Memorializing the late Negro Author Richard (Native Son) Wright, Ebony magazine described the last Paris days of the embittered, Mississippi-born expatriate. Before his death of a heart attack in November, Wright discussed his 15-year absence from the U.S., denied that he was anti-American. "I know what a great nation and people America could be, but it won't be until there is only one American, regardless of his color." Also published: the first excerpts of some of Wright's last works--poems in the medieval Japanese haiku style. Among them:

In the falling snow A laughing boy holds out his palms Until they are white

I am nobody A red sinking Autumn sun Took my name away

Where there's a will, there's a way--maybe. As New York Surrogate's Court untangled the tax and other claims on the $607,128 estate of the late Pepsi-Cola Chairman Alfred Steele, it appeared that there would be nothing left for his widow, Pepsi Prolocutrix (and Cinemactress) Joan Crawford, 52. Also on the Surrogate's docket last week: a claim by Socialite lleana Bulova, for the widow's share of the $10 million to $15 million left by the late Arde Bulova. Still the smashing-looking blonde she was at 18, when first wooed by the watch magnate. the Rumanian-born widow, now 34, charged that in 1956, two years before he died at 69, Bulova "harassed and importuned" her into waiving any interest in his estate in return for a $600,000 cash settlement. "He told me that if I signed the pact it would lead to our living together in harmony and trust," but within a few months, "he banished me from our home," later bequeathed her only $25,000. "It is regrettable," she concluded bitterly, "that my husband made a trading post of our marital bed."

When Julia, Jake and Uncle Joe tried out in Wilmington, Del., Star Claudette Colbert realized that the stage adaptation of Oriana Atkinson's Over at Uncle Joe's desperately needed doctoring. "Yet they were just applying poultices where a leg should have been amputated," Claudette recalled. "I asked the producers to close it then and do extensive rewrites--either that or let me out. One of them just turned to me and said, 'I didn't know you were a quitter.' " She stayed, and last week the show had its opening night in New York, proved to be something less than the critics' choice -- so much less in fact that there was no second night. It was the quickest capitulation by a Broad way producer in three seasons.

Tipped off that some $30,000 in stolen jewelry had been cached in Buffalo, the FBI recovered part of the loot, while New York City cops gathered information that led to the arrest of four men and a wom an, members of a ring of international hotel thieves. Victim of the mid-January theft from her Savoy-Hilton Hotel suite in Manhattan: Patricia Kennedy Lawford, sister of the President and wife of Actor Peter Lawford.

Looking like anything but a misfit, Marilyn Monroe was radiant as she at tended a Manhattan showing of The Mis fits, escorted by Co-Star Montgomery Clift. Seated two rows in front of her was ex-Husband Arthur Miller, who had written the script. They exchanged no greet ings -- but both seemed to enjoy their own work as displayed on the screen.

After coordinating his brother's cam paign in 13 Western states, Lawyer Ted Kennedy, 28, took an apartment on Boston's Beacon Hill. Last week his immediate future seemed determined with the report that the ex-Harvard football player would become an assistant district attorney of Massachusetts' Suffolk County. A couple of crafty, mach 2 base runners stole their way into the already plaque-packed Baseball Hall of Fame. This year's unanimous choices: William ("Sliding Billy") Hamilton and Max ("Scoop") Carey (originally Max Carnarius). Hamil ton, a hard-hitting igth century National Leaguer who set the alltime league record for stolen bases with 797 in an era when the catcher stood far behind the plate, died in 1940. Carey, like Hamilton an out fielder, ran rampant with Pittsburgh and Brooklyn for 20 years after leaving St. Louis' Concordia Seminary in 1910. A prodigious student of the game ("Babe Ruth killed scientific ball"), Carey mem orized the mannerisms of pitchers, once pulled nine consecutive successful double steals with a teammate named Casey Sten gel, established the modern National League standard of 738 thefts. After re tiring, he returned to the Dodgers as man ager in 1932 and 1933, was, until his re lease three weeks ago, racing judge at the Miami Beach Kennel Club. But like many another survivor of the day when the ball was dead and the Players' Pension Fund unborn, Max Carey, now approaching 71, last week listed his total assets as "social security and a house with a big mortgage."

Wintering in Jamaica, T. S. Eliot and his wife Valerie, the plumply attractive Yorkshire lass he married four years ago, kept busy with nightly gin rummy, breezed through novels from the hotel library, daily ventured out in the midday sun. As he basked contentedly with his 34-year-old ex-secretary, the poet, at 72, looked not a little like the hero of his 1917 Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach . . .

Over the objections of neighbors trying to exclude "undesirable elements," and despite the lavish offers of land developers, some 1,400 acres of lush Long Island exurbia--long owned by the late Marshall Field--became a New York State park. Selling the property for $4,278,000 were his widow, Ruth Pruyn Field, and the Field Foundation. With its polo field, shooting preserve, seaplane and yacht docks, the Caumsett domain was called by Long Island State Park Commission President Robert Moses--"one of the largest and finest remaining privately owned estates on the Island."

Back in the blizzard-blitzed North between his ten-day Southern vacation and this week's trip to Palm Desert, Calif., Dwight D. Eisenhower put in his first working day at an office on the Gettysburg College campus. In addition, his staff of 15 maintained a five-room Washington headquarters, where mail still comes in at the rate of 1,900 pieces a day. Among last week's items: a fluffy, fly-chasing yak's tail, sent by a Himalayan guide who knew Ike's name but titled him "Big Chief All American Villages."

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