"This is the perfect rehabilitation," bubbled Watergate Burglar Bernard Barker last week. "Now if this isn't the American way, you tell me what is." Barker's postprison rehabilitation program is a central Florida housing project he has agreed to promote along with his break-in partners Eugenic Martinez and Virgilio Gonzalez. The project, dubbed Watergate Hills, is a brainchild of Florida Builder John Priestes, who himself just ended a six-month stint in the slammer for FHA influence buying. The foursome hope to make $7 million to $9 million from the 600-unit complex, but last week their profit margin was shaved when thieves relieved on-site construction trailers of $9,000 worth of equipment. "The irony to me is that when we went to the Watergate and were called burglars, we didn't take anything," said an indignant Barker after the robbery. "As a matter of fact, we left something," he added, referring presumably to the Waterbuggers' abandoned professional tools. -

Can a beautiful, innocent, honest girl from a small mining town in the Midwest find happiness as the President of the United States? That is the question to be answered by Linda Lovelace for President, the newest movie by the hardworking star of Deep Throat. To help the film along, Lovelace struck a candidate's pose in front of the White House last week. The movie is billed as a satiric look at American life and the leading lady hopes that it will be a transitional step toward Weightier roles. "I'm really Miss All-America Country Girl," says Linda in a moment of introspection. "I am very honest and open. People in our society don't know how to handle that." Lest anyone's vote be missed at the box office, distributors plan to release the film in December in three versions: PG, R and, of course, X.

When we last left Margo Flax, middle-aged divorcee, her frantic love for a younger man had caused her to undergo a facelift. That, to be sure, was nothing spectacular for the script of All My Children, one of television's soapiest midday dramas. Yet when kindly Dr. Julien removed the bandages from Margo's uplifted face before 10 million viewers this week, the postoperative black eyes and discolored skin thus exposed were in very living color. It turns out that Eileen Letchworth, fiftyish, the actress who has been Margo Flax for the past two years, had her real-life face surgically elevated earlier in the month. The show's relentless producers, recognizing a heart-rending episode when they saw one, arranged for art to imitate lift. Margo and Eileen are facing their new face with equanimity: "It's no different from having one's hair colored or teeth capped." Or eyes debagged, an off-screen drama that Actress Letchworth lived through seven years ago. -

Charles Bronson, one of Hollywood's hottest actors (Death Wish, Mr. Majestyk), was really cooking with gas recently. On the set of his current film, Breakout, Bronson and Co-Star Robert Duvall were toying with the controls of a $250,000 helicopter when its engine suddenly overheated and caught fire. That unscripted event, of course, had nothing to do with Breakout's true-life tale of Adventurer Victor Stadter's copter flight into a Mexican prison to spring wealthy American Joel Kaplan. Nor, for that matter, did some of the scripted scenes; though the actual 1971 jailbreak went uneventfully, not so the movie version. Appearing unexpectedly on the set, Kaplan and Stadter watched in amazement as two Jeeploads of movieland police blasted away at Actors Bronson and Duvall re-enacting the escape. Said Stadter afterward: "I was more scared watch ing all this than when we did the caper."

"It's a challenge, especially since 1 have green eyes," observed Actor Peter Ustinov. "I have to be careful not to open them too much." Ustinov's ocular difficulties are caused by his role as Hnup Wan, a bungling Chinese spy in the Walt Disney spoof One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing, which he is filming in London with Co-Star Helen Hayes. Ustinov's skill in portraying his character has proved especially unnerving for his wife Helene, who visited the set during the first day of shooting. "She seemed extremely upset when she realized who I was," says Ustinov. "She looked like a faithful dog who sees the same make of car as his master's, yet someone else climbs out of it."

Though his protean athletic skills include hunting, soccer and skiing, French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing joined thousands of his countrymen by packing up his wife and four teen-age children for a vacation at the beach. While his constituency fought for space in the sand, however, Giscard enjoyed some swimming, tennis and boating in the privacy of a Cote d' Azur estate bor rowed from Prince and Princess de la Tour d'Auvergne. "My vacation I devote especially to my children," declared Giscard to a French reporter, then came in out of the sun for a quick shuttle flight to Paris for a Cabinet meeting.

Cast as an indomitable spinster teacher in the pre-World War I South, indomitable Bette Davis was hard at rehearsals last week for Miss Moffat, her first stage role in 13 years. The Broadway-bound production, which opens in Baltimore next month, is a musical adaptation of Emlyn Williams' The Corn Is Green, in which Davis first starred for Warner Bros, back in 1945. "I'm delighted to have an opportunity to play the character again because now I look the right age," says Davis, 66, who has been working steadily through lunch and cigarette breaks on a part that includes six songs. "Through the years I've done an enormous amount of singing that no one remembers," she rasps gamely. "It's a rather low voice. I'm not an opera singer."

Sheathed in a shimmering blue jumpsuit topped by a towering headdress of ostrich feathers, Josephine Baker, grande dame of the music-hall circuit, pranced across the stage of the London Palladium last week with grace belying her 68 years. Between torch ballads, the St. Louis expatriate paused long enough to reminisce about the good old times in Paris. "I started in 1924, and we were all beginners together--Pablo, Matisse, Hemingway," she recalled to her audience. "I used to look after them all, too, picking up their clothes, getting them organized. And I was always popular because I was earning all the money." About those peekaboo costumes of strategically placed bananas? "I wasn't really naked," the adoptive mother of twelve revealed. "I simply didn't have any clothes on."

"I have a lot of things to think about before Snake River," said Motorcycle Daredevil Evel Knievel in Toronto last week. Moments later, the two-wheeled wonder eliminated one worry when he arced his cycle over 13 Mack trucks and landed safely 40 yards away, breaking his own world's truck-jumping record. All of which was better than he did in Dallas last February, when he cleared only eleven trucks and broke his back. Despite his $65,000 fee, Knievel's Toronto show was clearly only a tune-up for the big one: his planned 4,871-ft. leap across Idaho's Snake River Canyon on Sept. 8 in a steam-powered Sky Cycle. While New York Congressman John Murphy sought legislation to ban coverage of Knievel's ultimate caper over network TV, "where it can be viewed by our children," good old Evel, at age 34, vowed to make his flight as planned. "I'll never want to jump so high or so far again," he reflected, "but I'd like to keep jumping till I'm 50." -

Despite more than two decades of triumphs (Bonjour Tristesse, A Certain Smile), French Novelist Franc,oise Sagan, 39, has had more than her share of personal woes. After two divorces, a couple of car accidents and some sizable gambling losses, small wonder that the consummate writer of romances should have earned a reputation for the consumption of spirits. "I drink sometimes, but a lot less than I used to," she told the Italian magazine Gente this month. "When you drink, the time arrives when you don't eat any more; if you don't eat, then you get tired; if you get exhausted too much, then you don't sleep well; and if you don't sleep well, then you burst." After describing herself as basically happy, tolerant and honest, Sagan added: "As for my negative side, you could say that I am lazy, cowardly and that I am fond of all the excesses."

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