly created congressional district in suburban Denver, Swigert decided that he would keep on with the race and that he would not keep quiet about the disease. Says he: "We have 3 million people in this country walking around with controllable cancer. I'm just an average American who got cancer."

Seldom is there a quiet moment in the clan of Windsor, whose comings and goings never cease to delight the subjects of their tiny sceptered isle. But last week's escapade was a doozy by any royal standard. Within days after Prince Andrew's celebrated return from his tour of duty in the Falklands aboard the carrier Invincible, he plans a well-deserved rest. Ah, but not alone. Andrew, 22, and a winsome lass named Koo Stark, 25, head off for the Caribbean island of Mustique and the house once used as a trysting hideaway by Princess Margaret and her old flame Roddy Llewellyn. Hoping to get away unnoticed, the couple travel under the names Mr. and Mrs. A. Cambridge. But the press tumbles, and it turns out that the young lady, who is said to have dined with the prince and his mother Queen Elizabeth II, is an American-born, onetime soft-porn ingenue who had starred in a racy 1977 British quickie called Emily. Within hours, Fleet Street has culled naughty photos of Stark naked and splashed them across its front pages. The Queen by this time has to be in an absolute tizzy. From Australia, she reportedly orders Andrew to cut short his vacation and bans both unmarried sons from entertaining "overnight guests" in the palace. The whole affair is so toothsome that Britishers scarcely have time to keep up with their real TV soaps.

--by E. Graydon Carter

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