Is the call of the wild too tempting for a newly tamed Richard Burton? On a safari around southern Africa with Elizabeth Taylor, 43, as part of the couple's trial reconciliation, Burton, 49, let his primitive instincts emerge. So noted Johannesburg newsmen, who rumored that he swiped a passing paw at a local beauty. Then, enraged when Liz was asked for a dance at a charity ball, Burton, said the press, turned Tarzan and threatened to punch the man out. Can it be that Burton's only fuel was passion? Supposedly on the wagon, the actor was observed taking a slug of whisky in a local restaurant. "Purely malicious," scoffed Burton about the rumor. To prove it, he auctioned off a set of beer mugs marked "Hiz" and "Liz" from the couple's Swiss home. Said Burton:

"These were a marriage gift. I used them a lot when I was in the habit of having a nightcap at 8:30 in the morning."

Elaine Steinbeck tapped virtually every source in her effort to gather the 5,000 or so letters written by her husband, Novelist John Steinbeck, to publish in her forthcoming book, Steinbeck:

A Life in Letters (Viking; $15). "There was one source we missed," says the author's widow. "We never thought of the CIA." John Steinbeck's name turned up recently on a list of prominent U.S. citizens whose foreign correspondence had been opened and copied by the agency.

Even without the CIA's help, Steinbeck and Collaborator Robert Wallsten, a family friend and writer, have put together about 700 chronological letters to friends, family, wives, girl friends, children--even Presidents. "John wrote about politics, sex, love, child rearing--just everything," reveals his widow.

Mrs. Steinbeck, who will discuss the book with the ex-New York City mayor and rookie interviewer John Lindsay on ABC's AM America, says that the later letters show a "mature and simple style." But the early stuff, written when Steinbeck was in his 20s, is "purple prose."

"They'll get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday," complains Edith Beale, 58, cousin of Jacqueline Onassis and Lee Radziwill. Three years ago, Edith and her mother, Edith Bouvier Beale, 80, were threatened with eviction from their decaying, cat-and raccoon-infested mansion in the plush Long Island resort town until Jackie and Lee provided $4,000 to clean the place up. The two eccentric recluses, who get by on the remnants of family money, are the subject of a documentary by Film Makers David and Albert Maysles (Salesman, Gimme Shelter). The movie, Grey Gardens, a B-grade cross between The Glass Menagerie and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, had its premiere last week at the New York Film Festival.

"The Beales resent Jackie and Lee for cleaning the place up," insists David Maysles. Still, the mother and daughter deigned to accept Jackie's castoff clothes --and even to model them rather inelegantly in the film.

The familiar sonorous voice and stately presence never seem quite right in a thriller. Yet at 68, Laurence Olivier is again swapping the stage for the cinema and co-starring with Dustin Hoffman in Paramount's forthcoming spy flick, Marathon Man. Olivier plays the part of a professional assassin and is scheduled to sprint about Manhattan next month in the filming of a chase scene. Such sprightly plans are rather extraordinary for a man who has been fighting a long battle against cancer of the prostate, thrombosis and other serious ailments. Confided Olivier optimistically to a friend last summer: "I am going through an extremely tricksy situation of trying to recover and get strong again after a lengthy illness."

Visiting friends in Hawaii, the widow of a second American writer, Mary Hemingway, dropped by to view the filming of Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway's semiautobiographical novel published after his death. She gave sound approval to Actor George C. Scott, who plays the hero Thomas Hudson.

Says Hemingway: "He has a most skillful and talented manner." But she refrained from any other opinions about the production. Insists "Miss Mary":

"For me to tell those movie people anything at all would be like a salesperson selling a dress and then telling the customer how it should be worn. It would be frightfully bad manners."

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