Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who is pushing for a city ordinance to bar youngsters under 18 from seeing violent movies, has drawn the fire of a premier gunslinger. Actor John Wayne, who has been drilling Hollywood bad guys for nearly 50 years, showed up in Chicago last week and defended his brand of movie gunplay. "I've shot as many people on-screen as anybody, but I haven't shot them -- like they do today -- with snot running out of my nose, sweating and with my pants torn open," said Big John in an interview with Chicago Tribune Film Critic Gene Siskel. Still, isn't all that homicide harmful to younger fans? "I'll explain it abc, kindy-god-dam-garden for you. Children's stories have always included knights and dragons with blood, fire and everything," retorted Wayne. Any more questions, pardner? Mr. Mayor?

When she was a college girl in the 1940s, Eileen Heckart had an impolitic opinion of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. "My feeling was, 'Who is this lady in the funny hats who runs all over the place?' " confesses the actress. Now the lady in the funny hats is Heckart, 57, who opens this week at Ford's Theater in Washington in a one-woman biographical play titled Eleanor. Besides body padding and capped buck teeth, the Eileen-to-Eleanor transformation required extensive background study. Heckart listened to old broadcasts by the First Lady, spent three days at the family's Hyde Park home and read more than two dozen books on her subject. "I wish that a great deal of her graciousness and loveliness would rub off on me," says Eileen. Something has. "I recently gave an autograph," she recalls, "and, my God, I signed 'Elea' before I realized what I was doing."

"Imagine, the daughter of the President of the U.S. and the baddest man in the whole world," mused Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali after welcoming Susan Ford to his Maryland training quarters last week. Susan, 18, who had first met him at the White House last March, had come to see Ali before his title defense against third-ranked Heavyweight Jimmy Young. "I used to watch him box on television," she said of the champ. "I had no choice; my brothers used to watch, and we only had one TV set." She said she would like to have seen this fight live--at Maryland's Capital Center--but she had a date for the weekend in Norfolk, Va., where she was queen of the 23rd International Azalea Festival. By fight night, Ali may have wished he had done more training and less visiting. After 15 rounds with a surprisingly tough opponent, he barely squeaked by with a decision over Young.

As movie openings go, Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood made its bow with a wow. Producers of the film, a take-off on 1920s animal flicks, shunned the usual theater scene and held the premiere right on Paramount's spacious Hollywood lot. With good reason, since 100 of the 575 first-nighters were canines. Among them: Zsa Zsa Gabor's Lhasa Apso, Genghis Khan, and Valerie Perrine's 250-lb. mastiff, Thurber. "Genghis was the only pet allowed inside the movie," boasted Zsa Zsa--a fact apparent to everyone once the beast began demonstrating his barking skills. The picture's title character, German shepherd Won Ton Ton, arrived by limo, sporting a rhinestone collar and accompanied by his trainer and a social secretary who will be arranging his promotional tour across the U.S. No autographs, please.

If the Rolling Stones gather no moss, it's probably because there's no room for any. When the durable British rock group set off on a European tour last week, its caravan consisted of 13 trucks filled with sets, costumes and instruments, five bodyguards, a dozen stage assemblers, assorted flacks, gofers, accountants and one man whose job is to tune Guitarist Keith Richard's 18 axes. One purpose of the tour is to promote the Stones' latest album, Black and Blue, which has sold more than a million copies since its release two weeks ago. With 39 concerts scheduled in two months, Stone Singer Mick Jagger prepared for the grind with tennis workouts near his house in the south of France--and got a bit black and blue in the process. "For the last tour it was karate," he said. He makes tennis look tougher.

Considering her measurements (31-22-32), she got farthest with the leastest as a London model of the 1960s. Now Twiggy, 26, is spreading out. She has added 15 lbs. to her famed 91-lb. frame, recorded an album (Twiggy) of country-and-western music to be released this summer and just completed her first TV acting role. In a British documentary series called Queen Victoria's Scandals, Twigs plays the part of a 19th century spiritualist, complete with straitlaced Victorian corsets. Her expanded measurements (32-24-34) did not require stays, but her costume did. Says Twiggy of it all: "A bit painful."

Something about Actress Trish Van Devere is bringing out the animal in her husband George C. Scott. Occasionally boorish off-camera, Scott looks truly boarish after a daily three-hour makeup job for his co-starring role in the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. The production, being filmed in England, will run as a 90-minute NBC special in the U.S. and as a feature movie in other countries. The pair hopes it will fare better than their 1974 joint effort, The Savage Is Loose, which the critics castigated. Purrs Trish: "We are trying to do Beauty as a mature love story."

"When I played small clubs in Greenwich Village, the sound of ice cubes in a glass became as grating as chalk on a blackboard," recalls Brooklyn-born Singer-Composer Neil Diamond, 35. And that, adds the hitmaker (Longfellow Serenade and Song Sung Blue), explains why he has never appeared as one of the high-priced acts on the Las Vegas strip. Not until now, anyway. In early July he will give three concerts at the Aladdin Hotel's Theater for the Performing Arts. His fee: $500,000, a bigger haul than Frank Sinatra's current record of about $300,000 per week. If Neil does well, say Aladdin officials, they will hold him over for $170,000 a night. And Diamond gets one other concession. No drinks will be served while he performs. The only clink heard will be the cash.

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