By Guy D. Garcia

His famed family tree reaches all the way back to a small village in West Africa, and earlier this month, Roots Author Alex Haley, 62, was breaking new cultural ground on another continent. He was in Peking as the executive producer for a 12-hr. TV mini-series called The Last Emperor: The History of China. "I didn't know anything about African culture before I started working on Roots," he explains. "If you do hard research, you can fill in your knowledge of any culture." As part of that research, Haley visited Peking's Forbidden City with Pu Jie, the only surviving brother of Emperor Pu Yi, who was deposed in 1911. If Haley was still learning about China, the Chinese seemed to know all about him; Roots has sold over 200,000 copies in translation there. Says he: "I found myself signing more autographs in the Forbidden City than in Atlanta."

"Fifty is what 40 used to be." That may be news to mathematicians, but it seemed to make perfect sense to Gloria Steinem and the 900 or so people gathered at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria hotel last week for the Ms. magazine editor's semicentennial birthday party. The feminist fete featured speeches and songs by such liberati as Mario Thomas, Bella Abzug, Bette Midler, Sally Ride and Shirley MacLaine, who wished the birthday girl "success and happiness in all your future lives." Ride, for her part, recalled that her mother, after watching Sally rocket away on television last June, had said, "God bless Gloria Steinem." Steinem, meanwhile, characteristically interpreted her friends' outpouring of affection as a political harbinger. Said she: "Women seem to be the one group that gets more radical with age--some day an army of gray-haired women may take over the earth."

When Jesse Kuhaulua went to Japan from his native Hawaii in 1964, he was a 19-year-old, 253-lb. "skinny" kid with a dream of being a professional sumo wrestler. Eight years later he became the first foreigner to win a sumo tournament and went on to fight in a record 1,654 bouts, making him something of a popular legend. Recently Takamiyama, 39, began to feel the combined effects of time and a string of injuries, losing 13 of his last 15 matches. Last week, confronted with a humiliating down-ranking to the third tier of sumo wrestlers, the 6-ft. 3-in., 400-lb. giant instead announced his retirement at an emotional farewell ceremony. "I am happy that I wrestled for 20 years," said a tearful Takamiyama. "I consider that as my biggest accomplishment." His departure from the sport will be formalized when his topknot is cut off in a ritual to be staged in a few months.

Among the stars of the sci-fi firmament, Arthur C. Clarke, 66, is one of the very brightest. The Sri Lanka-based writer is not so well recognized as he is well read, however. Fans of the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey are therefore advised to look sharply for him in the sequel, 2010, due to land in theaters in December. The movie, about a U.S.-Soviet astronaut team that blasts off to investigate a series of mysterious events at one of Jupiter's moons, features Clarke in a cameo role that can be measured in nanoseconds. He plays a bum sitting on a bench in front of the White House, the "only part in the movie that was down to earth," he laughs. His miniappearance is not without precedent, of course. Says Clarke: "Move over Alfred Hitchcock." --By Guy D. Garcia

On the Record

Nan Kempner, New York City fund raiser and partygoer, acknowledging her ubiquity on the nonstop social circuit: "I wouldn't miss the opening of a door."

Eugene J. Carroll, retired rear admiral of the U.S. Navy and arms-control advocate, on why the Reagan Administration's name for the MX missile is a nomen dubium: "Calling the MX a peace keeper is like calling the guillotine a headache remedy."