Backstage on Broadway went Margaret Truman Daniel, 39, renewing acquaintance with a puppet regime that strikes her as a million laughs. The occasion was opening night of Sergei Obratsov's Russian Puppet Theater, a miniature spectacular that had the critics banning real live actors to some theatrical Siberia. Among the characters applauded was one splintery soprano, and Margaret loved that too. "A marvelous show," she trilled. "I first saw them in Moscow in 1960."

Roger M. Blough, 59, board chairman of U.S. Steel Corp., first tested his mettle playing guard, tackle and end for Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, Pa. That was in the rah-rah '20s when Susquehanna lost the big ones by scores of 91-0, 87-6, 61-7. In December, Blough will receive the National Football Foundation's 1963 gold-medal award for "outstanding contributions to the game." How come? Well, deadpans the foundation, which in previous years has honored such All-American names as Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy, "Blough may not have been one of football's greatest players, but he was certainly one of the pluckiest ... an undersized, hard-playing lineman for an outmanned varsity."

"Pretty Penny," her 21-room house in suburban Nyack, N.Y., abounds in memories: a wood carving from Alex Woollcott, a clock from Richard Burton, a salad bowl from John Barrymore. "Bric-a-brac, that's what it all is," says Theatrical First Lady Helen Hayes, 63, who has already put up for sale the house where she spent nearly three decades with Playwright Charles MacArthur. This week the dishes, furniture and memorabilia--more than 1,000 items--will be sold at auction on the front lawn, with proceeds going into a scholarship fund named for Daughter Mary, who died of polio in 1949. Having a last look around before flying off to winter in Mexico, the actress evinced few regrets. "The financial and spiritual strain has been too hard. There is so much--from so many years."

While making a speech in Philadelphia, Edward R. Murrow, 55, chain-smoking director of the U.S. Information Agency, grew hoarse and decided to check in at Washington Hospital Center on his return to the capital. Doctors found a tumor in his left lung, decided that location of the growth made it necessary to remove the entire lung.

An organization man who really swings was what Warner Brothers wanted. So, for an undisclosed sum, they hired none other than Frank Sinatra, 47, as a new special assistant to help 71-year-old President Jack L. Warner on matters of high policy. Whether Sinatra might be heir apparent to Warner's movie-making empire was anybody's guess, but Hollywood insiders can readily identify the secret ingredient that qualifies Frankie to join the ranks of rising executives: it's a gas.

For years some 300,000 items from the bulging correspondence and papers of Warren G. Harding lay gathering dust in the basement of the 29th President's home in Marion, Ohio. "But historians have been clamoring for them," says Dr. Carl W. Sawyer, 82-year-old son of Harding's personal physician and head of the Harding Memorial Association. Now the Association has donated the entire lot to the Ohio Historical Society, which plans to move all 157 ft. of file cases to Columbus for sorting and cataloguing.

Setting the tone of his six-day pleasure jaunt to Paris, Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, 29, spoke at a luncheon in Deauville: "The world is divided into two fiercely hostile clans--men and women." Thus went the playful new party line. Gagarin enjoyed dinner at Maxim's, rampant vaudeville and slender nudes at the Lido, and accepted the Silver Medal of the City of Paris (also awarded by proxy to U.S. Astronaut John Glenn). Next trip will be to Mexico City, with a stopover in New York, where Yuri may bump into a comrade, Spacegirl Valentino Tereshkova, 26, and have to explain that battle-of-the-sexes remark. Last week in Havana, Valentina was telling Cubans that she and Yuri have booked His and Hers berths on Russia's first manned rocket to the moon.

Eunice Shriver, 41, the President's sister, is expecting her fourth child in February.

Her professional TV debut, Elizabeth Taylor in London, earned its star a tidy $250,000 in mad money, but otherwise the Thameside travelogue proved largely a bust. Overdressed (in gowns by Yves St. Laurent) and overshadowed (on the upper eyelids), Liz occasionally seemed over her head as she struggled with recitations from Keats, Shakespeare and Sir Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, down Mexico way, her knight of the Iguana, Richard Burton, 37, acted tame as a lamb. Gossip columnists eager to thicken the off-screen plot of Tennessee Williams' lusty epic kept an eye on pert co-Star Sue (Lolita) Lyon, 17. But Dickie stayed cool with a cold beer, displayed no passion, except for one minor outburst when Sue muffed her lines. Never far away was Liz, who interrupted one scene because she thought Burton sounded tired. "Oh, it's nothing, luv," said he, and the show went on.

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