NEWS LITE : KUDROW EXPECTING IN LIFE, ON `FRIENDS'.

A potential new ``Friend'' has been sired. Lisa Kudrow, who plays the cerebrally challenged Phoebe on the NBC show, is expecting her first child. She's not showing yet, but the pregnancy will be worked into the story line. Kudrow, 33, is wed to Michael Stern, an ad exec. ``Friends'' producers aren't sure if they'll marry her off on the show.

Country singer tells of love hangovers

In her autobiography, country singer Lorrie Morgan writes about the men in her life, including the painful death of hubby Keith Whitley, a fellow singer who died of alcohol poisoning in 1989.

In ``Forever Yours, Faithfully: My Love Story,'' Morgan says Whitley had a rabid obsession with pornography and was in the arms of another woman the night he died. He would drink anything containing alcohol, she says, including hair spray, cologne and Formula 409.

On other lovers, she writes that her affair with Kenny Rogers ``was one of those kamikaze relationships that had to end with a nose dive and a major explosion.'' When it ended, ``I was devastated,'' she writes.

She calls Troy Aikman the love of her life and says she ``almost laid down and died when that one was over.'' It ended, she writes, because ``he was very young and wanted children of his own and I had just had a hysterectomy.''

She also dated Sen. Fred Thompson, but says she felt ``stifled at those political dinners and fund-raisers. I could not express myself as a pungent, pithy country singer.'' She's now married to a younger man, country singer Jon Randall. ``He's very attractive and he makes me laugh, which is as important as making love,'' she says.

Seattle kids sass really rich guy

Leonardo da Vinci's 500-year-old scientific document ``Codex Leicester'' - bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million - will be the centerpiece of a Seattle Art Museum exhibit opening Thursday.

To hype it, the Microsoft man took a bunch of fifth-graders on a pre-opening tour this week. One smart aleck piped up: ``Leonardo didn't finish all of his work, and you didn't finish Harvard or your first computer program. Do you think you are like him?''

Gates deflected the query and went on to something else. Another kid said the best thing about the tour was ``walking around with the richest man in America.'' Galaxy, squirt

Girls to spice up royal visit to South Africa

Britain's Prince Harry will go to South Africa with his father Prince Charles next month for a safari and a meeting with the Spice Girls.

Harry, 13, is scheduled to attend two public engagements with his dad - a Spice Girls charity concert at Johannesburg Stadium on Nov. 1 and a Nov. 3 visit to the Kwazulu village of Duku Duku.

The two will depart Oct. 28, but Prince William won't be able to go because his school break will end too soon, St. James's Palace said.

The boys returned to their boarding schools less than two weeks after the Aug. 31 death of their mother, Princess Diana, and have remained out of the public eye.

Priceless wand awaits master

of `Journey'

``Merlin's Journey'' by Jonathan Gunsen and Martin Coombe will be released next September in 40 countries at the exact same moment. It contains 1,000 clues to a puzzle, and the first to solve it gets a wand made of gold, silver, bronze, crystal and lapis lazuli. It's worth $80,000, but with every copy sold, another grain of gold will be added to it by HarperCollins so its ultimate value could be about $400,000. The authors took three years to fashion the brain-twister. If nobody solves it within three years, the prize will go to the Save the Children Foundation.

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4 Photos

PHOTO (1 --2) Welcome to his nightmare

Rock music legend Alice Cooper, center, mingles with the monsters from Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights on Thursday. Cooper appeared at the studios to receive an ``EyegoreAward'' for his contributions to the world of fantasy and horror.

Hans Gutknecht/Daily News

(3) Gates

(4) Morgan