"I love being rich. I love playing tennis and not being cold in the winter. I am the original Horatio Alger story." The "I" is Diana Ross, who will tell some of that story in a March 6 NBC special featuring songs, dances and other acts. Paying tribute to black entertainers who paved the way for her, she dresses up as Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. Ross, 32, identifies especially with Holiday, whose life she portrayed in her first movie, Lady Sings the Blues. Says Diana: "Billie needed a lot of love. She had so much luxury and loveliness around her, but was still so very much alone in a crowd."

From Russia without love came a biting film critique in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. The plot is "pretty naive and banal," and the purpose of the film is to "arouse a psychosis against the Soviet Union in the Western countries --the evil atmosphere of days long since gone." The offending movie: Telefon, a U.S. spy flick now being filmed in Helsinki. Cast as a brainy KGB agent who goes to the U.S. on a mission, Charles Bronson is denounced by Izvestia as "the stereotype immutable hero of thriller-type movies." Is Bronson crushed? Nyet. "They must like that," he says. "I understand I'm very popular in Russia."

It wasn't the Snake River Canyon this time, but Daredevil Evel Knievel came a cropper anyway. CBS-TV had signed him up for a live 90-minute mini-Jaws show: he was to vault his Harley over a 64-ft.-wide tub full of "killer sharks." On a trial run before the show, Knievel made it over the sharks but skidded into a retaining wall in Chicago's International Amphitheater and for the 13th time in his frangible career broke some bones: the right forearm and the left collarbone (his 55th and 56th breaks). After putting out a blizzard of P.T. Barnum-like press releases, all CBS got for its $500,000 fee was some taped footage of the crash, which it duly showed several times along with some live daredevil stunts. Meanwhile, twelve sharks shipped up from Florida for the show found themselves not only unemployed in the very cold Midwest but with their reputation as man-eaters impugned. Sniffed one expert: "This load of sharks would have just been frightened silly if Knievel had landed in the middle of them."

The trial was followed by a quick sentencing--and Claudine Longet, convicted of criminally negligent homicide in the gunshot death of her lover, Ski Champ Vladimir ("Spider") Sabich, was condemned to 30 days in the county jail. Although Longet pleaded with Judge George E. Lohr not to separate her from her three "very gentle and open" children, Lohr did not relent. To impose no jail sentence, he said, might "unduly depreciate the seriousness of the offense or undermine respect for the law." Longet chose not to appeal her conviction, but she told a phalanx of reporters that she had been unfortunate to fall "into the hands of a district attorney more concerned with his own ambitions than with truth and justice."

It seems only yesterday that she was a mere princess, but the British are getting ready to mark the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen ascended the throne Feb. 6, 1952, and official portraits of the royal family were released last week to mark the date. The main festivities, however, will take place in June because, explains a palace spokesman, "February is no time to conduct a celebration." The summer jubilee events will include parades, river pageants, bonfires and visits by the Queen to nearly every corner of the British Isles. The British Tourist Authority has issued a 32-page booklet listing scores of 25th-anniversary events before and after the national thanksgiving service at St. Paul's Cathedral on June 7. Even London's transit authority is getting into the spirit: a fleet of 25 silver-painted double-decker buses will tool around the city.

Since the New York Rangers hockey team has scared almost nobody this season, their French Canadian goalie Gilles Gratton hit on a terror tactic of his own. He bought a $300 fiber-glass mask that looks like a snarling lion with flashing fangs. "Im a Leo," Gratton explained. "This mask becomes me." Mixing his menagerie metaphors, Gratton added, "That's no bull. I really feel stronger." Gratton's famous teammate Phil Esposito thinks the bright mask "is terrific. It makes Gratton happier, so he plays better." Indeed, the Rangers won a victory the very first time the goalie wore teeth. But Emile Francis, coach of the losing St. Louis Blues, declined to blame the mask. "If a player is close enough to see it, he's not looking at it," said Francis dryly. "He's looking for a hole in the net." Fangs a lot.

The 1977 contest for the Spiro Agnew Memorial Ethnic Slur Award, which last year went to Earl Butz, is already under way. A strong early bid has been made by Federal Trade Commissioner Paul Rand Dixon, who called Consumer Watchdog Ralph Nader a "son of a bitch" and a "dirty Arab" in a Jan. 17 speech before the Grocery Manufacturers of America. Nader's offense was charging that the commission coddled industry at the expense of the public. Dixon's semiapologetic remarks to a reporter did not help matters much. Conceding that his slur on Nader, who is of Lebanese descent, had been a mistake, he added, "I understand there are Arabs who are not dirty." A conventional letter of apology failed to mollify Nader. Said he: Dixon's 16-year record as a commissioner plus his "deeprooted prejudice" make him unfit to hold a high Government office.

At the age of five, Jean-Paul Sartre envisaged love as it was in books--"the seducer and the femme fatale." At age eleven, he lied to friends that he "had a mistress and we were going to hotels." In an interview published in the French weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, the French philosopher, 71, admits that the subject he has thought about most over the years is not existentialism, but women. "Even when I am thinking of subjects that have no direct connection with women, I am thinking of them." He looked down on women as inferiors until at the Sorbonne, he met Simone de Beauvoir, now 69, who became his longtime friend and lover. Says Sartre: "I had found a woman who was equal to what I was as a man. It is, I think, that which has saved me from pure machismo. Woman has taken her true place."

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