The world is Evangelist Billy Graham's parish. At his insistence the South African government temporarily abrogated its apartheid laws in order to let blacks and whites mix at an international conference in Durban on mission and evangelism. In his keynote address to the 1,500 delegates and observers, Graham last week described the gathering as a watershed: "You will never be the same. South Africa will never be the same." Later, before a Johannesburg rally for 80,000, the sometime White House preacher let off some steam about crime and punishment back home. In an eye-for-an-eye spirit, Graham pushed for capital punishment and "the strongest possible rape laws. I believe that a person guilty of rape should be castrated. That would stop him pretty quick."

Twice a week, a dozen legislators retreat to a gym in the basement of the Old Senate Office Building, put on do boks (loose-fitting white karate suits) and grunt and kick away. The organizer of the group, North Dakota Senator Milton Young, 75, an honorary black belt, can chop a one-inch board in half with his bare hand. The most advanced student, though, is Democratic Representative James Symington of Missouri, 45, with a second level yellow belt, who admits that he hasn't broken a board yet, adding: "I'm saving that for an audience. There's no point breaking my hand in private." The other ten, including New Mexico Senator Joseph Montoya and Florida Senator Lawton Chiles, are still working toward the tenderfoot's white belt. "There's a great deal of incentive," Symington says, "because without a belt you drop your drawers."

Jacqueline Susann, the exactress turned author, has just delivered herself of another novel. Her earlier books, Valley of the Dolls and The Love Machine, "are about ancient history," Susann feels. In Once Is Not Enough she is now telling the story of a "really contemporary girl," a stage and movie producer's daughter who spends most of the book trying to avoid the drugs, sex and high living all around her. Meanwhile, Susann has made a startling discovery: many girls are still innocents, "still have illusions." How did she find this out? Partly by chatting with contestants as a judge for the 1972 Miss U.S.A. crown. "A lot of the girls were virgins, and a lot of them still looked up to their fathers." None of them, presumably, were the model for January Wayne, Susann's new heroine, whose feelings about her father are "emotionally and spiritually incestuous."

At a benefit auction in Los Angeles for the "Neighbors of Watts," Norton Simon, the millionaire art collector and philanthropist, plunked down a cool $23,000 for Ripening, a drybrush watercolor of two tomatoes on a weatherworn windowsill. "Fantastic," glowed the artist, Actor Henry Fonda, who had donated the watercolor to the auction. "Norton and Jennifer [Norton's wife, Actress Jennifer Jones] phoned my wife Shirlee the day after the auction to say how pleased they are with the painting. Norton said: Tell Henry that's not the way to ripen tomatoes--on a windowsill in the sun. You can't ripen them off the vine.' " Simon should know. He made his first million putting tomatoes in Hunt's tomato sauce. But Fonda's thumb isn't green just from painting: "I make my own compost and raise tomatoes in my organic garden back of my house in Bel Air."

"I remember being only mildly stirred to see him with Missy on his lap as he sat in the main stateroom [of Franklin D. Roosevelt's houseboat, the Larooco], holding her in his sun-browned arms." So goes Elliott Roosevelt's account of his father's affair with Marguerite ("Missy") LeHand, his secretary for 20 years. In his already controversial forthcoming book An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park, Elliott says that everyone within the family, including Eleanor, accepted Missy's intimacy with the President. Another skeleton Elliott rattles with apparent enthusiasm is that of Joseph Kennedy, whom, he claims, his father had urged to end his great and good friendship with Actress Gloria Swanson. "Joe replied that he would be willing only 'if you give up Missy LeHand.' " Elliott writes further: "Father looked on that as a score to be settled. When Kennedy arrived back in disgrace [after he was forced to resign as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's], the President refrained from sending any ranking member of the Cabinet to meet him, as custom required. Instead, at Washington airport stood Missy, all smiles."

Even a lot of help from his friends wasn't enough. Despite testimony by a parade of character witnesses that included New York City Mayor John Lindsay, Talk-Show Host Dick Cavett and United Auto Workers President Leonard Woodcock, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service last week gave ex-Beatle John Lennon, 32, 60 days to leave the U.S. Lennon, who has been living with his wife Yoko Ono in Manhattan since 1971, was refused permanent residency because of his 1968 conviction in England for possession of marijuana. "If we are deported, it is synonymous with losing our child. That is why we are so desperate," said Yoko, referring to the Texas court decision a year ago that she could have temporary custody of her nine-year-old daughter only if she raised the girl in the U.S. The child is still with her father, Yoko's former husband, whose whereabouts are apparently unknown.

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