People: Aug. 16, 1963

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At 89, ex-President Herbert Hoover was making an astonishing recovery from the gastrointestinal bleeding that brought him near death in June. He now spends some time every day at his desk in his Waldorf Towers apartment. But Hoover canceled his traditional birthday-eve press conference on doctors' orders, instead issued a written statement. "The longer I live and the more I see," it said, "the more confidence I have in the American system of constant good will and service to other nations, and of free enterprise and personal liberty. We have a great way of life—let's keep it that way."

For seven years the number of Broadway plays (not musicals) that had ever passed the 1,000-performance mark stood at an even dozen. Now Mary, Mary has come along to make it a baker's dozen—and to serve up a yeasty $1,000,000 for Playwright Jean Kerr, 40. But she is almost too busy to spend her dough. Wife of the New York Herald Tribune's Drama Critic Walter Kerr, she is expecting her sixth child in October, has just sold her best-selling novel Please Don't Eat the Daisies to NBCTV, is finishing up her next play, Poor Richard, due on Broadway next year.

The big stars said no. Even the little stars said no. But LuLu Porter said yes, and so the U.S. was assured that one of its own would be in there singing with representatives of 32 other nations at this week's International Song Festival at Sopot, Poland. Swell, but who's LuLu Porter? Well, explained White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, he had heard LuLu, fetching, brown-eyed and 23, belt out nine songs at Ye Little Club in Beverly Hills last spring, later met and congratulated her. Youngest of nine children of a music-loving Ohio farmer, LuLu (nee Marianne Wolford) began singing professionally only a year ago, says her first act was "a bomb." She does a mean belly dance as a sideline, but finds the bumps a grind, hopes to narrow her repertory to singing and acting.

When their case went to court last year, Actor-Director José Ferrer, 51, tried to talk Singer Rosemary Clooney, 35, out of divorcing him. Accused of carrying on with other women throughout the nine-year marriage, José seemed subdued and penitent, insisted he still loved Rosemary and wanted a reconciliation. "Not at this time," said Rosemary, and she made it sound as if what she really meant was never, never, never. But last week, when the two flew into Cincinnati together to visit their five children, they let it be known that they had made up, after all, canceling their California divorce just a few days before it was to have become final.