"The setup is this: we're selling 600 memberships at $25,000 apiece. That's 15 million bucks, which is what it will take to build the golf course. Anybody can join--white, Negro, Catholic, Jew, Italian. What we're looking for is young people on the go, not just actors but doctors, lawyers, people from every walk of life. I got nothing against old people, but they just don't make for a lively atmosphere at a golf club." He isn't kidding. The mountains above Beverly Hills are being graded, and when the 18-hole Beverly Hills Country Club course is finished in 1969, he fully expects that 600 young Negroes, Jews and Italians from all walks of life will have coughed up their $25,000 apiece to play golf. After all, with Dean Martin, 49, set to be their president, who could afford to say no?

Majestic as a ship of the line, Dramatic Soprano Eileen Parrel I, 47, cruised through an aria from La Gioconda as she neared the end of a concert at Atlanta's Municipal Auditorium. Suddenly the mighty voice quit cold. "You wouldn't believe it, but I've forgotten it," blurted Eileen to the audience. By the time the laughter died, her memory had recharged itself, and she finished the aria to a cataract of applause. Later, she bemusedly recalled the contretemps that had built up to her monumental blank. "The programs were printed incorrectly. The weather was 90DEG and I could have died. They'd just painted my dressing room and my eyes were watering. And all of a sudden--clank!--I couldn't remember the song."

Ordinarily, General Motors Chairman Fred Donner keeps his wit to himself. Last week, after Donner and G.M. President James M. Roche delivered their annual state-of-the-company report to stockholders, the chairman was needled by critics about the size of his salary and bonus (a total $790,000 last year).

Donner coolly noted that the bonus fluctuates with his company's fortunes but that the salary, alas, hasn't changed from its $200,000 annually in almost nine years. "So I have the distinction of being the only employee without a pay raise since 1958." While the stockholders laughed, Donner added: "But I'm not complaining."

There must be 500 miniskirts swirling around when this longhair composer David Amram sits in with the band to blow I'm Coming, Virginia on the French horn. And there's Allen Ginsberg gassing pretty good with Arthur Miller at a table in the corner, and Norman Mailer won't shut up about his friend Jose Torres, the light-heavyweight fighter who keeps losing. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wants to shut up about Viet Nam but they bug him with it. And there's Charles Addams and David Merrick and maybe a thousand other names all jammed in this Manhattan cellar raising money for the Paris Review, which practically none of them reads but which George Plimpton, 46, edits when he is not sparring with Archie Moore or playing football and writing books like Paper Lion. "Everything George touches turns to gold," says one writer, looking around. "That's why I hate him."

Guest of Honor Dwight Eisenhower, 76, was recuperating from a gastrointestinal ailment in Washington, but his presence certainly saturated two floors of Manhattan's Gallery of Modern Art. Ike's wife Mamie led a constellation of 800 family members, friends and political and military colleagues through a preview tour of "The Memorable Eisenhower Years," the most exhaustive chronological display ever assembled of his boyhood mementos, battle gear, presidential memorabilia, photographs, portraits and 80 of his own paintings. Ike's own celebration took place later in the week when he left Walter Reed Hospital, feeling chipper enough, he said, to think about accepting President Johnson's suggestion that he undertake a goodwill tour of Southeast Asia.

"I remember being in a blind rage as I was emerging from the anesthetic. I was hearing some loud noise, which I later discovered to be the sheet rubbing against my bandage." For more than 25 years prior to the operation two months ago, Musical Comedy Star Nanette Fabray, 46, would have been lucky to hear a bulldozer rubbing against a slate wall. A gradually worsening case of otosclerosis, a fusing of the ear's tiny vibrating bones, had forced her to resort to a hearing aid even while performing. Now pluperfect in her left ear (her right is still afflicted), she spends ten to 20 hours a week speaking "any place they ask me" and serving on the boards of the New York League for the Hard of Hearing and the U.C.L.A. Hope for Hearing Foundation.

Kenya's newest and highest official honor, the Order of the Golden Heart, a gold medal depicting a lion against a background of snow-capped Mount Kenya, will certainly be worn with pride by the 50 Kenyans who have earned first-class membership by their "most conspicuous, outstanding and special service" to the republic. But no one is likely to derive greater satisfaction from the new order than the founder himself, who from now on will answer to the resounding title of His Excellency the Honorable Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, Member of Parliament and President of Kenya, Chief of the Order of the Golden Heart of Kenya--a sobriquet only a few credits shorter than that of his old friend, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, King of Zion, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Branch of the Tree of Solomon, and Implement of the Holy Trinity.

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