Dancing girls balancing lighted candelabra gaily preceded the bridal couple into a large tent after the wedding of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's youngest daughter, Jihan, 16, and Engineer Mahmud Osman, 26. Inside, the newlyweds settled down with Omar Sharif and 1,000 other wedding guests to watch an eight-hour music and comedy show. At that, the reception was an austerity model, in deference to Egypt's economic problems. The entertainers, including an ample belly dancer, donated their services. And the father of the bride cut costs by serving the guests only a light snack of canapes and cakes.
Horns, gongs and drums sounded through the Royal Plaza of Bangkok last week to herald a royal wedding. Just before the astrologically auspicious moment for their marriage ceremony--8:39 a.m.--Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, 24, and his first cousin, Somsawali Kittiyakorn, 19, rolled up to the palace in a procession led by two yellow Rolls-Royces. Following Thai tradition, the ceremony included prayers to Buddha and the pouring of lustral water on the heads of the young cousins by the groom's grandmother. After the rites were concluded, the bride's father added a Western touch to the event. He gave the prince a 1936 car adorned with strings of tin cans and a sign saying JUST MARRIED.
That lady nuzzling a serval is Actress Barbara Carrera, on location in the Virgin Islands for the filming of H.G. Wells' 1896 science-fiction chiller, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Carrera plays a prostitute shanghaied from Panama to Moreau's Pacific island for his grisly experiments in trans-species engineering. Michael York co-stars as a shipwrecked Englishman who also gets entangled in the mad scientist's endeavors. To provide raw materials for Vivisectionist Moreau (played by Burt Lancaster), the film makers imported a small-scale Noah's ark of creatures. So far, actors and animals are getting along famously. In fact, whenever the cast takes time out for body surfing, they are joined by an athletic brown bear.
Keeping a Carter down on the peanut farm these days is not easy. The President-elect's younger brother Billy, 39, figured it would be a lark to go up, up and away in a hot-air balloon. "I ain't worried about getting up," he said. "It's coming down." A contingent of reporters big enough for a moon shot watched Billy soar aloft, narrowly missing a utility pole, and sail over the pine trees of Americus, Ga., with the pilot and a friend. Billy blithely ignored federal recommendations that ballooners use hard hats. Instead, he wore his old Pabst Blue Ribbon cap, which matched the case of refreshments he took along. Back on earth, Billy was somewhat deflated by Georgia officials: they issued him a warning against selling beer at his gas station on the Sabbath.
The director of Smiles of a Summer Night and other cinema classics can be excused a wintry grin. A Swedish court has ruled that Ingmar Bergman's production company, Cinematograph, does not owe $135,370 in back taxes for 1969-70, as the National Tax Board had claimed. Bergman, 58, suffered a nervous breakdown after the case began; he later left Sweden in disgust and now lives in Munich. He is not likely to go home yet, if ever. Zealous tax authorities plan to appeal the court's decision and also hope to press charges that Bergman owes $980,725 in back taxes for other years.
After more than six lustrous years on Saturday night TV screens, Mary Tyler Moore will film her show's last episode at the end of the month. But spunky Mary is not about to retire. In March she will start filming a two-hour TV adaptation of Newscaster Betty Rollin's courageous account of her mastectomy, First You Cry. "This is definitely not a soap opera," says Moore. "It has great humor and verve." Adds Mary soberly: "The possibility of a mastectomy confronts every woman, and after reading Betty's book, I really think I could handle the problem better."
What do Mark Spitz, John Denver, Bill Cosby, Danny Thomas and Gerald R. Ford have in common? Why, the same agent, Show-Biz Whiz Norman Brokaw of William Morris. Brokaw has signed on not only the President, but Betty and the kids to handle "memoirs and related matters." Despite his own prowess as a negotiator, Henry Kissinger has also hitched up with an agent, Marvin Josephson, president of International Creative Management. Among his other clients: Steve McQueen, Barbra Streisand, Isaac Stern and Laurence Olivier.
Looking pale and thin but girlish in a short coat and knee-high boots, Singer-Actress Claudine Longet entered a courthouse in Aspen, Colo., last week for the opening of her "reckless manslaughter" trial. Longet, 34, is charged with the March 1976 shooting of her lover, Professional Skier Vladimir ("Spider") Sabich, 31. Her former husband, Singer Andy Williams, 46, accompanied her on the first day to show his support. But some others were clearly not on Longet's side. Several prospective jurors--including Aspen's swinging mayor, Stacy Standley, 31--said that they already felt Claudine was guilty. They were excused from serving on the jury. A local ski patrolman, who was selected as an alternate juror, told the court about inviting Sabich to a party where pretty girls stripped for a "best breast" contest. Longet, who claims she shot Sabich accidentally, listened somberly to the proceedings and declared herself "heartbroken."
As the most delectable Austrian export since the Sacher torte, Actress Romy Schneider has portrayed a pampered playmate on movie sets all over Europe. For her 50th film, however, roaming Romy has a somewhat different role. She is cast as Leni, a gritty German whose family and fortune are destroyed by World War II, in the movie version of Nobel Laureate Heinrich Boell's Group Portrait with Lady. Romy, 38, ages 30 years in the film, from a carefree teen-ager to a middle-aged landlady. "When I saw myself in the mirror with gray hair, I was shocked," she says. "I asked myself: Is that the future?" If it is, most women would settle for it.
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