Monday, Sep. 13, 1971
It was one of the more unusual Alfred Hitchcock double features. There on a park bench alongside the Thames sat the great director himself, holding a head that was a duplicate of his own. Actually the head will be used to carry on the Hitchcock tradition of including a shot of himself in each of his pictures; it belongs to a rotund dummy "victim" that will be found floating face up on the Thames in his 55th movie, Frenzy.
Steal This Book is a do-it-yourself guide to revolution by Yippie Abbie Hoffman. It has earned hefty profits from 200,000 customers who have ignored the title and forked over $1.95 each. But does Abbie really deserve all the loot he is getting? Not according to Tom Forcade, who charged before a counterculture kangaroo court of Manhattan radicals that Abbie owes him some $8,500 for editing and helping publish the book. And not according to Izak Haber, who says he conceived the idea for Steal, did 90% of the research, wrote a 700-page manuscript that Abbie merely edited, and was promised 70% (but is getting only 22 1/2%) of the royalties. "It was a brute-force rip-off," says Haber. Abbie, who decided not to appear at the "trial," denies it all. "An unmitigated lie," he countered. "I wrote the book, it's my style, and you name me one researcher that ever got 22 1/2% of the royalties of a book." . . . The party in Manhattan for his 70th birthday was of the surprise variety, but Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had a speech ready anyway. "Some days it's optimism, some days sheer frustration," Wilkins said in describing his 40 years with the N.A.A.C.P. "But optimism prevails. If I didn't believe it was possible for minority groups in this country to achieve equality by using the tools within the System, I would have given up long ago." Said Toastmaster Thurgood Marshall, the first black man to sit on the Supreme Court: "The world is a whole lot better for what you have done, so the only toast is just 'Thank you, Roy.' " . . . It was "roll 'em" time on the Young Winston set at Swansea, and the place was crawling with make-believe Churchills. There was Simon Ward, 28, playing Winston the war correspondent, Michael Audreson, 14, portraying Churchill as a schoolboy, and Anne Bancroft in the role of Winston's mother, Jennie. Suddenly by the sheerest coincidence some real McCoys showed up: Member of Parliament Winston Churchill, grandson of the great man, and his son Randolph made their appearance to watch the filming of a battle scene. Commented young Randolph during a lull in the sound effects: "I suppose they have run out of caps." . . . Halfway round the world, in Burbank, Calif., Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger took a brief vacation from his duties at the Western White House in San Clemente to visit another movie set with his children,* Elizabeth, 12, and David, 10. After watching Pop Singer Bobby Sherman filming a new TV series called Getting Together, the goggle-eyed Kissinger kids breathlessly asked for his autograph.
She will raise the child herself, have her baptized at a Roman Catholic church in Cookstown, and has given her the name of Roisin Elizabeth. But Unwed Mother Bernadette Devlin, Ulster's flamboyant civil rights crusader, still refuses to give another name: the father of her two-week-old daughter. Not only that, Bernadette admitted, but there is little likelihood that she will marry him or anyone else. "The only persons concerned with the prospect of my getting married," she said, "are people who are considering marrying me. And at the moment I can't think of any." . . . In Amsterdam to lead off a seven-day European Congress for Evangelization, Billy Graham had only good things to say about teenagers. "The Jesus Revolution which is taking place in America will soon spread to Europe," he promised. "It's the greatest movement the country has ever known." Having evaluated a new phenomenon, Billy turned to an older one. Putting on shabby clothes and glasses ("because I didn't want to be recognized, especially not by Americans"), he visited Amsterdam's famous red-light district. Why? "I felt the urge to tell the people there: 'Why don't you go to Jesus, where you'll find real happiness?' But I did not; I only wanted to watch what goes on there."
"Richard Nixon will probably emerge as one of the greatest Presidents the United States has ever had," said the American salesman upon his arrival in Sydney, Australia. "If everyone could have the opportunity of meeting and knowing him personally, he'd have 85% to 90% of the electorate straightaway." After that objective appraisal of his brother, Francis Donald Nixon revealed a little more about himself. "They call me 'Big Don.' I'm larger than Richard and one year older. I let my brother make all the public statements."
*From a marriage that ended in divorce in 1964.
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