The Commons is never vulgar. And yet its two leaders looked as though they had been mixing it in the neo-Gothic corridors, when they hurried back to London from holidays for consultations on Cyprus. Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, 61, had a bandage on his right hand, while Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson, 48, sported a smashing shiner. Both, however, were casualties in the never-ending struggle to relax, dammit. Wilson had banged his eye in a fall among the rocks of Cornwall's Scilly Isles; Sir Alec pricked his finger pruning roses at his Berwickshire estate.

In Anna's day, the King of Siam had 61 wives. His great-grandson, Thailand's King Bhumibol, has only one. But the celebration that marked the 32nd birthday of Queen Sirikit would have sufficed for at least three ordinary royal consorts. On the first day, the army and navy fired 21-gun salutes, while roses smothered Bangkok's main boulevard. On the second, Buddhist monks chanted as the Queen lit candles in the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. On the third, the royal household organized a charity fete, with a specially built nightclub resounding to the King's private orchestra, Bhumibol tootling on the clarinet. After all, his gemlike regent's name translates into "Joy of the Family."

"I drove myself to serve my country," U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin Reischauer, 59, bravely confessed. Fearlessly treading earthquake-shaken villages as a gesture of good will? Not exactly. As he recuperated this spring in Honolulu from stab wounds inflicted by a deranged Japanese youth, Reischauer, who is wise in the ways of the Orient, worried about the loss of face his Japanese hosts would suffer if he returned still looking wan and pallid from the ordeal. So day after day, he manfully stretched out on the beach at Waikiki, acquiring a glowing tan for the worried Japanese, who exhaled gustily when he returned to the job looking properly genki (healthy) once again.

Half his time at Boston's New England Baptist Hospital is spent strapped face down in his steel frame, reading, writing and eating. Then he is rolled face up, in what his aide calls "the rotisserie," to sleep or watch TV. Still, Ted Kennedy, 32, is in good spirits, and with reason: his doctor says that he is making "an excellent recovery" from that near-fatal June 19 plane crash in western Massachusetts, and will not need an operation for the proper alignment of his three broken vertebrae. Nerve reflexes and muscle functions are back to normal, his fractured ribs are completely healed, and if all goes well Teddy should be out of bed by Christmas, back on the job in Washington by the end of January--assuming that he wins reelection, but there's not much doubt of that. At a press conference, Teddy's not-so-secret weapon burst into a brilliant, relieved smile. "I hope to do some campaigning for him," said Joan Kennedy, 27.

He'd grown accustomed to her face before she locked him out of their 19-room, $500,000 Manhattan town house. And even though Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo Lerner, 36, sued her millionaire husband, Alan Jay Lerner, 45, and won a $1,500-a-week separation allowance, the lovelorn lyricist appealed the case and won the right of access to his fair lady's mansion. Still, it was not enough just to be there on the street where she lived. Now comes word that the twosome is loverly again. No more hurricanes? Well, they hardly ever happen. Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?

"At last I'm among people who won't find my name unusual," chirped Lady Bird Johnson, 51, at the Crow Reservation outside Billings, Mont. She had stopped off on a three-state jaunt through Goldwater territory that ran the gauntlet from fish fries to a float on a raft down the Snake River. And she was about to be adopted into the tribe, a move duly approved by the braves of the executive committee of the Crow Tribal Council. "Lady Bird" was not an unusual name, her feathered friends decided, but sort of palefaced, and so, restyling her "Pretty Walking Bird," they wound her in a blue blanket (decorated with the emblem of the reservation's American Legion Post), shod her in moccasins (size 7 1/2-AAAA), and to the beat-beat-beat of a tom-tom made her a squaw. It was more than a lark. Warbled Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, who accompanied her on the trip: "We will get a strong Indian vote because of the rapport we have established."

Bob Hope springs eternal. As he started his 50th flick in Hollywood, the 61-year-old combination comic and straight man cracked, "And still no Academy Award. They should at least have given me one for stubbornness." They may yet (if they can catch him between benefit tours), after he finishes I'll Take Sweden, a comedy that co-stars Frankie Avalon and Tuesday Weld, a pair of almost-has-beens who weren't even will-bes when Hope made his first movie in 1937. Meanwhile, Bob got a "Lucky 50" party on the set, complete with smorgasbord and a visiting Miss Sweden. "I don't plan to retire," he snorted, "and don't give the public ideas. I have so much confidence in this picture that I'm going to see it myself."

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