"For the first time in 25 years I'm seeing the world without an alcoholic haze," Richard Burton boasted last week. And all because wife Elizabeth bet her convivial Welshman that he couldn't abstain for three months. A trimmer Burton has not only won the wager (a kiss or something; he forgets), but has stretched his dry period to nearly six months. Lest his public misunderstand his sober ways, Burton begged his interviewer: "Please don't make me out to be against alcohol. I'll get all sorts of letters from the temperance people, and I certainly don't want to encourage their cause. I owe a lot to booze, so I don't want to offend it."

The friendship between former Senator George A. Smothers and President John F. Kennedy was firm, but often tried. Cuba was the toughest trial, as newly opened documents at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library showed last week. From the 1960 presidential campaign onward, Smathers urged Kennedy to take a hard line against Cuba. The President listened until the Bay of Pigs invasion, after which he told his friend: "George, I don't want you to talk to me any more about Cuba." Smathers stopped--for a while. But one evening at an informal supper, Smathers says: "I raised the question of Cuba and what could be done. He took his fork and hit his plate, and it cracked and he said, 'Now dammit! Let's quit talking about this subject.' " Smathers did.

Who says you can't go home again? Janis Joplin did it last week, and for her special effort won the prize--a flat tire--as the member of the class of '60 who had come the farthest for the reunion (from San Francisco to Port Arthur, Texas). Her Thomas Jefferson High School chums were more than a little bit surprised to find that she hadn't changed much, except for her feathered, wild, mod clothes. One buddy muttered rather sadly of the let-it-all-hang-out soul-rock singer: "I hate to say she was a real lady because that's not her image. But she was."

She has served her country in three wars, and plans to leave this fall for her eighth annual tour of duty in Viet Nam. Martha Raye, however, will not be playing her mod-witch part from Bugaloos, a fall TV show, but will serve as a surgical nurse with the Green Berets. The Nightingale role is hardly a new one for Colonel Raye, who has been a sometime practicing nurse ever since 1936. Twice hit by shrapnel during the Viet Nam years, she bravely classifies her wounds as "not serious. Once in the foot, once in the ribs. I've had worse hangovers."

Retired Cape Town Dentist Philip Blaiberg lived longer than any other heart-transplant patient, 191 months. But last week his 22-year-old daughter Jill belittled her father's borrowed time and blasted the operation and Surgeon Christiaan Barnard. "I personally think heart transplants are not worthwhile. I saw my father suffer." She blamed Dr. Barnard for urging the family to make money out of the operation. The resultant publicity, she said, "set my life back by more than two years."

The newest star of Forty Carats last week returned home from a performance poorer by more than 40 carats and $625,000. Not that Zsa Zsa Gabor did not think fast. While two gunmen trained their weapons on her, she slyly slipped off her 31-carat diamond ring and let it fall to the red plush carpet of the Waldorf-Astoria's elevator. Alas, one of the bandits spied her ruse, picked up the bauble and then demanded the rest of her jewels--another diamond ring and earrings. All of it, Miss Gabor lamented, was uninsured.

Once upon a time he was a respected statesman, one of Franklin Roosevelt's advisers at the 1945 Yalta conference. Convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying that he had passed U.S. secrets to the Russians, he went to jail for 44 months, then faded into oblivion. Last week Alger Hiss, now 65 and a printing-company salesman, appeared at a press conference to announce that he would challenge the "Hiss Act," a 1954 law that prevents federal employees who are convicted of certain crimes from collecting annuities at retirement age. He may even ask for a presidential pardon--although he owes his conviction for perjury largely to the aggressive probing of the then California Representative Richard Milhous Nixon. Even if the pardon would have to come from Nixon, Hiss said, "I would go to him."

These days the only way to feel about Eddie Fisher is sad. The Elvis Presley of the early '50s--million-dollar records, top TV show, packed nightclubs, annual income of $700,000--could do no wrong. Now he can't seem to get anything to go right. He has repeatedly beaten the comeback trail, but now it has beaten him. Last week, from his home in Puerto Rico, he was forced to declare himself bankrupt. His petition listed $916,300 in debts, his only assets being $40,000 in municipal bonds.

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