"To show how much I care, I wore my hair," quipped long-playing Crooner Bing Crosby, 72, after taking the concert stage in New York City last week. Crosby, who last appeared on Broadway in 1931, began a two-week stint with Old Friend Rosemary Clooney, 48. Also on the program: Wife Kathryn, 43, and their three teen-age children. Though his locks may be thinner, the Groaner's baritone seemed as full as ever as he traipsed through almost 50 songs in the three-hour show. Afterward Crosby reminisced about the first time he played New York in the late '20s. He and Fellow Singer Al Rinker had put together an act for the Paul Whiteman Band. "We had been a big hit on the road," recalls Bing, "but we were taken off the bill in New York because we didn't do well. Paul put us back in the band, just humming.'"

After 34 years of perking up Washington as a White House reporter and later as press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson, Auntie Mameish Liz Carpenter is heading home to Austin, Texas, "to think more, to write more and to raise a little hell." At a farewell party at Ford's Theater, Old Friends Pearl Bailey and Carol Charming sang a duet, and Nancy Dickerson and Gloria Steinem helped narrate Carpenter's life story. But stealing the show, as usual, was Liz herself. "I stand here as the only Democrat leaving town," she told the 650 guests. Reminiscing a bit, Carpenter, 56, cracked: "I can remember most of the men's first wives and Bill Proxmire's first hair." Liz is calling her new home in Texas "Grassroots." That way, she explains, her friends can visit her on their expense accounts, claiming they have been "to see what they're thinking at the grass roots."

It was like a scene out of a Graham Greene novel: a Central-American strongman and an Oxford-educated Briton sat beneath a coconut tree on a tropical beach philosophizing. The strongman, Panamanian Dictator Omar Torrijos, noted that both their fathers had been teachers, and that he had left his family at 17. The Briton, Author Greene himself, mused between sips of rum punch: "You should thank God you did escape from home, because if you hadn't you might be an intellectual today." Greene quickly added: "I am not, because to be an intellectual is rather academic. A creative writer seems to me to be emotionally involved, and that is not being an intellectual. They are people who regard from a distance and don't involve themselves. When an intellectual like Kissinger gets involved in events, it's a disaster."

Norway's Trygve Lie, the first Secretary-General of the United Nations, once said he had "the world's most impossible job." Lie was accountable to only 55 member nations in 1946; now there are 146, and the job has not grown any easier. Even so, Austrian-born Kurt Waldheim, who was elected Secretary-General in 1971, wanted a second five-year term, and last week he got it. Unflappable Waldheim, 57, has earned respect from big and small powers for his quietly energetic diplomacy. He received a 14-to-0 endorsement on the second ballot in the Security Council, and was re-elected by acclamation in the General Assembly. How does Waldheim view his job? As one of moral suasion, he says. "Like the Pope, I have no divisions."

Move over, Muse, here comes Cupid! Dancer Donna McKechnie, 33, who plays the director's ex-girl friend in A Chorus Line, rewrote the script by wedding the show's real director and choreographer, Michael Bennett, 33, in Paris. Hollywood's William Friedkin, 37, who directed The French Connection, The Exorcist and The Boys in the Band, plans to marry French Actress Jeanne Moreau, 48, next month. Even television's fiercely independent Bionic Woman has been smitten. The intended for Lindsay Wagner, 27: her longtime roommate, Actor Michael Brandon, 31.

Blase about the upcoming ceremony, Brandon says: "We're going to wing it. Who wants to write a script and memorize lines? We do that all the time."

In their heyday, California-Texas Oil Chairman James Moffett and Wife Adeline fancied his-and-her yachts as well as luxurious estates in New York and Florida. After James died in 1953, however, Widow Adeline fell upon harder times and by 1964 had moved into a $150-per-month apartment in Palm Beach, Fla. Now 82, she may have a shot at the salad days once again. Evicted four years ago, after a rent dispute, she has filed a $50 million-plus suit for "wrongful eviction, embarrassment, humiliation and shame" against her former landlord, reputed Billionaire John D. MacArthur, 79. Last week a Florida appellate court ordered MacArthur, sole stockholder of the Bankers Life and Casualty Co., to reveal his net worth in case punitive damages are awarded to the widow. The notoriously frugal MacArthur, who once said that "anybody who knows what he's worth isn't worth very much," complains that finding out in his case would cost a fortune in accountants' fees. Says the gleeful Adeline: "I'm the only person who might ever get a look at his money. That's quite a win in itself."

"Bob Marley, with a Bullet," blared Rolling Stone last August over a cover story on Jamaica's master of reggae music. The headline alluded only to Marley's speedy progress up the record charts, but it would have been literally on the mark after gunmen broke into the singer-composer's home outside Kingston. Armed with automatic weapons, they winged Marley and wounded his wife, his manager and a friend. The attackers, police surmised, were angered by Marley's commitment to appear last week in a concert sponsored by the People's National Party of Prime Minister Michael Manley, who is fighting a bitter election campaign against the Jamaican Labor Party. Two days after the shooting, surrounded by government troops, Marley performed as promised before some 80,000 fans. His description of the shooting: "Lots of machine-gun fire, mon, but only one shot in my left arm. It don't hurt too much."

That picture of a demure young bride-to-be is not by Bradford Bachrach but by a salesman lucky enough to have had a camera in hand when Olga Korbut tried on a wedding gown in a St. Louis suburb. The darling of the 1972 Olympics, who is on an eleven-city U.S. tour with the U.S.S.R. National Gymnastics Team, pulled out three crisp $100 bills in J.C. Penney's to buy the gown and matching veil (total: $225). Olga, 21, plans to be married back home next year. Who is the lucky guy? "Just an ordinary boy," shrugs Korbut. No honeymoon is planned. Says the bride, with no hint of a blush: "If you get all your kicks in one month, what else is left?"

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