His eyes are "bloodred pools." His "familiar bald head hangs low from the heavy excess of the night before." He shows up on the set late and bobbles his lines. So said the London Daily Mail describing Telly Savalas filming a movie in West Berlin. Savalas' eyes turned purple when he saw the article, and last week he took his beef to a London court. Fellow Actor James Mason defended Telly's casual treatment of scripts, saying that he was "famous for the spontaneous and creative use of the language." Telly, for his part, disputed the Daily Mail's view of him as an unprofessional boor: "I am a loud, extraverted, friendly person, but never rude." The jury awarded him $60,000 in damages, which Telly, noting that his current wife Sally is English, magnanimously promised to spend in hard-pressed England. "I'm the biggest mouth,"; he conceded, but also "the biggest Anglophile."
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First, fun-loving Financier Bernie Cornfeld lost his mutual fund empire. Now, at 48, he's said goodbye to another cherished asset -his swinging bachelorhood. In a candlelit ceremony at his Beverly Hills mansion, Bernie appeared in dazzling white -it was, after all, his first marriage -to wed Lorraine Dillon Armbruster, 28, a sometime fashion model whom he met in Paris a year ago. After the Jewish ceremony, the happy couple accepted congratulations from a crowd of well-wishers that included Best Man Tony Curtis, Warren Beatty, Michelle Phillips and Bernie's Russian-born ma, Sophie Cornfeld, 88, who pronounced it all "the greatest day of my life." She was, after all, gaining not only a daughter but a grandchild, due in August.
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How, in this McLuhanesque visual age, had there been no photograph of the great event? As Raquel Welch, 35, was churning through a dance number at the Painters Mill Music Fair in Baltimore, the crowd suddenly gasped, the musicians put down their instruments in awe. Raquel's hot-pink halter top had come fluttering down, thus revealing, for the first time on stage or screen, the superstructure that made her famous. La Welch quickly pulled herself and her costume back together, ad-libbing with admirable aplomb: "Well, at least I didn't let myself down."
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When last seen as the starched, love-parched maid in Upstairs, Downstairs, British Actress Jean Marsh was helping the Allies win World War I by serving tea at the Bellamys and moonlighting as a bus conductor. But lately she has been embroiled in World War II, filming The Eagle Has Landed, in which she plays a British WAC gone awry aiding Michael Caine, a German colonel, in a plot to kidnap Winston Churchill. How could the prim Rose of Upstairs switch from kitchenling to quisling? Easy, she says: "I'd do it to anyone for the money."
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J. Paul Getty once kept a pay phone at his English mansion, but he wasn't the sort to nickel and dime his women -except possibly his wives. The oil billionaire was married and divorced five times before he died this month at 83, but his will mentioned only No. 5 -Louise Lynch Getty of Santa Monica, Calif., a singer who wed Getty in 1939 and gets $55,000 a year for life. Eleven other women shared in Getty's largesse, including a German countess, a French art dealer, Getty's Nicaraguan companion Rosabella Burch (she got $82,625 in Getty stock) and Lady Ursula d'Abo, a merry London widow who acted as hostess at his parties ($165,250 in stock). The big winner, with $826,250 in stock plus $1,167 a month, was Penelope Ann Kitson, 53, a decorator who had known Getty since the 1950s but refused to marry him, said her ex-husband, because "she was not prepared to be trampled on like his other wives."
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Poor O.J. Simpson. He turns 29 next month, and he is itching to move back to California after seven years as a running back for the Buffalo Bills. "I've paid my dues in Buffalo," he feels. So, too, does his wife Marguerite, who refuses to leave Los Angeles. So O.J. is looking for locker space with some team closer to home and his acting career, in which he has appeared most recently as a North African paterfamilias in the ABC-TV movie Roots. He has also signed up for lessons with Drama Coach Lee Strasberg, which is an approved way of paying dues in Hollywood.
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Patty Hearst has been snatched again. In Network, a thriller-with-a-message by Director Sidney Lumet, a young heiress named Mary Ann Gifford is kidnaped by an outfit called the Ecumenical Liberation Army, joins them in a bank robbery, then helps them try to sell a film of the heist to a big TV network, to be shown on its Mao Tse-tung Hour. During the negotiations, which lead to the crackup of a venerable anchorman, played by Peter Finch, Mary Ann cries out, "It's not the money that's important, it's the principle." The principled girl is Kathy Cronkite, Walter's aspiring actress daughter. Cronkite, who was originally offered the anchorman role (CBS said no way), suggested that his old chum Lumet might hire Kathy, who had been working as bookkeeper in a Sunset Strip rock club. Father read her script, she says, "but never volunteered any comments. My dad and I keep our careers very far apart." And that's the way it is, Walter.
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No pinchpenny honorific career at some university for Harold Wilson. Three months after he abruptly quit No. 10 Downing Street at 60, Britain's former Labor Prime Minister has been so busy signing lucrative deals that he barely had time to get up to Windsor Castle last week to have Queen Elizabeth II award him the Order of the Garter. TV Impresario David Frost has signed him to narrate a 13-part series titled The Prime Minister on Prime Ministers, a personal Wilsonian look at his predecessors from Robert Walpole to Harold Macmillan. Although the $175,000 or so that Wilson will get is only about one-fourth of what Frost is paying Richard Nixon for his reminiscences, he can also count on royalties from a just completed 85,000 word tome on The Governance of Britain. Wilson dashed it off in twelve weeks -although, he is quick to add, "I've been thinking about it for a long time."
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