By Guy D. Garcia

It was originally intended as a gift for his wife's 50th birthday, but John Lennon never got to begin work on a collection of Yoko Ono songs recorded by other artists. The idea, however, lived on, and with a little help from her friends, Ono, 51, finally finished the album. Every Man Has a Woman features twelve songs performed by such divergent talents as Harry Nilsson, Elvis Costello, Eddie Money, Rosanne Cash, Roberta Flack and a young lad more or less new to the business, Sean Ono Lennon, 8, who sings It's Alright. Next Tuesday the musicians will convene in New York for a nationally syndicated "family birthday celebration" radio broadcast in honor of John and Sean, who were both born on Oct. 9. Does his first recording mean the younger Lennon plans to follow in Mom's and Dad's musical foot steps? "It seems kind of inevitable," admits Yoko. "Then again I'm prepared for the possibility that he'll want to be a baseball player."

"Humans are the only animals that know they have to laugh. And we laugh because we know we have to die. Well, it's a good way of spending the time in between." Author Umberto Eco, 52, has long contemplated the many kinds of laughter, including recently the all-the-way-to-the-bank kind. The awesome success of his medieval-monastery mystery, The Name of the Rose, has turned the scholarly Italian professor of semiotics into an international literary icon. During an autumn promotional tour of the U.S. last week, he delighted an audience of New York City fans, but deftly declined to interpret the meaning of his work. Eco did talk about the pressures of fame and fortune. "I used to think that financial success would enable me to pursue my interests more," explained Eco. "The exact opposite has happened. It's quite a paradox."

Mary Shelley would be pleased--or would she? The author's redivivus creation, the Frankenstein monster, is back again for a new-wave horror movie that sounds like, but is not, a remake of The Bride of Frankenstein. It stars Rock Singer Sting, 33, as Baron Frankenstein, and Flashdance Star Jennifer Beals, 20, as Eva, whom the good doctor whips up in the lab as a mate for his born-again monster. "I thought it would be interesting to play someone who came back from the dead but was still very human," says Beals. Understandably, her character shuns Frank for Sting. So the monster, sensitive '80s-style male that he is, trashes the doctor's lab. Sting was accidentally gashed seven stitches' worth in the melee.

Merely showing up for the event at Miami's Fontainebleau hotel was enough to cause a pimple. But Philip Michael Thomas, 36, and Don Johnson, 36, stars of the new TV show Miami Vice, risked complexion and cavities to do their part at a two-day chocoholics' festival. The pair took turns on a spring-loaded seat over a 400-gal. vat of chocolate syrup, while a bevy of young girls lobbed baseballs at the target for $3 a pop. After three splashdowns each in the high-calorie goo, the men were just too delicious for the girls to resist. Recalls Thomas: "They licked the chocolate off my hairy chest." For their lickerish female admirers, the idea of having a hunk of chocolate will never be the same.

--By Guy D. Garcia