The Follies That Come with Spring

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, spring with all its fads, fancies and general nuttiness arrives, and of general folly there is no end.

All over the world, for instance, the new bestseller is suddenly Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, which JAMES F. COYNE comes encased in red plastic with a red-ribbon marker. At Berke ley, it is treated like an amulet by the Black Muslims; at Columbia, it is outselling everything since Henry Miller; and Bren-tano's at the Pentagon has already unloaded 1,000 copies at $1 each. A few of the buyers may be genuine sinologists, but for the vast majority it is the new camp classic.

Harvard students are now exhorting one another with such Maoisms as "What we need is an enthusiastic but calm state of mind and intense but orderly work," in Great Britain, sassy teenagers have taken to Maothing retorts to teachers who rebuke them, and Carnaby Street regulars have begun wearing $22.40 Red Guard uniforms; in Manhattan, Mao sayings are briefly as popular as old Confucius-say. But their days as a cocktail-party drop are numbered. For as London's Sun Columnist Henry Fielding noted: "In their cunning way, the Chinese are now using it instead of their water torture; they are just boring people to death."

With youth, the "antique look" this spring is in. Students in Paris and London have been ransacking secondhand stores for old uniforms dating back to the Crimean and FrancoPrussian wars. But in the U.S., uniforms are generally out in favor of the Frank Nitti gangster look, including palm tree-studded ties and double-breasted pinstripe jackets. At Dartmouth, the particular "drinking uni" (for uniform) at the moment is the "blow-lunch look" (so called, one student explains, because "when you look at one of those ties you want to blow your lunch") topped off with a Red Baron Flying Ace helmet, complete with ear flaps and shrapnel holes. At Harvard, the grapevine passes the word around within hours whenever Secondhand Deal er Max Keezer or "Morgie's" (Goodwill Industry's Morgan Memorial) gets in any old taxi-driver hats or brownand-white shoes, and some Harvards are even beginning to talk antique: "Those teeny-boppers are a caution." Getting the Message. Women, after years of going hatless, are now covering up again. At the moment, the vogue for hats is running strongest in Paris, where the noctambules show up at La Coupole in Montparnasse wearing floppy Garbo-style fedoras, gaucho hats with chin straps, and overgrown newsboy caps. One reason that hats are back on top is that there is suddenly much less hair underneath. Short hair cuts, among them what Parisians call le Farrow and I'Artichaut, are replacing the elaborate bouffant hairdos that made hats hard to wear. Paris' Alexandre has already shorn Elizabeth Taylor, Queen Sirikit of Thailand, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. And while Elsa Martinelli, Sophia Loren and Jean Shrimpton have so far resisted the shears, they are all tucking their hair under short wigs to achieve a similar effect. Manhattan's Kenneth, who gained fame as the architect of Jackie Kennedy's bouffant extravaganzas, has switched to the short crop. Explains Kenneth: "Short skirts need a small, close head, and my clients are getting the message."

Short skirts also mean new lengths in stockings. Courreges recommends tennis socks that rise to midcalf; Ungaro pulls his stockings two inches above the knee. And for Palm Beach, the Duchess of Windsor is packing along a pair of Givenchy's yellow knee socks to go with her Dior cullotte. What ever the length, bright, solid colors are in and applied dimensional texture is out; the pattern, if any, is now being knit right into the fabric.

Everywhere, ongoing fads are picking up momentum. Among the campus set, wall posters depicting its heroes and anti-heroes are bigger than ever. "When wa-,j#^ '" " ter is boiling, it's hard to tell when it gets hotter, but the fad hasn't reached its peak," says Martin Geisler, owner of Manhattan's Per PROTEST BUTTON sonality Posters. Right now the Monkees are the most popular of his 70 posters; other favorites, each for $1, include Chairman Mao, Dracula, the Hell's Angels, Shirley Temple, Humphrey Bogart, Allen Ginsberg in his Uncle Sam suit, and Peter Fonda on a motorcycle. Also prized: the offbeat "You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's" subway poster ads for rye bread.

With posters go protest buttons, and they are popping up dirtier than ever--at least in the eyes of the Manhattan district attorney's office, which is now prosecuting a Greenwich Village retailer for selling "obscene" buttons. The offenders ranged from "Pornography Is Fun" to pornography unprintable. But for Civil Liberties Un ion Lawyer Robert Polstein, banning buttons is restricting of expression. "What young people see clean," he argues, "older persons see dirty."

Rhino Desk, Ostrich Bar. With fads turning on and fading out with the dizzy psychedelic speed of a discotheque slide projector, the old, posed Bachrach studio shot may be becoming passe. A Columbia University philosophy major, 24-year-old Julie Motz, has set herself up in business making 20-minute-long, 16-mm. BioPix. For $500, she will follow her subject (a Texas brewery president, say, or a New Jersey American Legionnaire), shooting candidly and in color from dawn to dusk. So far she has been banned only from Manhattan's "21" Club ("It bothered the other customers"), had to sneak in shots at the Forum of the Twelve Caesars after hours.

And what makes the perfect setting to view an instant film biography? Right now in Chicago, it is the animal furniture-sculpture of French Designer Francois-Xavier Lalanne. Delighting the throngs at the Art Institute are his furnishings, including a flock of 22 woolly-coated, roller-footed sheep that serve as seats, sofas or hassocks; a monumental housefly three feet long that sports a rosewood toilet seat; and a life-size brass rhinoceros weighing 735 Ibs. whose side swings down to make a desk.

Lalanne's prices are equally fantastic: $10,000 for the sheep or the housefly, $25,000 for the rhino. Among the happy few who have chosen to afford them: Designer Yves St. Laurent, who bought a rhino, and French Premier Georges Pompidou, who bought a pair of china ostriches whose beaks hold a metal board serving as a bar. And why does Lalanne spend his time creating such extravagant fancies? His answer is as good as any likely to be heard this spring: "For the most elementary reason--it amuses me."

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