It's not much compared with the digs next door, but Amy Carter calls her new tree house home. Situated in a secluded thicket on the south lawn of the White House, the 4-ft. by 5-ft. platform is raised on wooden stilts and can be reached by shinnying up a sturdy old Atlas cedar. Amy introduced her 20-month-old nephew Jason, son of Jack and Judy Carter, to her leafy perch last week, and even her dad, says the First Child, "climbed up here once." The architect of the project is the President, who remembers well his own childhood tree house in Plains, Ga. When playing in it one day, he refused to answer a parental summons and was forced rudely back to reality by a peachtree switch.

It was, quite clearly, the strategy of his-and-her vacations, so often recommended for, and sometimes even beneficial to, marriages in distress. There was Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau slipping down the snowy slopes and flipping off the diving board at Utah's Snowbird mountain resort. And there was Wife Margaret, tripping through Boston's Logan Airport, her three young children in tow, on a visit to her sister in Winchester, Mass. Earlier, the P.M. had made a pilgrimage to that shrine sought by every world statesman--California's Disneyland. "My kids would have loved to see this," he remarked wistfully as Mickey Mouse showed him around. "The world of children is beautiful."

Lowell Thomas just keeps on schussing--even on his 85th birthday. A ski trip to the Canadian Rockies ended a 50,000-mile honeymoon for the peripatetic broadcaster and his second wife, Marianna Munn, 49. The couple married on Jan. 5 and wandered through the South Seas, the Far East, the Himalayas, Alaska and other exotic spots that Thomas has visited in his 60 or so years of roving the globe. Now back home in Pawling, N. Y., he is hard at work on his 54th book--the second volume of his autobiography, So Long Until Tomorrow--and is also narrating a TV series called Lowell Thomas Remembers. Will the octogenarian ever take a rest? "I've thought of retiring at age 100," says Thomas. "But I've moved that up to 105."

It was a marriage made in the Super Bowl. Producer Bob Evans (Godfather I and II, Chinatown, Love Story) was in Miami filming Black Sunday when he met CBS Sportscaster Phyllis George, once a North Texas State cheerleader and Miss America of 1971. Although the thrice-married (most recently to AM MacGraw) Evans had firmly declared that "three times to bat is quite enough," Bob, 46, and Phyllis, 27, were married last week on the lawn of his Beverly Hills mansion. In a specially composed ceremony the minister sang: "Together you step from the darkness/ The sun is beginning to rise/ You are living the questions together now/ Finding answers in each other's eyes." At the conclusion, he pronounced the pair "two travelers in exploration, two hearts powerful with commitment, two souls side by side, husband and wife." Music down, fade out.

"It isn't that I think women are superior to men," said the former Congresswoman from New York in a speech at Harvard. "It's just that they haven't had the opportunity to be corrupted by power." When the cheers of the students died down several minutes later, Bella Abzug added, "We'd like that opportunity." The particular office she seemed to be after was that of mayor of New York City, a job she described as "the toughest in the country, maybe in the world." Her two days on campus as a visiting fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government were one of her few public outings since she lost the New York Senate primary race to Harvard Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan last September. As she put it, "Harvard's loss was my loss."

To celebrate what she says have been "the most beautiful years of my life," Hungarian-born Jolie Gabor, seventyish, invited 300 of the "beautiful, elegant people of Palm Springs" for a little get-together. The occasion: the 20th anniversary of her marriage to Manhattan Jeweler Edmond de Szigethy, ten years her junior. Jolie's daughters were there, of course: Eva, who has had five husbands so far, Zsa Zsa, seven, and Magda, six. Jolie, who found contentment on her third try, sighs that the girls will not listen to her advice, namely, that "they don't have to marry millionaires and important people to be happy."

To be strong, the prisoner once wrote, a man "must be able to stand utterly alone, able to meet and deal with life relying solely upon his own inner resources." To show that he was such a man, he once held his hand over a candle flame without flinching. This is G. Gordon Liddy, 46, eccentric ex-lawyer who was sentenced to 20 years as a ringleader in the original Watergate breakin. The last of the seven Watergate burglars still incarcerated, Liddy has steadfastly refused to talk about the conspiracy, or to show, in John Sirica's words, "even a hint of contrition or sorrow." Nonetheless, President Carter last week decided "in the interest of equity and fairness" to commute the silent conspirator's sentence to eight years. He will thus be eligible for parole from the Allenwood, Pa., federal penitentiary next July. Liddy characteristically said nothing at the news, but his lawyer said he was "pleased."

She had painted the 31-ft. by 16-ft. canvas to hang in a 200-ft.-high geodesic dome designed by R. Buckminster Fuller for Montreal's Expo '67. But Guiding Red, Abstract Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler's biggest painting, has been rolled up in a warehouse ever since. Last week the work found a suitably grand setting: a 50-ft.-tall marble wall on the mezzanine of the south tower of Manhattan's 110-story World Trade Center. Why the title? Explains Frankenthaler: "I was guiding the red and j the red was guiding me." !

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