Carol Channing once jokingly called her "the world's greatest stage stepmother," and the lady herself, Denise Minnelli, would be the last to deny it. So when Liza Minnelli, 19, her husband Vincente's daughter by his marriage to Judy Garland, opened at the Persian Room of Manhattan's Plaza Hotel there was Denise with a lustily applauding troop of 85 show-biz and cafesociety friends. Not that the gal who knocked them dead in Flora the Red Menace needed a private cheering section. After a dozen or so songs, that old belter Ethel Merman rushed over to embrace Liza. "She was absolutely fabulous!" cried Ethel. "That child is so good."

Sure, it's only a small plant, but the unions really ought to do something about the industrial hazards there. Just the other day, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, 58, almost lost a finger at the place-a workshop on the grounds of his house in Rochester, Mich. Cabinetmaker Reuther, who fashions all his own furniture, was trimming a wooden light fixture when his hand slipped and the power saw zipped the tip from his ring finger. All patched up, Reuther went back to his U.A.W. desk job, chuckled at a telegram from the carpenters' union wondering what Walter thought he was doing scabbing at their trade.

"He has to be very careful with stairs," the duchess explained gently. "Oh hell," said the Duke of Windsor, 71, spryly negotiating the two flights down to the projection hall of Paris' Marbeuf cinema. Then the duke settled down with the duchess to stare raptly at a grainy, long-ago history called A King's Story, a documentary telling how Britain's Edward VIII gave up the throne in 1936 to marry "the woman

I love," an American divorcee named Wallis Warfield Simpson. Afterward, the ex-King, who was narrator as well as star of the film, murmured to French reporters: "Beaucoup de tristesse et beaucoup de joie."

None of the reviews rankled so much as the one that his "old friend" Edmund ("Bunny") Wilson, 70, wrote for the

New York Review of Books last July, picking apart the translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin by Novelist Vladimir Nabokov, 66. At last, in the February Encounter, Lolita's scholarly old man replied to Bunny. "A number of earnest simpletons consider Mr. Wilson to be an authority in my field," Nabokov began, and went on to recall their old association: "I invariably did my best to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar and interpretation" of Russian. And, just to finish the job: "Mr. Wilson's use of English is also singularly imprecise."

Bestselling Author (The Proud Tower) Barbara Tuchman, 54, had a few unfashionable thoughts about what's going on in the houses of haute couture. "All those boots and helmets!" she crackled in Manhattan. "Fashion is being taken over by the pansy boys. We're being made to look like Lolitas or lion tamers. Who, over 20, wants to look as though she just came out of a sandbox?"

On that miserable December morning in 1915, after a night of homeless wandering, her mother had scarcely managed to struggle to the doorway at 72 Rue de Belleville before she gave birth to the child. Last week more than 10,000 Parisians swarmed around that same dreary doorway in a sentimental riot as Old Chanteur Maurice Chevalier, 77, dedicated a plaque at No. 72. "On the steps of this house," read the memo rial, "was born, in the greatest poverty, Edith Piaf, whose voice was later to stir the world."

Considering that, despite his advanced age, he led the National League last year with 52 homers, scored 118 runs, batted in another 112 and won his second Most Valuable Player Award, the San Francisco Giants decided that Willie Mays, 34, ought to get a two-year contract at $125,000 per annum, the most money anyone has ever made for playing baseball.

Leave it to Walden Cassotto to give back to Hollywood some of its oldtime extravagance. Walden, who much prefers to be known as Singer Bobby Darin, 29, set off for a Miami singing date in a private Union Pacific Pullman car with his wife Sandra Dee, young son Dodd, special cook, private porter, .personal manager, larder of caviar and liberal store of chili. Walden had just finished up a TV pilot show entitled The Sweet Life.

Pablo Picasso, 84, was not in his blue period. He merely couldn't stomach the prospect of hordes of reporters and photographers swarming over his hideaway at Mougins on the French Riviera. And so when Valerian Zorin, the Soviet Ambassador to France, put through a call to request an audience, Pablo sent word from the studio that he would not be at home to the Russian. The old cubist did materialize sufficiently next day to receive Soviet Author llya Ehrenberg as a house guest, but poor Zorin once again had to report to Moscow that he had failed to dispose of one of Communism's highest honors-the Lenin Peace Prize that the Russians have been trying to hand over to Pablo for the last four years.

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