Two months ago Jazz King Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong was gravely ill in a Manhattan hospital, fighting an apparently losing battle for his life. Now the gravel-throated singer and trumpeter has told newsmen: "My playing and singing's O.K. and I feel pretty good." To prove it, he took up his trumpet, blasted into What a Wonderful World, and announced he planned to go back to work. Said Satchmo: "That's what life's all about, man."

Slowed down by a dilatory auto ahead of him on an English highway, former Racing Ace Stirling Moss stepped on the gas and passed the slowpoke. Unfortunately, the leisurely motorist turned out to be an off-duty policeman, who charged Moss with crossing a double white line. Haled into court, one of the world's most famous drivers had his license taken away. "Terribly unfair," grumbled Moss, who had to be chauffeured home by his attorney. "At the moment I'm riding a bicycle and it's bloody awful."

In the Dominican Republic to file for a quickie divorce from Barbra Streisand, Actor Elliott Gould, 32, walked hand in hand from the courtroom with pregnant Jenny Bogart, 19. Gould announced that he was the father of her baby, due to be born "around Christmas." Furthermore, Jenny announced defiantly, she and Elliott will continue to live together out of wedlock because "we don't believe in marriage."

In Rome, a city that takes its singing seriously, the uproar was reminiscent of the time Maria Callas failed to complete a performance of Bellini's Norma. This time it was Aretha Franklin, who had been touring the country while the Italians hailed her as La Regina del Soul. After fainting at the end of a performance, Aretha canceled her next day's show, a move that produced outraged howls and legal action from Promoter Ezio Radaelli, who had paid her $65,000 in advance. Aretha responded by booking a flight to Paris. But she was picked up by forewarned policemen at Rome's Fiumicino Airport, hustled away, searched, and--after promising to return $40,000 to Promoter Radaelli --finally allowed to board a plane for New York. "I'll come back for you," she shouted to fans cheering from the terminal terrace. Her famed vocal cords sounded as strong as ever.

After her firebrand activities on behalf of Northern Ireland's Catholic minority, Bernadette Devlin, 23, the youngest member of the British House of Commons, would hardly seem to need more publicity. Yet last week Bernadette, who is unmarried, went out of her way to disclose to the press that she expects a baby in the fall. She refused to name the father. "I do not expect it to be easy," she admitted, "some people might want to see me hide and sulk. Others might feel that they were owed some explanation. But my morals," she insisted, "are a private matter."

For years she had seemed unable to avoid the glare of publicity. Thus it came as a surprise when word leaked that Tobacco Heiress Doris Duke, 58, has for two years sung as a chorister in an almost all-black gospel choir in Nutley, New Jersey's First Baptist Church. Along with the other 100 members of the Angelic Choir, Doris goes to Friday-night choir practice, tours along with the gospelers, and occasionally invites them all up to her 2,500-acre estate in Somerville. "We know Doris is a millionaire," said Pastor Lawrence Roberts. "But all those who walk in the ways of the Lord are millionaires."

Conspiracies are the specialty of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. And his reputation was firmly established during his two-year prosecution of Businessman Clay Shaw on a charge of conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Now U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell has charged Garrison with indulging in some conspiring of his own: accepting bribes to protect illegal pinball machines. After allegedly receiving the latest installment of $1,000 in marked $50 bills, Garrison was arrested, fingerprinted, and released on $5,000 bond. "I've never accepted a dollar in my life," he snapped.

His life in the South was hard and the treatment he received at the University of Mississippi, where he was the first known Negro student, was something less than cordial. So it seems strange that James Meredith should want to go back. But after spending six troubled years in New York City, where he lost $20,000 as a landlord, and was sentenced to two days in jail for harassing his tenants, Meredith has abandoned the North to return to Jackson, Miss., where he will campaign to obtain more economic power for blacks. "The South," Meredith announced, "is a more livable place for blacks than any other place in the nation."

"He loves antiques and I think that's why he fell for me," rumbled British Actress Hermione Gingold, announcing that romance--and perhaps even the prospect of marriage--has entered her 73-year-old life. Her fiance, Beaudoin Mills, whom the actress described as tall, thin, handsome "and younger than me," is an English antique dealer. "You know all those stories about old men marrying young girls," Hermione noted. "Well, I'm striking a blow for Women's Lib by reversing that." What effect would the engagement have on her? "Almost none, except that it feels nice. And I suppose you could say I'm not in the marriage market any longer."

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