Mama Judy Garland was so charmed when she met Australian Singer Peter Allen three years ago that she immediately started matchmaking. Wouldn't Peter be perfect for her daughter, Liza Minnelli? Later Liza conceded: "I got so sick of hearing about him I really built up a complex against him." Peter felt the same way for a while, but Mama was right. The engagement was announced; then, just to be sure, Liza and Peter waited a full two years before marching into Manhattan's Municipal Building to obtain a marriage license. "We don't believe in jumping into anything," Liza explained. This week they take the big jump in a small ceremony at a friend's Park Avenue apartment.

For most of his speech before an assembly of metal workers in Havana, Cuba's Fidel Castro, 40, railed against the evils of creeping bureaucracy in his island paradise. Then he digressed for a while to savor one of the glorious advances of his revolution: ice-cream production. "Our ice cream can compete with the best ice creams in any part of the world," drooled Fidel, as the workers cheered. "Today we produce 26 flavors, and it's worth emphasizing that not once has one of the flavors failed. Never has the peak of quality been allowed to drop." Almost as if he had just signed a treaty with Howard Johnson, he promised earnestly: "Not only will the number of flavors be maintained, but it will be increased. We are going to reach 40, maybe 42 flavors."

The poet passed his 60th birthday in the midst of a six-week reading tour at colleges in the U.S. Back in London, the Sunday Times invited some of W. H. Auden's rhyming friends to celebrate the event. Stephen Spender, Christopher Logue, Maurice Wiggin and Ted Hughes all sent in earnest occasional paeans.

John Betjeman offered eight whimsically sentimental lines written in a large, childish scrawl:

Mums, Kiddiz, Dads and Bards

Now must have birthday cards.

Old friend across the sea,

Here's one to you from me--; Look with a grateful gaze

Back to our Oxford days,

Glad till our life ends

That we are old friends.

As one of the great losers in the history of U.S. presidential elections, a title he won in 1936 by carrying only two states against F.D.R., Kansas' Alf London, 79, has a rueful understanding of the uncertainties of politics. So when CBS-TV's Eric Sevareid dropped in at his Topeka homestead to talk about the next race, Landon smiled, said simply that he is backing Michigan's Governor George Romney, and added: "Anybody who attempts to predict the election of 1968 is nuts."

Normally, Palm Beach society stays only for the first act when visiting mummers put on a show at the local Royal Poinciana Playhouse. No point in wasting time at the theater with so many parties to attend. This time everyone stayed to the very end of a not-so-hot comedy called A Warm Body. After all, the star was one of their own: Actress and Post Cereals Heiress Dina Merrill, 41, who returned to her family's old wintering grounds to appear in the one-week run. Her mother, Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post, beamed proudly from her box along with Dina's husband of nine weeks, Actor Cliff

Robertson. Dina herself was delighted. "I enjoyed the Palm Beach audience," she said. "I found them quite warm."

For a moment, it looked as if one of the biggest estates in history would soon be under probate. While stalking lions on Kenya's northern frontier, Stavros Niarchos, 57, spotted a handsome pair of males and dropped one of them. The other bolted for the bush, then wheeled and sprang as the Greek shipping magnate was inspecting his kill. The lion was in mid-air when Stavros and his white hunter snap-fired simultaneously for the kill. "Close. Very close, that one," muttered Niarchos. Then he strolled back to camp to dictate some business letters.

Red Chinese students of decadent Western literature get pretty standard Marx. At Shanghai's Fu Tan University, reported a group of visiting Australians, Western tomes are catalogued with some oddly class-conscious critiques. Charles Dickens, for example, "was the last great writer who was able to gather, in a single effective image, both the emerging proletariat and the radical bourgeoisie." As for Cervantes: "In Don Quixote, he tolled the death knell of feudalism and peasant exploitation." Not a word about poor, downtrodden Sancho Panza.

"Aaow, oi think it's so styew-pid!" complained Lesley Hornby, 17, more aptly known as Twiggy, the cockney ghost of a sylph who has become one of England's top models. She was all set to become tops in the American colonies too, but the London passport office allowed that as a minor, Twiggy may not go abroad to work. Invoking child-labor laws, an official said that the defenseless little girl, whose Twiggy Enterprises, Ltd., planned to unload about $1,000,000 worth of clothes in department stores across the U.S., might be exploited by mean foreigners.

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