His career may be prospering, but Actor Richard Chamberlain has still had some abrupt ups and downs lately. Last week he started out on the Hollywood set of Towering Inferno, a film in which he plummets 360 ft. off a building to a sudden conclusion. Death scene completed, Chamberlain then caught an overnight flight to Rome to play the Count of Monte Cristo, who rises from the dungeon after 14 years. Featured with Chamberlain in the January television special of Alexander Dumas's classic are Actors Trevor Howard as friendly friar and Tony Curtis as villain.

Chamberlain's makeup artists spent a full two hours applying the dungeon look, and though the actor suffered through some scenes with a bad case of jet lag, no one seemed to notice.

When Senate Majority Whip Robert Byrd rose to accept the West Virginia Broadcasters Association Distinguished Achievement Award last week, guests at the staid Greenbrier resort expected the standard political speech. Instead, Byrd picked up a violin and to his own accompaniment let loose with a few choruses of Old Joe Clark. "He's no violinist, but he's a damn good fiddle player," judged Association President Bob Brown after Byrd's performance. Actually, Byrd began his music career as a boy back in Stotesbury, W. Va., and began using the violin on the campaign trail to draw a crowd before his speeches. He now performs regularly for his six grandchildren. "When I have a lot of work to do, I take out the fiddle and get a real workout from it," he says. "It allows me to forget all the pressures."

While his father wrestles with a bearish economy from the White House, Steve Ford, 18, plans to wrangle with more manageable stock on a Utah ranch. Postponing his freshman term at Duke University, the publicity-shy son of the President will seek out the private life of a ranch hand. Despite Ford's detour from Duke, his classmates at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., apparently have no doubts about his future. He and Coed Janice Hodges were voted "most likely to succeed" by then" fellow seniors, and posed for the appropriate yearbook picture, costumed as Bonnie and Clyde.

For years, politicians have been recalling the late John Nance Garner's observation that the vice presidency "isn't worth a pitcher of warm spit."* Apparently, being a candidate for the office is not so hot either. "I can assure you that having been 'considered' for the job in 1968 and having been 'considered' for it again in 1974," Republican Senator Howard Baker Jr. said last week, "I'm the world's leading authority on the proposition that that's the most helpless position in politics that you can be in."

What is more, added the Tennessee Senator, "I'm not sure that I'll ever be a candidate for anything other than the U.S.

Senate again. If I am, I can promise you that it will not be as a candidate for Vice President."

As part of Women's Equality Day, the National Organization for Women last week staged its annual putdown of male chauvinism: Media Awards. Among the winners: a "Keep Her in Her Place" prize went to Singer Paul Anka for his tune Having My Baby and to Seals and Crofts for their Unborn Child. A "Discarded Older Woman" award was given to Ash Wednesday, the Elizabeth Taylor film of a middle-aged wife who undergoes a body-lift in order to keep her husband. Ad writers for National Airlines won a "Hall of Shame" award for their "Fly Me" campaign, and Playboy's Hugh Hefner, along with his competitors at Penthouse, Gallery and Viva, picked up a "Meat Market" prize for their role in "dehumanizing both women and men." The envelope, please.

Never a sailor to waste his shore leave, England's Prince Charles, 25, took his latest R. and R. in the company of blonde Davina Sheffield, debutante daughter of an English army major.

Sheffield, a former partner in a London boutique, took a well-chaperoned trip to Scotland last week to visit her prince before his assignment to helicopter training at the H.M.S. Yeovilton naval base.

All of which kept royalty watchers wondering: What ever happened to Lady Jane? As Charles and Davina passed 4,000 well-wishers while driving to church near Balmoral Castle, Lady Jane Wellesley, an earlier entry in the prince's little black book, was 190 miles away in Ayrshire, Scotland, vacationing with her mother.

"The difference in cost between the one-year shooting in the countryside of northern Italy and a year of shooting on a set in Hollywood," sums up Italian Director Bernardo Bertolucci, "is the same as the difference between a Fiat 500 and a Cadillac." Bertolucci should know, having chauffeured himself from the low-budget The Spider's Stratagem through Last Tango in Paris to his current luxury-class movie, 1900, now being shot near Parma. The film, chronicling eight decades of Italian history, stars Burt Lancaster as a patriarchal land baron and Sterling Hayden as a peasant farmer. Expected to cost $6.5 million, it will be the most expensive movie in Italian history. Neither budget nor historical panorama gives Bertolucci pause.

With more than a fourth of the footage shot, he says grandly, "1900 is my first romantic novel."

Muhammad Ali's bid to regain the heavyweight championship got a shot in the arm last week. Several, in fact.

Abandoning his Deer Lake, Pa., training camp, the ex-champ drove to nearby Reading Hospital for some inoculations before his trip to Zaire this month to fight George Foreman. "I hate 'em; let's get 'em over with," protested Ali in mock terror as he awaited his bout with the needle. The challenger endured his prophylaxis against smallpox, yellow fever and polio, then grumbled, "My fights don't take this long."

Why, is that Actress Debbie Reynolds, 42, romancing on the screen with the ever confident, debonair Warren Beatty, 37? Not quite. The Debbie Reynolds look-alike in the forthcoming movie Shampoo is Carrie Fisher, daughter of Debbie and Crooner Eddie Fisher. Like Mom, Carrie is starting her Hollywood career at age 17. Unlike the star of such '50s films as Tammy and the Bachelor, Carrie is shunning the girl-next-door image with some four-letter dialogue. "We have the same facial flesh," says Carrie of her resemblance to mother. "Cute. Round and cute. I think the reason they wanted me to do the role was the contradiction between the looks and the language. People don't believe you said it." Could her mother get away with off-color dialogue too? "She could definitely get away with it," laughs Carrie. "She could say it and nobody would hear it, I think."

Despite her planned opening at London's Grosvenor House, enduring Marlene Dietrich, 72, has kept her celebrated profile even lower than usual lately.

Last week the reason surfaced when TIME learned that she had broken her leg in her Paris apartment in August.

After the accident Dietrich was spirited aboard a Pan Am 747, bedded down atop eight flattened first-class seats, and flown to New York for repairs. While the throaty singer vowed that her shows would go on, doctors were less certain.

Dietrich's injury at Washington's Shady Grove Music Fair last year, which resulted in only a bad gash, led to a string of concert cancellations.

* Actually, Garner said that the office "isn't worth a pitcher of warm piss." After his retirement, he complained that "those pantywaist writers wouldn't print it the way I said it."

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