Dressed in pure Martian style, British Rock Singer David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars packed in 6,000 in two nights at a marijuana-smoke-filled Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. Bowie landed onstage in a contraption that looked like an overgrown Christmas tree ornament, and he seemed to have attracted an audience every bit as spaced-out as himself. Showers of valentines with little love messages poured down from the upper balconies, while Bowie and the Martian Spiders blasted their songs with such supersonic zeal that even the squeals from the audience were drowned out. One of Bowie's fans, an 18-year-old girl, looking a little like a Martian herself with green, orange and purple feather boas, red glitter around her eyes and black lipstick, spoke for the squealers: "I wish David Bowie were from Mars. It would be so sexy."

Muhammad Ali was right in his element--both his elements, as a matter of fact. In the ring, Ali slugged out a twelve-round victory over his sometime sparring partner, European Heavyweight Champion Joe Bugner. "He's going to be one of the greatest after I'm through," said Ali when the fight was over. Sporting a robe given him by Elvis Presley, he then hobnobbed with such fans as Diana Ross and Sammy Davis Jr. But it wasn't all fisticuffs and show biz. Ali was also promoting his new toy Oop-fli (a ring spun off two sticks and caught by an opponent's two sticks), which he hopes will earn him a tidy bundle. Another Frisbee or Hula-Hoop it isn't, but then Muhammad Ali is not the champion any longer, either.

Entertainer Ann-Margret, 31, seems to be able to take anything in her stride --including a near fatal 20-ft. fall. Though she suffered a broken jaw, five facial fractures and a broken arm, it took only three months for her to get back on the nightclub circuit. Now she is ready to go before a nationwide audience and is busy taping the NBC special When You're Smiling, to be aired April 4. Gussied up in silk, energetically doing high kicks as the notorious "lady in red" who did in Gangster John Dillinger, Ann-Margret looked better than ever. Said she: "I'm myself again."

Kissing is nothing new to the Navy, explained Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., Chief of Naval Operations. He told the American Bar Association convention that after he was photographed kissing an admiral--Alene Duerk, the first woman to reach that rank--he received a mock critical letter from a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Zumwalt's reply: "You should have recalled that nobody reaches the place I'm at without kissing a lot of admirals."

Charles Percy, Robert Redford, John Connolly, Bernardo Bertolucci: What to call them? "Beautiful people" is passe. "Jet set" was wrong from the start. "Cat pack" was a try, but no one could figure out what the password "cat-pack kiss" was, or who exactly was doing it and how. Now, for what it's worth, W, Women's Wear Daily's biweekly supplement, offers "Juicy People." W solemnly reports two ways that JPs can be recognized: "Watch a JP cut into a steak. He always makes the first cut right in the center. Get to the pleasure fast." And: "Ask your lover to fold his hands. If the left thumb overlaps the right one, he's a JP...He thinks with his heart. If the right thumb overlaps the left, he thinks with his mind. No juice." That may be great for recognizing male JPs, but inexplicably W has so far failed to inform its readers on how to recognize a female JP, although it listed Lee Radziwill, Cristina Ford and Mme. Georges Pompidou as juicers.

Nobel-prizewinning Physicist William B. Shockley, 63, was supposed to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Leeds on the 25th anniversary of his participation in the invention of the transistor. But Leeds had second thoughts because of Shockley's controversial view that blacks are genetically disadvantaged and a eugenic threat to civilization. Shockley was philosophical. "If life gives you a lemon, make lemonade."

If words were epees William Buckley Jr. and Germaine Greer would have been in bloody tatters after their lively TV debate last week on the platform of the Cambridge Union Society. The motion: "This House Supports the Women's Liberation Movement." Arguing against the proposition, Buckley picked up Feminist Greer's favorite complaint, turned it around and labeled his opponent a female chauvinist. "It seems to me altogether plain that Miss Greer, who knows [and] understands her theatrical resources, has very definitely exploited sex in the course of attempting to shock people into a recognition of the Women's Liberation movement." How is it, asked Buckley, that she supports divergent forms of sexuality? Greer drew audience laughter by replying: "I'm still heterosexual. That's my problem." Buckley: "Well, as I say, insecurity is a fact of life." When the laughter and applause died, the society rendered its decision: 546 for Women's Lib, 156 against.

Appearing on NBC's Tonight Show, Truman Capote told Television Host Johnny Carson that he and his friends were playing the most wonderful new game. What was it? Johnny asked. Well, said Truman, you list as fast as you can the 25 most boring people you know. The trick is to name people everyone else thinks are fascinating. Truman's top bores: First, Howard Hughes, because "who cares about his reclusion, his plane flights, his hiding and his money." Second, Aristotle Onassis, because "all he is doing is sitting in the corner of a nightclub thinking of ways he doesn't have to pay income taxes."

NBC's Barbara Walters was not exactly happy that CBS's Marvin Kalb beat her to Henry Kissinger for an exclusive post-cease-fire interview. Barbara said that she had been planning the interview for three years and had Kissinger's word that she would be first. "This was a case of conflict between his word and what the White House planned," explained Barbara. Her feelings were somewhat soothed by a call from President Nixon, who assured her during a ten-minute conversation that after Kissinger's trip to China there would be "enough to talk about in an in-depth interview."

"I was tired of sitting around my big expensive living room. My new Cadillac bored me. And I didn't know what the hell was right or wrong." Joseph Wambaugh, 36, the author of The New Centurions and The Blue Knight, is back on the beat as a detective with the Los Angeles police department after a six-month absence. Wambaugh's bestsellers about policemen have earned him more money than he wants to say, certainly more than his 13-year cop career. He still plans to write on his off-hours, but mainly, he says, "I want to stay a working cop." -

Unlike other American writers who are highly critical of the way the Soviet Union treats its authors, Erskine Caldwell, 69, says that he could hardly care less. During his fifth visit to Moscow, the author of such bestsellers in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. as Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre showed little sympathy for the plight of Russian Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose bestselling novels in the West are banned in his own country. Caldwell tartly observed that "there's no law requiring a person to be a writer." He added: "Russian writers must conform to certain ideological rules laid down by society. Maybe that's better than being a mercenary."

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