"Sometimes, unexpectedly, in the early morning, I will imagine an extraordinary woman--lush and lavish and lovely--and . . ." Many a man's early-morning fantasy may look quite a bit like Elizabeth Taylor. But few could go on, as did Richard Burton when he saw the latest photograph of Liz: "I will reach out with my hand and find the reality of the dream woman. She exists, and lo and behold, she is alive. She is warm. She responds. She murmurs. She weeps. She is wild. She is dangerous. But sometimes, like this photograph, she will come running at me with all the beauty of the unmistakable tide coming in on the rough shore. And I lie there like a rock . . ."
"We are poor little lambs who have lost our way, baa, baa, baa." The sad, self-pitying song was echoing from the Saigon residence of U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. Were things really going that badly? Certainly not. To celebrate the founding of the Saigon Yale Club, the famed Whiffenpoof Song (an adaptation of one of Rudyard Kipling's glamorizations of the white man's burden) was being sung by old Eli Bunker, class of '16, and some 15 others, among them a U.S. general who graced the occasion in a Y-inscribed blue T shirt. The ceremony was complete with derisive remarks about Harvard from the ambassador himself. Presumably the newest Yale Club is due for eventual Vietnamization.
Melina Mercouri, the green-eyed Greek who never did it on Sunday, was in the U.S. to promote her new movie, Promise at Dawn, in which she plays the Russian mother of Novelist Romain Gary. It was a perfect opportunity to deliver some diverse opinions. On smoking:
"A French professor told me that marijuana would be better for me than tobacco, but I hate the taste." New York City: "Very phallic." America: "You are close to the real thing--democracy. But, ah --right now you are not in very good shape." Her five-year marriage to Moviemaker Jules Dassin: "I love Dassin the director. I love Dassin the writer. I love him for his blue eyes. Julie and I quarrel all the time. Quarreling--that's the best part of loving."
"Who understands women?" asked President Richard Nixon of his cousin, Author Jessamyn West, who tells all in the February Good Housekeeping. Then the President went on to say what he does understand about his daughters. "Appearances are deceiving. Julie looks like the strong, outgoing one. Tricia looks fragile. The fact is, Julie is more easily hurt than Tricia." Pat Nixon agrees that appearances are deceiving. "Dick is the easiest man in the world to live with. Outside, he may seem very serious, even forbidding to some. But when he comes home to me and the girls, he comes whistling and joking."
"You are more French than the French because you like to eat well and to drink well. You were the only one to explain England to us. You were one of the first to show us what Hitler really was. And now that you are an American, America is beginning to appreciate food and drink." Who could this be but Movie Director Alfred Hitchcock, as eulogized by French Cinematheque Chief Henri Langlois at the Great Fisheye's investiture last week as a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur.
No writer likes to think of himself as a producer of garbage, but this had nothing to do with an experiment by Novelist Louis Auchincloss and his environmentally minded wife Adele. After a week of removing all unnecessary wrapping and packaging before taking home any purchases and using only returnable bottles, the Auchinclosses compared their accumulation of garbage with the normal week's waste from a similar Manhattan family. The result: 57 Ibs. to 107 Ibs. The trash test over, Adele is continuing to conserve. "I still disrobe the French bread and hand back all other unnecessary paper bags in the store," she says.
When the protean Peter Ustinov--actor, author, director and polylingual wit --undertook to break into opera a few years ago, as director of Mozart's difficult Magic Flute, music critics were scandalized by his nerve. The Flute was no work for an amateur, they carped, until the Ustinov production with the Hamburg State Opera turned out to be a hit. Last week, almost as if Ustinov had arranged to give the critics another crack at him, it was announced that he would be back in Hamburg's TV version of the opera--this time singing the demanding comic baritone role of Papageno.
Whatever it takes to make the annual best-dressed list of fashion's foremost publicist, Eleanor Lambert, Her Highness the Begum Ago Khan (a onetime model) has it this year--as do Mme. Ahmed Benhima, wife of the Moroccan ambassador to the U.N., U.S. Singer Diahann Carroll, French Actress Catherine Deneuve, Italian Actress Sophia Loren, International-Setter Denise Minnelli, Mme. Georges Pompidou, Manhattan Big-Game Hunter Mrs. Richard Pistell, California's Mrs. Ronald Reagan, and New York Socialites Mrs. Samuel P. Reed, Mrs. Charles Rev , and Mrs. Harilaos Theodoracopulos.
Ezra Pound, who showed the way to the poets of the '20s, always had an opinion about everything--from Oriental philosophy to European politics. And he never hesitated to speak out. When he was 60, the U.S. committed him to a mental hospital rather than try him for treason because of his anti-Allies broadcasts from Italy during World War II. Now he has been free for almost 13 years and is living in Italy. At 85, the old poet watches the world from the windows of a friend's home in Spoleto, with his companion Olga Rudge, a concert violinist who frequently played Pound's compositions during his heyday. "I am homesick after mine own kind," he might write again, as he did at 22. "Oh, I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces./ But I am homesick after mine own kind . . . And ordinary people touch me not."
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