Like anyone in the six-figure bracket, Quarterback Fran Tarkenton of the New York Giants has tax problems. So the business-minded scrambler played hookey instead of football in the first pre-season game because the Giants management would not give him a large loan (paying interest on such a loan while putting the money to work is one way to beat the tax man). With the Jets' Joe Namath hospitalized by a knee injury, it appeared for a while that pro football fans in New York would have no first-string quarterback playing for them this fall. A meeting between Tarkenton and Giants President Wellington Mara clarified matters. Tarkenton would receive a salary reported to be $125,000, but no loan--period. A contrite Fran promised to be good. "I'm very, very sorry," he said of his brief delinquency. "It was a hasty move."

She may have hit the road with a touring company of the musical Coco, but, fumed Katharine Hepburn, she has not been reduced to selling pickled herring for a living. Charging that the makers of Vita products had been imitating her distinctively nasal tones in radio commercials, the actress sued the herring marinaters and their advertising agency, Solow/Wexton, Inc., for $4,000,000 in damages. What they had done, said Hepburn, was to lead her fans to think that she had "stooped to perform below her class, stature, prestige and prominence."

In his announcement that he would run for a second term, San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto showed no lack of optimism: "San Francisco soars on a fresh wind of change that excites our people and encourages them to face modern urban problems with the determination and the will to prevail." His Honor will need a good deal of that determination and will himself. He is the defendant in a civil suit over the splitting of legal fees and is also under federal indictment on a conspiracy charge in the same case, which is to be tried in January. As if that were not enough litigation, the retrial of Alioto's $12.5 million libel suit against Look magazine--which accused him of having business associations with mobsters --comes up in December. If the court action hurts his present career, he can always turn to the violin, which he plays with distinction.

While preparing to putt during a friendly Acapulco match, Golf Champion Lee Trevino was startled to see an iguana slink onto the green and glare balefully at his golf ball. Trevino gingerly sank a 12-ft. shot from under the lizard's chin, then, since the iguana offered no objections, repeated the performance for local cameramen. The beast departed hurriedly only after Trevino picked it up and dunked it in the pool. When the subject of being Mexican was brought up, Trevino, a Dallas-born Chicano, allowed that he is "making too much money to be Mexican." The poor, durable iguana, he said, is "real Mexican."

It is the first film he has shot in Britain in 21 years, but Alfred Hitchcock is not impressed. "London," he groused, "is just work and a hotel room." Passers-by clustered around his Rolls at every stop in quest of autographs. When one woman said that she merely wanted to look at him, Hitchcock cracked: "You could have done that at Madame Tussaud's." On the subject of killing, the movies' biggest murder expert was more upbeat: "When some people present murder, it seems to have a heavy cloud over it. I don't believe this really happens. In real life everyone seems to discuss it fairly cheerfully. It is possible to laugh at a funeral. The first person to be forgotten is always the victim."

Norman Mailer as a sex object? In the September Esquire, Feminist Germaine Greer recalls her now-historic skirmish with Mailer last April in Manhattan's Town Hall. Before the meeting, says Germaine, "It became a standing joke that I would seduce Norman Mailer and prove to the breathlessly waiting world that he was the world's worst." In fact, an underground newspaper had offered to commission the field work for such a report. But for Female Chauvinist Germaine, it was ennui at first sight: "I expected a hard, sort of nuggety man, and Mailer was positively blowsy ... I liked Mailer, but not enough. I disliked him too, but that not enough either."

Her native South Africa lifted her passport and she chose to return her alien's registration card to the U.S., but African Folk Singer Miriam Makeba is not exactly a woman without a country. She arrived in Goeteborg, Sweden, for a concert tour boasting four passports--from Algeria, Sudan, Tanzania and, of course, Guinea, where Husband Stokely Carmichael teaches English and philosophy. "I just take out the most suitable one for the country I'm visiting," said Miriam. Though she claims that American radio stations blacklisted her records for a time because of Carmichael's radical views, she would like to appear in the U.S. again if she can get a visa. "I have been influenced by Stokely," she said, "but I don't choose my songs after his political beliefs."

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