Monday, Mar. 01, 1971
On its higher levels, at least, black protest sometimes bears a surprising resemblance to black capitalism. Last week, for instance, the Internal Revenue Service disclosed a claim against Expatriate Stokely Carmichael, former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and his wife, Singer Miriam Makeba, for $48,193 in income taxes for 1968 and 1969. Reporter Tim Findley of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote up a visit he recently paid to the $700-a-month penthouse pad of Black Panther Supreme Commander Huey P. Newton. " 'I stay here because it's a security building,' Newton said, looking out at the panorama of Oakland visible through the apartment's floor-to-ceiling windows. 'I feel like I'm a prisoner.' " Appropriately enough, Newton's 25th-floor "prison" has a very comfortable view of another security building he has lived in--the Alameda County Jail.
German Actor Curt Jurgens can enjoy a good many of life's pleasures at his house on the Cote d'Azur--and all at the same time. He need only raise a trap door before his hearth to loll in a red-tiled tub-for-two before a blazing fire, sipping a cup of something, while chatting with guests sitting on fur-covered sofas, and watching his pretty wife Simone whip up a delicious meal. The Jurgens farmhouse is one enormous room, designed for sybaritic simplicity against what Jurgens calls "the inevitable day when there'll be no domestic servants--even for the very rich." Outside, for a change of pace, is an electric sauna for four and a heatable swimming pool.
"Prince Charles is atop Christine Keeler, and he's riding her hard," rasped the public address system. The crowd cheered. This Christine Keeler was a polo pony, of course, lent to the Prince of Wales for a few chukkers with the Nairobi Polo Club on his tour of Kenya with Sister Princess Anne. Later, Charles bestowed his first accolade. With the traditional ceremonial sword of the Princes of Wales he dubbed William Duffus, President of the Appeal Court of East Africa, on both shoulders, pronouncing him "Sir William," and motioned him to rise. Then, the ceremony of knighthood being what it is these days, he smiled somewhat sheepishly and shook Sir William's hand.
Hardly since General Douglas MacArthur's "I shall return" has so momentous a comeback loomed. According to Italian Cinema Director Luchino Visconti, fabled Film Star Greta Garbo, 65, who has been dodging cameras for 30 years, has actually asked to play in his forthcoming movie version of Marcel Proust's seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past. The role that caught her fancy: Maria Sophia, the sixtyish Queen of Naples, who will have only one scene. Nothing has been signed as yet, but Visconti sounded as if Garbo's reappearance was already a fait accompli. Said he: "I am very pleased at the idea that this woman, with her severe and authoritarian presence, should figure in the decadent and rarefied climate of the world described by Proust."
"I am not like a tree," says 15-year-old Annette Ferra, "for which I am glad. I have an Italian figure." Annette's unarboreal construction helped her land the title role in Lolita, My Love, the musical version of Vladimir Nabokov's well-known novel, which opened in Philadelphia last week and is scheduled for Broadway in April. In fact, when she auditioned for book-and-lyrics Writer Alan Jay Lerner and Producer Norman Twain, her ace in the hole was a poster of herself in a bikini. "This is what Lolita looks like," she announced. The daughter of the Naples-born owner of a Los Angeles nightclub, Annette has neither seen the movie ("I was too young") nor read the book. "I don't read much fiction," she explains. "The last book I read was Psycho-Cybernetics."
G.I.s seem about to benefit from the ideological differences in show biz. Actress Jane Fonda last week announced the formation of a group of topflight entertainers to tour U.S. military bases with an antiwar stage show. Headliners involved so far include Actors Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland and Peter Boyle, Comedian Dick Gregory, Folk Singer Barbara Dane, the rock group known as Swamp Dogg. Under the auspices of the U.S. Servicemen's Fund, which has sponsored many of the peace-oriented coffeehouses now located near Army camps, the group has applied for permission to play Fort Bragg, N.C., on March 13 and 14. If it is turned down, the show will go on at nearby Fayetteville's Haymarket Square Coffeehouse. "We are not happy about the fact," said Miss Fonda, "that Bob Hope, Martha Raye and people of that political ilk would seem to have a corner on the market when it comes to entertaining soldiers, and we want to show that is not true."
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