By Guy D. Garcia

At 52, Ray Charles is still hitting the ivories and belting out the blues with timeless authority. And to celebrate his 40th year as a performer of jazz and soul, 500 of Charles' friends and fellow musicians showed up at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles. The result is Ray Charles, a Man and His Soul, a TV special that Producer Dick Clark is syndicating nationally in September. Among those who sang Charles' praises: Glen Campbell, Lou Rawls and, by recorded message, Stevie Wonder, who was pretaped doing an old Charles hit slightly reworked into Hallelujah, I Love Ray So. Tears and cheers are the hallmark finish to such show-biz bashes. Charles provided both with his familiar, still wrenching rendition of America the Beautiful.

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The scene on the bonnie banks of the River Dee at Balmoral was idyllic, but Prince Charles' choice of summer reading decidedly was not. On a recent afternoon during the royal family's annual holiday at their Scottish castle, Charles was snapped as he pored over Victims of Yalta, a grim account by Nikolai Tolstoy (Leo's grandnephew) of the forced repatriation of 2 million Soviet P.O.W.s by Britain and the U.S. after World War II. One Fleet Street scribe joked that between the covers the book might really be The Thousand and One Lusty Nights of Fifi.

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The mood and pace were allegro, but the program was strictly "Home Suite Home" for Composer-Conductor Leonard Bernstein, who marked his 65th year last week by returning to his birthplace in Lawrence, Mass. The big day began with a parade through the middle of town in a 1928 antique Ford, and went on to include a stop at the old family home (24 Juniper Street). As passionate about political issues as he is on the podium, Bernstein strongly endorsed the nuclear freeze movement in a speech. But the maestro was irked by Senator Edward Kennedy's failure to show up and disappointed that high winds had canceled an 18-minute fireworks display, which may have partly explained his verve in decrying the "lunacy" of the nuclear arms race. Cracked Bernstein afterward: "There had to be some fireworks, and that was it."

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"Playing a Southern belle was not a dream of mine at all," says Mariel Hemingway, 21. "But then the more I thought of it, the more I thought, 'Why not?' " Hemingway had gone from playing the trim, muscular pentathlete in Personal Best to portraying the voluptuous playmate and murder victim in the soon-to-be-released Star 80, with nude scenes in each. So a mere adjustment in her accent would seem a snap for her first stage role, in The Palace of Amateurs, which opens in two weeks in Dallas. At first, though, the Idaho-born actress may have pressed a bit too hard for a convincing Dixie lilt. She listened to tapes of deep-fried drawls and had long conversations with Southerners in her neighborhood. Says Hemingway: "For a week I made a total fool of myself trying to speak Southern."

--By Guy D. Garcia

On the Record

John Huston, 77, film director, on the relative virtues of two male pursuits: "If you sacrifice poker for girls, don't expect them to show up. They'll only show up for a man who wouldn't dream of sacrificing poker for girls."

Jorge Luis Borges, 84, Argentine author, on why he did not commit suicide on Aug. 25, 1983, as he wrote he would in a 1977 story: "Laziness and cowardice prevent me. [Besides] I am constantly falling in love." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.