When Tenor Richard Tucker, 60, set off for Alaska for a concert, he promised his grandchildren that he would have his picture taken driving a dog team. Arriving in Anchorage, however, Tucker found no snow. Gamely he dressed up in a fur-trimmed anorak and posed his wife Sara in the sled, then waved a whip above five puzzled huskies. He was not so happy when the dogs set up a wail reminiscent of / Pagliacci. "Mush!" he cried, and swung the whip in his wife's direction saying, "It's the first time in more than 35 years I've had a chance to crack a whip over my wife."

"This," declared Master Chef Danny Kaye, "is Empress Chicken with Devoted Eunuch Vegetables." His audience, ten Bay Area gourmets who had enlisted for a cordon crepe de Chine course at Mme. Cecilia Chiang's restaurant, The Mandarin, was suitably impressed, gasping as a duck skin was brutally inflated with a bike pump to demonstrate how to make Peking duck. Kaye started coming to class last year; then, when his old friend Mme. Chiang (no kin to Mme. Chiang Kaishek) fell ill, he stepped in as instructor. Danny still makes the weekly trip from his Beverly Hills home, reverting to his favorite role--that of enfant terrible. Halfway through surgery on a fowl, he was asked, "How old is that chicken?" Replied Kaye instantly: "He was born Jan. 16, 1971, and has lived happily ever after with three brothers and one sister on a ranch in California."

In the movie world, tempers and memories are short, contracts and knives long. So it was when the president of Paramount Pictures, Frank Yablans, 39, the promoter of such blockbusters as Love Story ($84 million net), The Godfather ($145 million) and Frank Yablans ($250,000 a year), finally got an offer he could not refuse. The remaining 6 1/2 years of his ten-year contract were bought up by Paramount. Yablans rejected the idea that he had created a personality less lovable than Genghis Khan. "I am not a cocky bastard," he said. "I have my style, and in this business, you must do things bigger than life." As he prepared to leave Paramount, Yablans took his downfall philosophically. "I don't like being called a first-rate son of a bitch," he confided, "but at least I was called first-rate."

The 16-member Soviet gymnastic team now touring the U.S. is being hailed as much for its trencherman as its skill on the high bars. Last week when the team arrived in San Francisco, plates of pears, mangoes, bananas and pineapples (all unavailable in Moscow) were awaiting them. But the star of the team, Olga Korbut, prefers apples. Said Olga's special bodyguard, "She eats them by the dozen. In fact, she eats everything in sight." None of the French fries, hamburgers, pancakes or cases of catsup, however, make the slightest bulge on Olga's 82-lb. frame. When she is not swinging through double flips or slithering along the balance beam with almost reptilian poise, the diminutive gymnast spends her time watching TV, preferably Porky Pig. And at her insistence, the team's first stop after reaching Los Angeles (before they even checked into their hotel) was Disneyland. This is just a phase. Sporting a pink WE LOVE OLGA button, Olga allowed that she had no boy friend now. She added with a cheeky grin: "But I will have."

Despite his halo of blond hair and seraphic smile, and those aphorisms he kept delivering in the movie The Little Prince, Steven Warner, 8, is a seasoned trouper. On a jaunt to Hollywood, Steven took along his bus-driver parents John and Rita Warner and his sister Mandy, 10, to enjoy his fame. In an appearance on Dinah!, he brought down the house when asked what he talked to other kids about. "The usual," he said. "My film." And when Gene Wilder, who played with Steven in Prince, protested, "This boy is just being exploited; he isn't having any fun at all," Steven looked distinctly annoyed and allowed a fine frown to crease his angelic brow.

Tel Aviv's Palace of Culture was tense with the hope of a long deferred promise about to be gloriously fulfilled. Valeri Panov and his wife Galina Ragozina were making their first appearance in the West, after two years of enforced idleness in Leningrad waiting for emigration visas. After a sparkling pas de deux from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, the audience of 3,000 relaxed, relieved to discover that the two dancers easily reestablished their reputations. Said one fan: "He took off like a jet." And when the Panovs completed the program with Valeri's own choreography of Harlequinade, they were acclaimed with ten minutes of rhythmic applause. Overwhelmed by their reception, Valeri said: "It's as though we have been born anew."

The Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor romance is over, but the bills for damages are still coming in. Robert and Antonia Henning, who rented Dick and Liz their Chico, Calif., house for six weeks last spring while Burton filmed The Klansman, are now suing for almost $3,000, alleging that carpets, bedspreads and mattresses must be replaced. This is not the only moment past to haunt Burton. Just before he proposed to Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, he gave an English magazine a handwritten advertisement for a woman under 38 to bear him a child for a fee. Explained the actor: "The sound of a little son running around again would be the saving of me." The price offered, however, was considerably less than the $1 million diamond Dick gave Liz in a warm moment: $50,000 for a boy, $25,000 for a girl.

Going nowhere for dinner tonight? Try the White House. The food is good, the service is excellent, and you meet interesting people. Before a reception and a state dinner in honor of Austria's Chancellor Bruno Kreisky last week, the White House social office revealed that bachelors asked over to the Fords' are encouraged to bring a date. The result: faces not seen around the White House in years. Architect Philip Johnson brought Lee Radziwill, and U.P.I. Reporter Richard Growald escorted Barbara Howar, who has been in exile since the Johnsons banished her eight years ago. Unrepressed as ever, Barbara announced that she had pinched matches, menu and program card as souvenirs. She also asked Nancy Kissinger: "Are you pregnant?" (Nancy's answer: "Absolutely not.") President Ford invited Justice William O. Douglas whom he tried to impeach in 1970. That breach healed, the President soon got into the swinging-singles spirit of the occasion. Whirling Chicano Singer Vikki Carr onto the dance floor, Ford was asked, "What's your favorite Mexican dish?" "You," replied Jerry without missing a beat.

"Dreams, power and imagination," murmured High Priestess of Fashion Diana Vreeland. She was looking over galleries that glittered and winked with rhinestones, diamante, sequins and paillettes. It was on the eve of her exhibition, Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design at the Metropolitan Museum, and the former Vogue editor in chief was putting last-minute touches on more than 100 refurbished but original costumes from the movies. Pausing by the white organza gown worn by Joan Crawford in Letty Lynton, she recalled: "Five hundred thousand copies of this dress were sold." Then she straightened the hat worn by Vivien Leigh when Scarlett O'Hara bailed out Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, and marveled at the exotic headpiece that disguised Greta Garbo in Mata Hari. When she got to the cane Mae West leaned on in films like She Done Him Wrong, Mrs. Vreeland briskly struck down one of Hollywood's fondest delusions. "Mae had quite a small bust, you know; it was all done with corsets."

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