By Richard Stengel

It was not a reunion of The Group that brought the prodigal daughter back from Paris to her alma mater, but an invitation to celebrate her 70th birthday by being Vassar's first "Distinguished Visitor." Mary McCarthy, class of '33, the ironical Athena of American letters (The Stones of Florence, Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, Cannibals and Missionaries) returned to the scene of her biting 1963 bestseller about the travails of eight alumnae. She has always thought Vassar had good teachers, it was the students she objected to. In the 1950s she described them as a "pretty, polite, docile and serene mass." When males arrived in 1969, "they just seemed a different kind of Vassar girl." And now? A mellower McCarthy hedged courteously. "The best students," she said, "are fantastic." She should know.

Unbaptized, unnamed, and as yet unseen by her father, the tiny raven-haired baby--the seventh child--was born in Gdansk, Poland, on Jan. 27. Her father, Lech Walesa, 38, was far away, interned by the Polish military authorities reportedly in a guesthouse outside Warsaw. The photograph of his wife Danuta and their child, the first known to exist, was taken by a Solidarity photographer and smuggled out to the West. The archbishop of Wroclaw, Henryk Gulbinowicz, is trying to organize a baptism for the infant with the entire Walesa clan in attendance. As for whether the proud father would be allowed to participate by the hard-line government, the archbishop can offer only a prayer.

"My doctors have come to two conclusions," announced Henry Kissinger, 58, to the throng of reporters at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. "One, that I do have a heart; second, that it is in need of repair." Kissinger's longtime friend and personal physician, W. Gerald Austen, chief of surgery at Massachusetts General, explained that the operation was to be a triple coronary bypass, in which a major vein from the patient's leg would be used to make detours around the clogged arteries leading to his heart. Kissinger handled the risks diplomatically: he quipped that he was negotiating for "a quadruple bypass--one more than Haig." (Secretary of State Alexander Haig had triple coronary bypass surgery in 1980.) After 4 1/2 hours of surgery last week, he came through in "excellent condition," according to the doctors. Austen predicted that following a two-week recuperation at the hospital, his model patient would be stronger than ever, which, Kissinger had said before the operation, "is the most terrifying news my associates could receive. I ask you to play that down in order to give them some hope."

When Ricardo Montalban, 61, the courtly Mr. Roarke of TV's Fantasy Island, goes home and hangs up his impeccably pressed white suit, what does a man who caters to dreams change into? Perhaps his own fantasy is to doff his fastidious mien, let his hair sprout, and lounge around in the tattered haute couture of an intergalactic hitchhiker? In Paramount's $10 million space epic Star Trek II, Montalban does just that. He plays the diabolic Khan, a villainous android who escapes exile on a nightmarish planet but not the embraces of two comely space maidens. As Tattoo might say: Hey Boss, whoever said dreams don't come true?

Clothes may make the man after all. At least, a sweater may warm up his image. CBS Anchorman Dan Rather, 50, who had struck some viewers as chilly after the avuncular Walter Cronkite, took to wearing a sleeveless, V-necked pullover on his newscasts some three months ago. Perhaps not so coincidentally, he has since reclaimed Cronkite's traditional top spot ahead of NBC and ABC. Says Rather: "God knows what would happen if you put a ring in your nose." Without going that far, Rather is prepared to stay bundled up through the summer. "If it takes wearing a sweater when it's 112 degrees," he vows, "we'll turn up the air conditioning."

--By Richard Stengel

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.