"There just aren't that many up-front roles for actresses these days," pouts Carol Kane, echoing Hollywood's longest running complaint. At 23, though, Kane seems to be doing all right. Cast as a winsome prostitute in The Last Detail, and as a bank robber's hostage in Dog Day Afternoon, she has finally found her proper niche in Hester Street, in which she stars as a Jewish immigrant to the U.S. in 1896. Says Kane: "I'm told I have the look of a different century."

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The Congress of Racial Equality wished him "a lengthy stay in jail"; his old Black Panther comrades ignored him altogether. Such was the cold welcome given to onetime Black Militant Eldridge Cleaver, 40, who stepped off a plane from Paris at New York's Kennedy Airport after seven years of self-exile in Cuba, Algeria and France. Facing charges of parole violation and assault with intent to commit murder, stemming from a 1968 Shootout with police in Oakland, Calif., Cleaver was immediately arrested by FBI agents and flown to San Diego. "It's a new situation now. Black people have undergone a fundamental change for the better," said the author (Soul on Ice) and former Panther Information Minister. "I've got two kids, I'm almost bald, I've got gray hair, and my political ideas have become refined. Living under dictatorships gives you a more balanced picture of what's going on in the world."

The program begins with an eight-minute chant during which the word cogitate is repeated incessantly. "After three or four minutes," says Actor Burgess Meredith, "people get bored and their brains begin to supply different words and entire sentences." Using this mind-bending opener, Meredith, 66, has been spreading the gospel of meditation to college campuses across the country. His two-hour routine features readings from Anthropologist Carlos Castaneda's Tales of Power, as well as music on a flute synthesizer and Tibetan oboe by Flutist Charles Lloyd. "It's heavy going," Meredith concedes, "but we've struck a minefield of enthusiasm."

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"I had never sung onstage or with an orchestra before," said Soprano Roberta Peters, 45, recalling her Metropolitan Opera debut 25 years ago. A Met understudy back then and the daughter of a shoe salesman, Peters had been called to duty when Nadine Connor fell ill hours before a scheduled performance in Don Giovanni. Last week, between acts of her 303rd Met performance (in Cost fan Tutte), Peters accepted a silver anniversary bowl from Met Board President William Rockefeller. The "little girl from The Bronx," she observed happily, "had really made it."

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"Competing with Hemingway isn't my idea of good business," wrote the late John Steinbeck. In Steinbeck, a Life in Letters, the author of The Grapes of Wrath is not too impressed by other talents. "The whole idea of the man turns my stomach," he said of D.H. Lawrence. On William Faulkner in 1956: "Sure he's a good writer, but he's turning into a goddamned phony. I don't know whether the Nobel Prize does it or not, but if it does, thank God I have not been so honored." Six years later, Steinbeck collected his own Nobel. "Maybe I don't deserve it," he wrote Princess Grace of Monaco, an old chum, "but I'm glad I got it."

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A possible first in world history: a statesman returned from an international summit feeling in awe of his opposite numbers. Back in Tokyo after attending the economic summit meeting in France (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS), Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Miki told reporters: "Until the summit, I had been thinking that I had been doing my best. But compared with the difficulties the European politicians have, I felt strongly that my efforts have been far from adequate." The Westerners, he noted with some astonishment, dealt with economic problems "as though they were matters of life and death of a nation or a culture."

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There are spies, Secret Service agents, dogged newsmen, a Middle East war plot and an ambitious Vice President in The Canfield Decision. But that is not too surprising, since the novel's author is former Vice President Spiro Agnew. Though the just-completed book is still six months away from publication, Agnew has already received more than $100,000 from Playboy Press for his efforts, plus advances from eleven foreign publishers. To celebrate, the novice novelist did what any new author of Greek heritage would do. He went to Athens, raised a glass and enjoyed the nonliterary lines of a local belly dancer.

He has spoken live to 51 million people in the past three decades, a feat that is starting to take its toll on Evangelist Billy Graham, 57. "In order to get up energy to preach in these big stadiums, I have to stay in bed nearly every afternoon, most of the afternoon," he wearily told a reporter shortly before he finished his five-day crusade in Hong Kong's 28,000-seat Government Stadium last week. "I used to read that Billy Sunday stayed in bed all day every day and only got up for his appointments. Now, at my age, I can see what he was talking about." And if given the chance, what would Graham have done differently in life? "I would have studied more and spoken a great deal less," answered Billy. "I would have spent more time with my family. I would not have allowed too many people to pressure me into too many meetings, too many appointments, too many speaking engagements."

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Blonde Reporter Sally Quinn sounded a trifle put out. "Who is Page Lee Hufty and what has she done to become Girl of the Year?" Quinn wondered in a prickly profile in the Washington Post. Page Lee who? She is a tall, good-looking blonde, by an old-rich Washington family out of the Madeira School and Stanford, who is 27, paints, rides horses and goes to parties. Since last year, when Senator Ted Kennedy was said to have been telephoning her frequently ("Ridiculous," she says), Page Lee has also become the darling of the D.C. society pages, including the Post's. They chronicle her outings on the capital canape circuit with such local eligibles as National Gallery Director J. Carter Brown and Assistant Interior Secretary Jack Horton, as well as visitors like Jordan's King Hussein, who so much enjoyed Page Lee's company at a dinner party that he sent her a pair of Arabian horses. Quinn, 34, snipes that the girl has "learned what sells, what grabs, what attracts." Page Lee's cool reply: "Washington is a big fast-moving city. There's no need for any jealousy."

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It was a grand old party indeed as Conservative Editor William Buckley assembled more than 600 friends and colleagues to celebrate the 20th birthday of his National Review. Among the guests on hand at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel: 1976 Conservative Aspirant Ronald Reagan, 1964 Conservative Aspirant Barry Goldwater, and even a sprinkling of Democrats, including U.N. Ambassador Daniel Moynihan, who is a possible contender for Brother James Buckley's Senate seat. Though his conservative biweekly is now running in the red, Bill Buckley had only the highest hopes for NR as well as Candidate Reagan's chances for the presidency. Said Buckley, alluding to the White House: "National Review will plan its 25th anniversary celebration in the most exclusive hostelry in Washington D.C."

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