In Hollywood, perhaps even more than in Manhattan, going out to lunch is a rite and an art, and in such gin-filled aquariums as the Brown Derby and Romanoff's, the tab frequently exceeds what a strong man could earn in a month delivering milk or teaching high school algebra. But last week it seemed that matters had gotten out of hand. Spyros Skouras, the sovereign lord of 20th Century-Fox, had summoned Writer-Producer-Director Leslie Stevens to a staff lunch. Stevens, whose Daystar Corp. forms a powerful fealty under the Skouras fief, sent a proxy, and Skouras, growing wroth at the breach of fealty, canceled Fox's contract with Daystar. Said Stevens, jousting back with a $5,877,500 damage suit: "The noon meeting of March 22 may well turn out to be the most expensive lunch in Hollywood history."

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Gary, Ind., Retired Steelworker Joie Ray, who tied the world indoor mile record in 1925, later became an Olympic marathon runner and a marathon dancer ("You can't keep the wolf from the door with medals"), last week celebrated his 67th birthday in his usual fashion. Donning shorts and spikes, Chesty Joie ran a mile in 7:04.8--still within hailing distance of his 1925 standard of 4:12.

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At the annual meeting of Chicago's Economic Club, Right-Thinker Eddie Rickenbacker, 70, the U.S.'s World War I ace of aces, now Eastern Air Lines board chairman, stood up and fired toward the left: "American liberalism is driving us into slavery and, with us, everyone else in the world--for the death of liberty here will be the death of liberty around the world and the beginning of complete Communist tyranny for centuries. But now, thank God, the wind has shifted. Conservatives are rising up across the land, finding new strength in their old convictions, making their voices heard, and winning at the polls. The battle is joined." sbsbsb

West Berlin's bouncy Mayor Willy Brandt, 47, has been picking up pointers from the career of Jack Kennedy. Last week, as he pushed his campaign to oust octogenarian West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the Socialist standard-bearer confessed that his attractive wife, Rut, was expecting a third child just about election time.

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Looking particularly hale at his farewell before heading for Gettysburg with Mamie, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 70, fielded a press query on the space race ("It's not necessary to be first in everything. Our people are to be congratulated for doing as much as they have"), climbed aboard his private railroad car, was still signing autographs when the engineer abruptly ended his two-month California holiday.

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When it sought $6,615 from a House appropriations subcommittee to install a resident historian at Fort Washington, the National Park Service reckoned with out a resident historian on the committee --Ohio Democrat Michael Kirwan, who never got past second grade, but knows all about the War of 1812 and how Fort Washington, twelve miles south of the capital, surrendered ignominiously to the British. "Do you have to remind people that that is the place we ran from without firing a shot?", the budget-cutting Congressman asked acidly. Just like Fort Washington's garrison, the Park Service surrendered.

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Ardent Stevensonian Jane Warner Dick stumped for her longtime friend and Illinois neighbor Adlai in his 1948 gubernatorial campaign; in 1952, taking time off from social-welfare work, she became vice chairman of the National Volunteers for Stevenson. In 1956 she took to the hustings again, proved herself as a front-line speaker and strategist capable of winning over almost everyone but her Republican husband. Office Equipment Executive Edison Dick. Last week the petite, 54-year-old grandmother of five was again working madly for Adlai, this time as the newly appointed U.S. representative on the Social Commission of UNESCO.

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In a will filed for probate at his adopted home of White Plains, N.Y., the late Australian-born Pianist-Composer Percy Grainger made a bizarre request: "that my flesh be removed from my bones and the flesh destroyed," with the skeleton to go to the University of Melbourne "for preservation and possible display in the Grainger Museum." But the remains of the eccentric creator of Country Gardens, interred in the family plot in Adelaide after his death last February, may never get to Melbourne. Explained his U.S. attorney: "By law a person cannot bequeath his body. The remains belong to the next of kin, which in this instance is Mrs. Grainger."

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After staving off deportation since 1953 (the Justice Department could not find a nation that would take him), U.S. Mafia Mogul Carlos Marcello walked into the New Orleans office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, was peremptorily handcuffed and hustled to the airport, was Guatemala-bound before he could phone his wife or pick up a toothbrush. Last week, while the American Civil Liberties Union attacked the "to talitarian tactics" of the Immigration agents, the Internal Revenue Service slapped a $835,000 tax lien on the squat mobster, charged him with leaving the country without a permit.

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