Four years ago, she hit the American scene in her size 50 muumuu, resembling a Hudson Hornet draped in one of Omar's tents. But look what's happened to Mama Cass Elliott. After almost two years of dieting, she has shed better than 120 Ibs., down from 290 to a mere 164. It was expensive, though--"about $2,000 a pound," said Cass, explaining that her regimen (four days of complete fasting per week) finally put her in the hospital and forced her to cancel $250,000 worth of bookings. "The Mama Cass diet can give you acute tonsillitis, hemorrhaging vocal cords, mononucleosis and a case of hepatitis," she said. And now? "Lose 55 more pounds--then ask Oscar de La Renta to design an entire wardrobe."

No one has ever accused Britain's Prince Philip of reticence. Yet rarely has he ranged as widely and acidly as in an interview with The Director, a London business magazine. On his countrymen's work habits: "The number of people who are actively constructive are minimal compared to the numbers who are just sitting there." On governmental controls: "People will soon need a license to breathe. I know that in Scotland we had to get permission to block up a fireplace in a cottage. It's unbelievable!"

They were on a plane returning from Australia, and he tossed a crumpled note asking who she was. So she tossed one back asking who he was, and he lobbed another, saying, "Mr. Williams, fisherman." That was five years ago, and today beautiful Dolores Williams, onetime Vogue model, can match her husband cast for cast ("Sometimes I'm even better than he is"). Except that there won't be so much fishing from now on. Ted Williams, 50, baseball's terrible-tempered but altogether "Splendid Splinter" of the 1940s and '50s, is back in the game as manager of the Washington Senators--and that is just fine with Dolores. "It's about time he learned to get along with people," she said. "He's up and down like the weather."

There was the usual run of Irish jokes and Polish jokes and Jewish jokes. But the star of the annual Circus Saints and Sinners show was a tall guy with a lopsided grin who told a few on himself. "In case you have forgotten, I'm the man who wound up a little more than 300,000 heartbeats from the presidency," quipped Senator Edmund Mus-Icie, the guest of honor. However, he pointed out, "There's only one thing lower than a defeated candidate for Vice President--and that's a successful one." Besides, "I have some reason to believe I can get an honorary degree from Macalester College."

Gloom hung thick over the group of 100 "prominent intellectuals" assembled in Manhattan at a "Theater for Ideas." The question for discussion was "The End of the Rationalist Tradition?"--and the answer seemed obvious. Pronounced Poet Robert Lowell: "The world is absolutely out of control now, and it's not going to be saved by reason or unreason." Said Author Leslie Fiedler: "Reason, although dead, holds us with an embrace that looks like a lovers' embrace but turns out to be rigor mortis. Unless we're necrophiles, we'd better let go." Intoned Norman Mailer: "Somewhere, something incredible happened in history--the wrong guys won. We're heading for a conclusion that consists of Joey Namath grinning hungrily over the line at Earl Morrall."

The way Hubert Horatio Humphrey tells the story, traffic at a Miami intersection was piling up around a lady who had stalled her car. Lights changed, tempers rose, horns honked. So H.H.H., followed by his Secret Service bodyguard, stepped from his car and pushed the stalled vehicle over to the side of the road. Humphrey then smiled in on the lady and her daughter. The woman pondered the familiar face. "Are you from the bank?" she asked. "Madam," offered the Secret Service man, "this is the Vice President." "Of what?" countered the lady. "Mother," whispered the daughter, "that's the man we voted for in the election." Mother peered more closely. "Nonsense," she said. "You don't look a bit like Lyndon Johnson."

"By all means let's have sex in fiction. Let's take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior." That was Author John Updike talking, in George Plimpton's quarterly Paris Review. Said John: "I plotted Couples almost entirely in church--little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program and carry down to the office Monday."

Good grief. The world has barely had time to adjust to the news that Ewa Aulin, 19, that sugar-sweet girl from Candy, had married British Writer John Shadow last year in Mexico. Now comes word that the lissome lass with the drooping baby blue eyes will become a mother this year. And that, said Ewa, is just the beginning. "I want lots of children. Little children are the wonders of the world. They are innocent. They are pure. They will go out into the world and perhaps then the world will be beautiful."

Though 73 years old, Henry Beetle Hough, dean of country-editors, still has a clear eye for whimsy and a delicate needle for his brethren in the publishing world. Witness the letter-to-the-editor that Hough recently offered readers of his Vineyard Gazette on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Mass.: "Now I have a real problem. McCall's Magazine advised my wife that 1,992 'lively' women in the Chilmark area are receiving a copy of McCall's every month and would she become number 1,993? The latest census of Chilmark shows a total of 300 souls, of which 160 are female ranging from 1 to 101. Now, dear Oracle, that means 1,832 women are running loose and reading McCall's someplace in Chilmark. Where do you suggest we find the 1,832 women, or should the 140 men run for their lives?" Signed: Joseph G. Kraetzer (male).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.