For Boston's insatiable hockey fans it was a slick--and dirty--trick. Bobby Orr, 28, their defenseman without equal in the history of the game, was skating off to become a Chicago Black Hawk. What would make beloved Bobby leave the Bruins? A reported fiveyear, $3 million contract. What would enable all Boston to blink back the tears? The knowledge that Orr's rickety left knee (five operations in the past eight years) allowed him to play only ten games last season. But at week's end Orr checked out of a Toronto hospital, where doctors examined that wounded knee and decided against operation No. 6.

Dear Editor: My Mommy and Daddy keep arguing about Liz and Richard. Mommy says they've been married and divorced three times with each other, not counting all those marriages and divorces and things with other people, and that they should keep on doing it, otherwise how can they tell they are in love with each other? My Daddy noticed in the newspapers that Richard went to Haiti with another lady, Susan Hunt, and tried to get a new divorce from Liz, only he didn't have the right papers, so they wouldn't give him the divorce. He bought a little doll and stuck pins in it and Liz said ouch in New York. My Mommy says that Richard should have his divorce and Liz should get custody of the press agent, but my Daddy says that any man who gets married so much to the same lady doesn't deserve a new divorce. Who is right? Yours, Virginia.

Dear Virginia: Your parents are both wrong. You see, there is really no such thing as a Liz and Richard. In reality, they are life-size plastic balloons that Henry Kissinger carries around in his plane, and when things get bad, he inflates the balloons in different parts of the world to show the mean people that there is really something worthwhile to believe in. Tell your Daddy to write to Mr. Kissinger, who will mail him a set of Liz and Richard balloons for only $1.98. This will stop all the confusion, end the cold war and make you all happy again.

When the Kennedys put on a do, it does. The latest was a ball held at Manhattan's elegant Hotel Pierre to raise money for the Special Olympics, an international athletic and recreation program for mentally retarded children and adults. For the 250 or so people who attended (at $125 each), there was champagne, roast beef and a demonstration of athletic prowess by a group of accomplished retarded kids, a fashion show, and then fun and games for the regulars. The Clan itself was heavily represented: Jackie O., Eunice Shriver, Pat Lawford, Jean Smith, etc., etc., but the most enchanting of the family were the new generation: Eunice's son and daughter Bobby, 21, and Maria, 20; and Pat's daughter Sydney, 19. As photographers snapped away, Sydney's mom told her: "Don't look too pretty." But what's a girl to do?

Oh, what a lovely war. The name of the flick will be A Bridge Too Far, based on the late Author Cornelius Ryan's blockbuster about World War II's battle of Arnhem. Producer Joe Levine (The Lion in Winter) has rented The Netherlands, signed up Director Richard Attenborough, and recruited a battalion of makeup-scarred vets whose salaries alone will cost him $9 million--to say nothing of plenty of billing headaches. The cast: Robert Redford, Laurence Olivier, Sean Cannery, Liv Ullmann, James Caan, Maximilian Schell, Anthony Hopkins, Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, Ryan O'Neal and Hardy Kruger. The climactic battle scene comes when everybody begins shooting 105-mm. Oscars at one another.

Gaudearnus igitur department: Safely back home after a three-month lecture tour of U.S. campuses, Jorge Luis Borges, 76, Argentina's nearly blind poet-essayist, announced flunking grades for the "extraordinarily ignorant" Yankee students. Said he: "They read only what they must to pass, or what the professors choose. Otherwise they are totally dedicated to television, to baseball and to football."

The vita simply got too dolce. Having reached the age of 37, Italy's sinuous Film Star Claudia Cardinale (Eight and a Half, The Pink Panther) decided it was time to take stock. "I just got tired of living under glass, all wrapped up in cotton wool, surrounded by secretaries and all the people who do everything for you as a movie star." Whereupon Claudia shucked her maid, cook, driver, agent and personal secretary (a husband had left some time earlier). She makes do in her luxury villa near Rome with a gardener and his wife, who helps with the heavy work. Otherwise, it is Claudia who dusts, cooks, does the shopping and lives life, as she says, "not as a diva but as a human being." Though she has publicly supported some women's causes--the drive for an abortion law, for example--Cardinale does not want to be taken for a militant feminist. "The women's lib--they do not believe in love. I believe in men and women being together, not only the woman." Then there is the career: "For a woman it is not easy. They used to look at you in the movies as a mother, as a prostitute or as a sex symbol. It is not that easy to find good parts." She is a woman of many parts and Cardinale virtues.

Hi, I'm Tom Brokaw, NBC Television's White House correspondent. The big news is that I am dumping this job to become Barbara Walters, who has left our Today show to go over to That Hot Network for $5 million. I will be getting up at some god-awful hour to be host on the program, while my good friend and colleague Jim Hartz will be what we call a traveling cohost. Before taking this new assignment, I made it clear that, unlike Barbara and certain other TV newsfolk, I would refuse to do any commercials for dog food, panty hose, or any of those other products that pay extra billions of dollars per second. In this way I can preserve my integrity as a newsman while earning maybe $500,000 a year. And now this message.

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