On May 29, which would have been John Kennedy's 50th birthday, the Post Office Department will issue a 13-c- stamp bearing his likeness, a photograph taken during the 1960 campaign. A part of the department's "prominent-American series," the stamp carries a 13-c- value so that it may circulate widely abroad as the postage on one-half ounce of international surface mail.

Everyone knows that communications between Peking and Moscow are scrambled at best. Now Radio Peking has set a new record for incomprehensibility in the land of Mao. Its Russian-language service has taken to replaying tapes of its anti-Soviet diatribes backward. The weird garble goes on for 21 hours at a stretch, and in London one mystified Pekingologist, who was monitoring the show, finally shrugged: "I suppose there's just nobody left in Peking who knows one end of a Russian tape from the other."

"I have no political base, no staff," admits retired Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, 60. Even so, a good many of his friends think that with all those opinions of his, notably about the war in Viet Nam, Curt might be a natural in politics. So he is being urged to go up against California's moderate Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel next year. In Santa Barbara, LeMay allowed that "if a real movement gets going for me, I might consider it."

The flick, a comedy called The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, calls for the heroine to play a swinging East German lady decathlon champ who decides to take it on the lam from that draggy country. Zoom!--she pole-vaults over the Berlin Wall. To get in shape for the part, Actress Elke Sommer, 25, has been tearing around the U.C.L.A. athletic field. "I consider myself very athletic," said Elke, who certainly did look in nice form as she took the low hurdles. For the Wall-vaulting sequence, though, the studio will use a stuntman made up to look like Elke--which will be quite a trick.

He was a talented talent scout, even if he couldn't spell very well. "Dear Max," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in 1924: "This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemmingway, who lives in Paris & has a brilliant future. Ezra Fount published a collection of his short pieces. I havn't it hear now but its remarkable & I'd look him up right away." Fitzgerald's letter was filed away at Charles Scribner's Sons in Manhattan, along with the publishing house's correspondence with hundreds of other authors, including George Santayana, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling and that bright young man Hemingway. Last week Charles Scribner Jr. announced that his firm was donating the archives of its 121 years in the business to Princeton University. As a first installment, he gave Princeton President Robert Goheen the Fitzgerald file, including 468 letters and 1,248 other documents.

As if it weren't enough to tear around Paris as the virtual director of Designer Pierre Cardin's fashion house while maintaining her reputation as the town's most dazzling hostess, Nicole Alphand, 49, is now hard at work becoming a lady of letters. Like practically everyone else who knew the Kennedys, she is writing a book. Actually, says Nicole, the tome will be more than a Kennedy reminiscence; it will record all the eight years she and her husband Herve spent brightening up Washington's social scene when he was the French ambassador there. Now that Herve is the No. 2 man in the French Foreign Ministry, there is some muttering that Nicole should not make such a public spectacle of herself, but she replies sweetly: "The Quai d'Orsay has never said a word to me about it."

As usual, Hungarian plainclothesmen were waiting outside the U.S. legation in Budapest on the remote chance that the old man might emerge. There was no chance at all. Inside, Josef Cardinal Mindszenty thanked the legation staff for a bouquet of red and white carnations that celebrated his 75th birthday, stared briefly from his window at the Soviet war memorial in "Freedom Square" below, and continued the political exile that began during the uprising of 1956. The Hungarians have offered him amnesty, but Mindszenty refuses to leave his asylum, or his country, until the Communists clear him of the trumped-up charges of treason that originally sent him to prison in 1949. "He is as stubborn as an ox," said one Budapest priest who has made his peace with the Communists. "But I think all our saints were like that."

It wasn't so long ago that Actress Lynn Redgrave, 24, was saying: "It's so easy to go wrong. I think you should live for quite a while with the man you love before even thinking of marriage." Well, she's only known the fellow for seven months, but they both seem sufficiently convinced. Lynn and English-born Actor John Clark, 34, announced they would be married over the weekend in an Ethical Culture ceremony in Manhattan. Explained Lynn: "We're not Ethical Culturists, atheists, Buddhists or agnostics, but we do believe in having the Ethical man along." Asked about her earlier pronouncements on marriage, she smiled: "I've been talking a fair amount of rubbish lately."

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