"I wanted to live heliotropically, with the bedrooms facing east and the cocktail and dining area facing west," complained Millionaire Stewart Mott, 38, describing his hopes to build the perfect Manhattan home. Begun three years ago atop the 54th floor of a new apartment building, the four-story penthouse was to include a solarium kitchen, a library, pool, four bedrooms, office space for up to seven secretaries, a multilevel grand salon and more than 1,500 sq. ft. of terrace for Mott's main passion: organic vegetable gardening. The fastest-growing item at Mott's midtown Xanadu, however, was the construction bill, which climbed from a projected $1.6 million to $3.2 million. So last week Mott sadly backed out of the deal, $300,000 poorer thanks to legal and engineering costs, and began the search for new digs. His builders, meanwhile, began the search for a new buyer and put the penthouse up for sale with a price tag boosted to $3.5 million to cover their losses.

The quiet rustle of asparagus sprengeri and chlorophytum comosum is music to the ears of Rock Impresario Bill Graham these days. Graham, 45, the former proprietor of the Fillmore rock emporiums in New York and San Francisco, last week opened a six-day horticultural extravaganza at the San Francisco Cow Palace. Called "The World of Plants," it is a kind of Woodstock for flora freaks, featuring exhibits by 250 plant merchants, a 35-ft.-high bush-covered volcano, human tomatoes, and the piped-in music of Villa-Lobos, Debussy and Bartok. Rock groups may be fun, Graham reflects, but plant fiends are easier on the nerves. None of that "standing beside a limousine at the airport praying that your star hasn't flown off to India instead of doing the concert," he says. "I'm the only one who raises his voice around here."

He started in the cheap seats at New York City's Ebbets Field watching the old Brooklyn Dodgers. When the team moved to Los Angeles, Actor-Comedian Danny Kaye went to the box seats and became one of the staunchest rooters in Chavez Ravine. But come spring, Kaye, 63, will be doing his cheering in Seattle, where he and five local businessmen have just bought the American League's newest major league franchise for $5.5 million. Will Danny have any playing tips for his yet unnamed team? Hardly, considering his own boyhood performance at the plate. "Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, boy could I hit," he recalls. "Tuesdays and Thursdays, I couldn't hit my ass."

The San Francisco Opera House provided the setting, and Carole King provided the entertainment at her own 35th birthday celebration last week. Now making her first concert tour in three years, the Brooklyn-born singer-composer (Where You Lead; You 've Got a Friend) starred in an S.R.O. performance before 3,400 fans. She had more to toast than just the passing of another year. While King sang in San Francisco, her 1971 album Tapestry celebrated its 254th week on Billboard magazine's top albums chart. Its worldwide sales so far: more than 13 million.

"For the man who is to the social sciences what Big Bird is to Sesame Street, that master of monetary mirth--John Kenneth Galbraith!" And so it went last week in Boston, where Harvard President Derek Bok, Author George Plimpton and 500 other old Crimsons watched the king-sized economist, now 67, honored as Harvard's "funniest professor in 100 years." The festivities, all part of the centennial celebration of the Harvard Lampoon, included a cash prize of $10,000, which Galbraith promptly donated to the university's Fogg Museum, noting that "nothing so fittingly caps an unsuccessful academic career at Harvard as recognition, however belated, by the Lampoon." But the Poonies got the last jab when they rolled out an additional gift--a $13,000 purple and gold Cadillac specially fitted out for the author of The Affluent Society.

Barbra Streisand drove costume fitters to the brink during the filming of Funny Girl by continually changing the padding in her bras. Playing Julius Caesar in Cleopatra, Rex Harrison allowed his own skinny frame to be beefed up with foam rubber, so much that the daggers kept bouncing off him during the death scene. So reports Oscar-Winning Designer Irene Sharaff, 64, describing the care and costuming of actors in a new memoir titled Broadway and Hollywood, Costumes Designed by Irene Sharaff. Stars are like "anyone else in underwear," she insists. In The Bishop's Wife (1948), for instance, Loretta Young wore a padded body suit to help make her long neck look shorter. Elizabeth Taylor required no padding for Cleopatra, but her 60 changes of costume presented a formidable challenge. "She was five feet two and had difficult proportions: high waist, large bosom, short arms, no behind but wide hips," snips Sharaff. "I was not awed by her."

Singer Pat Boone made it. So did Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair. But the first edition of Who's Who in Religion published by Marquis Who's Who, Inc., seemed most notable for the names that did not appear in its list of 16,000 people who "demonstrated merit in some form of religious activity." Among those not present: Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen; Unification Church Founder the Rev. Sun Myung Moon; Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee; and Manhattan Clergyman Norman Vincent Peale, whose "positive thinking" books have sold more than 5 million copies in the U.S. "It was a first-time publication and schedules were tight," explains Who's Who Sales Manager Sandra Barnes. She adds that the editors have already started making amends for the next issue, due on the shelves in 1977.

On the heels of Seabiscuit and Secretariat, now comes Telly's Pop. Telly's Pop? "You betcha," booms Telly Savalas, TV's surly-burly Kojak. "Two years ago, I paid $3,000 for a half-share in a horse nobody wanted. I named him Telly's Pop, and something happened, baby." Evidently. Telly's bargain-basement gelding, which he owns with former Paramount Pictures Production Chief Howard W. Koch, has finished in the money in all of his seven outings on West Coast tracks, winning $300,000 and an invitation to this year's Kentucky Derby. But Telly faces stiff competition in Louisville from another Hollywood hard guy, Rod Steiger, who paid $50,000 for half-ownership of a fast bay colt named Stained Glass. At Santa Anita in December, Steiger's steed outran Savalas' nag by a healthy length and a half. Says Rod: "We beat him once. We can beat him any time."

Behind the somber gaze of French Actress Dominique Sanda, 24, lies the soul of a freewheeling, cigar-smoking Italian flapper of the '20s. At least it does in 1900, Director Bernardo Bertolucci's expansive study of eight decades of Italian society that also features Actors Robert deNiro and Burt Lancaster. Dominique, who first worked with Bertolucci as a teen-ager in his 1970 movie The Conformist, grows from age 21 to 37 in his current picture, a feat which required six months of shooting on location in Italy. Says she: "With Bertolucci, you don't notice the time."

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