Though $600,000 in campaign bills are still to be paid, Eugene McCarthy appeared relaxed and unworried while vacationing on the French Riviera last week. In a group with Wife Abigail and one of his chief fund raisers, Wall Street's Howard Stein, he enjoyed his favorite sports--swimming, sunbathing and needling. Said the Senator, weaving a metaphor that he picked up while campaigning in an Illinois textile mill: "Nixon doesn't have woof. Humphrey has lots of woof but no warp."

America's senior dissenter started writing books before the turn of the century and since then has turned out 90 volumes that attacked Chicago meat packers, Wall Street bankers, capitalist publishers, and just about everybody else in the Establishment. But last week, "the king of the muckrakers" had kind words for everyone around him. At the Bound Brook, N.J., nursing home where he lives, a mellow Upton Sinclair beamed as he leaned over in his chair and blew out the candles on his 90th birthday cake.

Who says pitchers are heartless? Not Yankee Slugger Mickey Mantle. It was the top of the eighth one day last week, and Detroit Tiger Ace Denny McLain was coasting to his 31st victory on a five-run lead. Up stepped Mantle for perhaps his last time at bat in Tiger Stadium. Mickey took a called strike, fouled off two more pitches, and then signaled with his bat for Denny to put the ball belt-high, where he likes it. Denny served it up, and Mick lined the ball into the upper deck for his 535th home run. As he rounded the bases, he moved past Jimmy Foxx into third place in the alltime homer derby, behind Babe Ruth (714) and Willie Mays (585). "Be sure to tell Denny thanks," said Mantle afterward. "Thanks for what?" asked McLain when he got the message. Then he grinned broadly and added: "I make mistakes all the time."

The career of a famous trial lawyer is not always as predictably successful as Perry Mason's. Take the case of F. Lee Bailey. Lately his TV talk show was dropped, a New Jersey judge dismissed him as defense attorney in a murder trial because of "grossly unethical conduct," and filming of The Sam Sheppard Story, in which Bailey was to have played himself, was postponed. Now Albert DeSalvo, the self-proclaimed Boston Strangler, has replaced Bailey with a lawyer who was admitted to the Massachusetts bar less than a year ago. Shrugs the Great Defender: "If somebody else wants to take a crack at it, good luck to him, but Albert can't 'hire' anybody because he's bankrupt."

"Who's that?" asked one bored spectator. Answered another: "Only Senator Javits." With all the glamour around, there was no reason for a mere political pooh-bah to titillate the thousands who assembled outside Broadway's Criterion Theater for the benefit premiere of Funny Girl, the movie musical of the life of Fanny Brice. George Segal showed up in a double-breasted Nehru jacket, Rod Steiger in a black shirt with gold medallion, and Leading Man Omar Sharif in an old-fashioned tuxedo with wide peaked lapels. But all oohs and ahs were for the star of the spectacle, Brooklyn's own Barbra Streisand, who said: "I feel like a kid with a plaything."

His 25-acre farm was confiscated, his religious preaching got him arrested nine times, and unruly mobs hounded him with taunts of "Worm!", "Imperialist!" and "CIA agent!" No wonder Gerardo Gonzalez, 42, decided that it was time to leave Castro's Cuba. Gonzalez, better known as Kid Gavilan, the bolo-punching world welterweight boxing champion from 1951 to 1954, hopped a refugee airlift flight to Miami last week, leaving behind three sons, his mother, and wives Nos. 1, 2 and 3. Says "the Keed," now a Jehovah's Witness: "I don't think, if I had known God's Word, I would have become a boxer." He suffers from cataracts, sciatica and penury, but he has high hopes that his problems will all be resolved when he goes to New York City, where he has three other sons.

A pair of hypermasculine movie stars were in Paris to begin shooting the film in which they play two aging homosexuals. "It's the most exciting picture I've done in years," sighed Rex Harrison of his part in the movie adaptation of Charles Dyer's play, Staircase. "I love it," said Richard Burton, even though he has to wear a makeshift turban because the character he portrays is ashamed of his baldness.

They're burning books again in Red China. Singled out for censure in Mao's land, according to the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta--a potboiler that likes to call the kettle black--are the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Shaw, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Twain, Steinbeck, London, Pushkin, Gorky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Grinning mischievously from ear to ear, Viscount Lin ley, 6, returned to London from a holiday at Scotland's Balmoral Castle with his sister, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, 4, and his parents, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon.

Palace officials refused to confirm that the sixpence the viscount was proudly clutching had come from a good fairy in honor of the two front teeth he had lost during the vacation.

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