In the 1960s Private Eye John Steed (Patrick Macnee) was regularly upstaged in The Avengers on British TV by a sexy tough--Honor Blackman--who wore a black leather pantsuit when things got rough. Later Diana Rigg and then Linda Thorson took over the tough-cookie role.

Now, Producer Brian Clemens is reviving the series with a new avengeress: blonde Joanna Lumley, 30. Compared with her predecessors, she seems positively oldfashioned. Instead of pants or pantyhose, she prefers skirts and stockings and even packs her pistol in her garters. But Clemens attests that "when she had to kick a man in the teeth for the test, she did it perfectly."

It began with a suspicious scratching sound in Attorney General Edward Levi's ornate fifth-floor office in the Justice Department. A bug, perhaps? Much to the A.G.'s relief, a small gray mouse was eventually seen to dart into a hole not ten feet from his vast mahogany desk. Chicagoan Levi knew that the perpetrator was not from his home town, said an aide, "because it doesn't wear a slouch hat." Other Justice officials were unamused. Startled by what turned out to be a secret army of squatters in their gray stone colossus, they demanded a swift return to capital punishment, and in came the exterminators. Due process? The FBI could not be called in to investigate, cracked a spokesman, because "mice are not included in the new security guidelines."

What is Sophia Loren, 41, doing in yet another B flick? Now the Fiamma Napoletana is making Cassandra Crossing, a sci-fi thriller produced by Husband Carlo Ponti and co-starring Richard Harris, 42. In the movie, about a train that is supposedly germ-infested and is being shuttled around Europe with 1,000 passengers on board, Loren and Harris play a love-hating couple. "This role is basically ironic . . . it pleases me because I believe it is within my nature," says Sophia. That is not necessarily intended to be a comment on her 19-year marriage to Carlo, however, despite stories of trouble in the Ponti household. Often on Friday, when Loren finishes filming in Rome, she flies to Paris, where Ponti and their two sons are living.

An old Dinky car, a moth, a scrap of tapestry, a bow tie, some marbles, a pen nib, a pheasant feather, a piece of burnt parchment and a child's fan, all pasted onto a wooden board. Some fetishist's fun? No, it is a Victorian novelty, a riddle picture made by Britain's Princess Margaret, 45, for Roddy Llewellyn, 28, a rich young swell who recently vacationed with Margaret on the Caribbean island of Mustique. Roddy describes the work as "a private message between Margaret and myself." According to the London News of the World, Roddy, who wears a silver stud in his left ear, has twice invited Margaret to Surrendell, a decaying manoit near Bath that he and some chums have turned into a commune. On one of her visits--both made without her photographer husband Lord Snowdon--Margaret weeded the vegetable patch, then later joined Roddy at the piano to sing Chattanooga Choo Choo and Blue Moon. Some members of Parliament may applaud the idea of the Princess as communard: perhaps she can be persuaded to surrender some of her $70,000-a-year state allowance.

"I didn't start out to reform the world," says Sally Stanford, 72. Just the opposite, in fact. In the '30s and '40s, she was a flamboyant San Francisco madam, running an opulent Nob Hill house (including a 9-ft. Roman bath) that had a clientele to match (the 1945 United Nations conference was one of her busiest seasons). But in 1947 Sally went legit, opened a restaurant in Sausalito and got interested in politics. After four failed races for city council under the name of Marsha Owen, she resumed her nom de nuit in 1972 and swept to victory; last week her council colleagues elected her mayor. "The people voted for me because I've got common sense," said Sally, adding that it's high time folks stopped hounding her former profession too. "They ought to put the cops on something else and leave the girls alone."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.