Singer Charles Aznavour sawed ample Actress Raquel Welch in half; Kootchy-Kootchy Girl Charo cavorted with trained sea lions. The occasion: a French-American amateur-circus gala in Santa Monica, Calif., held to raise money for a pair of show business charities. During rehearsals, the big top's top attraction promised to be Actress Valerie Perrine riding a 2 1/2-ton elephant named Misty. As Perrine and pachyderm practiced, Misty got rambunctious and almost turned the startled actress into a barefront rider. No matter. "I adore Misty; I wish I could buy an elephant," gushed Valerie. "Just one more picture and I could swing it."

Arizona Democrat Mo Udall will not be waving to crowds on Inauguration Day, and not just because he lost his bid for a presidential nomination. Spending his first full weekend this year at his suburban Washington house, Udall decided to make some overdue repairs to a faulty roof gutter. On his way aloft his metal ladder slipped, dumping the Congressman more quickly than a campaign promise. Udall broke both forearms and chipped a bone in his left wrist. "It's not been my year," lamented Mo later, both arms in casts. "All I need now is to get swine flu, have my wife run off with Ronald Reagan and then have my house burn down on Christmas Eve."

There were a few other bad breaks last week. While gardening on her Beverly Hills estate, Actress Katharine Hepburn stepped into a hole and fractured her ankle in three places. After missing three performances of A Matter of Gravity in Los Angeles, Trouper Katie returned to work in a wheelchair. Heavyweight Boxer Jerry Quarry, whose pickup truck rolled when it should have weaved, fractured two vertebrae and will be wearing a steel corset for at least six weeks. Finally, Actor Gene Hackman lay in a London hospital, undergoing treatment for a bruised sciatic nerve in his back. Hackman took a fall while filming a Foreign Legion adventure called March or Die. His horse was frightened by a camel.

One observer in mufti said it looked like "a college mixer on Mars." "Illusions," a fund-raising costume ball for Manhattan's Harkness Ballet Foundation, attracted 600 guests, including a walking Brillo pad, a spangled birdwoman and an elephantman with a trunk like a phallus. Among the party poppers: Actress Julie Newmar, who came barely disguised as a butterfly. "I thought it best not to be totally naked," confided Julie. "Just half-naked."

That caped cavalier in the knee boots and curls is Rex Harrison, all dressed up like French Minister Colbert in his current film Behind the Iron Mask. The picture, which is being made in Vienna, is based on the Alexandre Dumas story of rival twin brothers, swashbuckling musketeers and beautiful maidens. Among the maidens is Dutch-born Sylvia Kristel, whose face and other features graced the 1974 soft-porn picture Emmanuelle. This time Sylvia keeps her shirt on, however, which might account for Rex's gentlemanly critique of his costar. "I admire Miss Kristel for her education," he says. "She is supposed to be almost a chartered accountant."

Tennis Ace Jimmy Connors, who has been playing doubles off-court with former Miss World Marjorie Wallace, leans toward "ladies with very smooth, very soft skin whom I can nestle up to and cuddle with." Actor Roger Moore says, "A woman is good if she doesn't argue." Elliott Gould doesn't "see how a woman can be bad in bed--if she shows up." The question posed to all three, What Makes A Woman G.I.B.-(-good in bed), is the title of a forthcoming book and an excerpted article in the December Viva by former BBC TV Reporter Wendy Leigh. "Glamour and beauty" have nothing to do with bedded bliss, insists Richard Burton, two-time ex-husband of Liz Taylor. "A woman is good if you can talk to her; but more important, if you can laugh with her afterward." Not all the 58 men quoted in Viva found the subject stimulating. Said Warren Beatty: "I think that is a terrible question."

In the 1950s he spent his time barking into a police-car radio on TV's Highway Patrol. Twenty years later Broderick Crawford, 64, has moved up to a desk job as the famed FBI chief in an upcoming film, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover. "It's unauthorized and uncensored," growls Crawford of the script. "But it's true. I couldn't care less if the FBI wants to look me up. I'm free and clear." Gotcha, Brod. Ten-four.

After being photographed with Mia Farrow and their young family, Andre Previn called him "the only man who can discuss Prokofiev and take pictures of five children at the same time." T.S. Eliot found him "acrobatic." Robert Graves lauded his "invisibility." In short, Photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt, who is still clicking his shutter at 77, does whatever is needed to get the pictures he wants. The results are evident in a delightful new book titled Eisenstaedt 's Album: Fifty Years of Friends and Acquaintances. Eisie, it turns out, has been gathering souvenir autographs from his lens subjects since he joined the original staff of LIFE magazine in 1936, and hundreds of them appear in the book. Robert Frost scribbled a poem. Salvador Dali, Walt Disney and Andrew Wyeth drew sketches. Among the photographs: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as a workaholic in the White House barbershop in 1972. "I wanted to take it there because other people snooze or do nothing when their hair is being cut," explains Eisie. "I'd been told Kissinger was busy all the time."

"What, am I going to retire and go to Florida?" scoffed Drama Guru Lee Strasberg amid the hoopla over his 75th birthday. In fact, the mentor to scores of Academy Award nominees is preparing for his own third screen role, in a movie tentatively titled Brighton Beach. As head of Manhattan's renowned Actors Studio for 28 years, Strasberg has tutored such thespians as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Shelley Winters. His favorite pupil? "Marilyn Monroe," answered Strasberg thoughtfully. "She was a great star, but she did not achieve the fullness of her talent. She acted for us in Anna Christie; she did a scene from Streetcar. It's a great tragedy that the public was not able to see her with the talent that we saw."

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