Even the luckiest people need a star to sigh by--or so it seemed when Astronaut Scott Carpenter, 39, went backstage to visit Broadway's Fanny Girl Barbra Streisand, 22. "I'm really honored," bubbled Barbra, clearly launched into orbit. "I'm always interested in scientific and medical things. Whenever I go to the dentist, I can spend three, three-and-a-half hours there talking about nerve endings and things like that. But about those things up there--I don't know what a star's made of. Do you?" "Good looks--talent--a sense of humor," drawled Carpenter, scattering a little moondust of his own.

It was Begonia Day, and Steve Canyon Day at the New York World's Fair--and also Art Buchwald Day, so proclaimed by Fair Boss Robert Moses because a) Buchwald was a busboy at the 1939 fair, b) Buchwald was the only reporter who showed up at a 1960 Moses press conference in Rome and well, anyway, Buchwald is syndicated in some 200 papers and who knows what could happen? What did happen is Art took along his father, Joe Buchwald, 71. "You think I want to go?" muttered Joe. "A man in the curtain business should lose money to go to the fair?" Joe tried the fondue bourguignonne at the Swiss pavilion, sent it back for chicken instead, was even less impressed when they made Art honorary mayor of the Belgian Village. "Who wants to be mayor of an empty village?" he wanted to know.

Constancy, thy name is Rudy Vallee, 63. On Oct. 13, the onetime Vagabond Lover will complete his third full year on Broadway as J. B. Bigley, the executive who yearns for knitting and well-knit redheads. The star of How to Succeed in Business, etc. (which the French translate as Comment Reussir en Affaires) will thus have stayed with the show longer than any star in musical history. But in October he resigns to depart with his fourth wife, Eleanor (whom he married in 1949), for a nightclub tour. Why so faithful to show biz? Proudly displaying his four French poodles, Pom Pom, Jolie, Michelle and Pitou, Vallee vows the real reason is "I have four hungry dogs to feed." Arf, arf.

He's not one to trouble trouble, but while touring India to lecture on U.S. law, Associate Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, 56, found himself constantly addressed at one reception as "Justice Goldwater." "That's O.K.," he remarked equably. "I have tremendous respect for Senator Goldberg."

Mama Ines Maria Cuervo de Prieto, 35, chose their first birthday to announce that still another brother or sister was on the way. But sibling rivalry is just one of those things that Venezuela's Prieto Quintuplets will have to learn to live with. In point of fact, they live rather well--thanks to Big Daddy Creole Petroleum Corp., for which Papacito Efren Lubin Prieto, 39, works as a $10-a-day oilfield hand. Creole built for the family a $30,000 five-bedroom house in Maracaibo, also provides free medical care, while advertising contracts with Gerber and Klim give meat and milk. The big problem is telling them apart, though their mother insists that this is no problem at all. "Otto is the lovingest," she says. "Juan Jose has the shortest fuse. Robinson's the fattest, Mario's the tallest and Fernando is the most easygoing."

'Ee lad, a Lancashire accent was gold in British music halls long before the Beatles. In fact, "I suppose the youngsters will call me a Mother Beatle," chirped Grade Fields, as she skittered onstage at Blackpool for a comeback after three years of goodbye on the Isle of Capri. To the oldsters, however, their sassy honey was still "Our Grade," and 3,000 of them stomped, clapped, wept and cheered for more as she hummed through her old routines, from by-crikey wheezes to such sticky trademarks as Now Is the Hour. "It isn't the money--I'm not starving, you know," murmured Gracie, who in her prime hived up to $750,000 a year. "I just have a lot of energy. I know I'm 66, but I feel 36."

"O'Hara said to me, 'O.K., you can write,' " recalls Author Courtlandt Dixon Barnes Bryan, 28. He likes that kind of spare, John O'Hara-type dialogue, and no wonder, since he is the novelist's stepson, child of O'Hara's third wife by her first marriage. "John," he says, "taught me a good deal about writing dialogue," and the blond, bespectacled Yaleman ('58) showed how well he had learned by winning the $10,000 Harper Prize for unpublished novels, which means that Harper & Row will publish his P. S. Wilkinson in January. C.D.B. has reached a certain critical plateau, however. Since The New Yorker published his first short story in 1962, O'Hara has read his work only after it appears in print.

Narrow as an arrow but fetching as an etching, Geraldine Chaplin, 20, Charlie's unmatched little girl, paired herself off with British Actor Richard Johnson, 36, for a romp about Chilham Castle in England, where Johnson is playing Kim Novak's leading man in Paramount's production of The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders. "I think he's the most marvelous man," Geraldine rejoiced. "We're very fond of each other--it's obvious, isn't it?" Johnson responded. But, he added, there is "no question of an engagement--at least at this stage." They only met in London six weeks ago.

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