She: Whose yacht is that?

He: It is a blue yacht. No, it's a white yacht. Yours, I expect.

She: So it is.

He: I gave it to you, remember?

She: So you did. What if it had been a blue yacht?

He: That would have been mine.

You gave it to me.

She: Of course, the first anniversary of our second wedding.

The speakers aren't really Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Diana Rigg and Tony Britton just sound like them in an upcoming BBC comedy skit wickedly titled "Public Lives." The Liz-Dick nuptial parody is part of a six-week series starring the British-born Rigg, 38, who also plays English Actress Celia Johnson in the 1946 movie Brief Encounter. Rigg is especially proud of her transformation into Taylor. Says she: "I did the major makeup work myself. The black wig, the beauty spot--and showing off the cleavage."

Actor James Earl Jones (The Great White Hope) commands about $200,000 per movie these days, but for twelve weekend performances in a workshop production at Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he agreed to work for nothing. "I even put in $1 a week for coffee," he says good-naturedly. Why so? Jones, 46, is fascinated with his role of Oedipus Rex and the adaptation of Sophocles' play selected for the production. For Translator John Lewin, says Jones, "the gut of the play is the discovery that Oedipus' mama agreed with Oedipus' papa to put Oedipus on a hillside at age three or four weeks, with spikes in his feet, to die. It becomes a play about parental betrayal." This, of course, leaves the Freudians to produce a new version of the Oedipus complex.

The Romeo of the television screen has gone legit. Henry Winkler, a.k.a. "the Fonz" on ABC's Happy Days, will play Juliet's lover on CBS's March 20 special Henry Winkler Meets William Shakespeare. Fonzie also narrates the show and even played a major role in the programming. Because the special is meant for young people, Winkler vetoed including Falstaff' s drinking scene, arguing that "alcoholism is even a bigger problem than drugs among the kids."

He also ruled out the "To be, or not to be" speech from Hamlet because "suicide is a big youth problem too." Winkler's aim is to show Shakespeare "as a very contemporary playwright who is filled with the emotions that everyone can understand." Says Winkler, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama: "Nothing I have done on television has ever meant more to me."

"I don't like you. I love you all . . . very much," said a tear-choked Mary Tyler Moore to her colleagues in television's most famous fictional newsroom. The occasion: the taping of the 168th and final episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, scheduled to air March 19. Even such spin-off graduates as Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman were written into the farewell show. How to end it? New management fires everyone but Anchorman Ted Baxter (Ted Knight). At a post-taping, post-mortem dinner, Mary and the rest of the cast sat through the outtakes of lines that were blown over the years. Said one bemused cast member: "After watching that, it seemed a miracle we ever got on the air at all." Now that she's off, Moore plans to take a year's rest before returning with a totally different show that allows her "to do a lot of singing and dancing."

"Oh, it's good to be back," exclaimed the most famous member of the Yale Law School class of 1941. Visiting the university campus on a three-day Chubb Fellowship, Gerald Ford talked with students about politics and public affairs. One of his regrets as President, he said, was his refusal to meet exiled Soviet Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn in July 1975, a decision that he maintained was a matter of "logistics" rather than policy. Ford emotionally embraced retired Football Coach Raymond ("Ducky") Pond, 74, who in 1935 hired Ford as his $2,400-a-year assistant, thereby enabling him to study law. Football, Ford told students, had "taught him to keep his eye on the ball and not to pay attention to grandstand critics."

The courting was, as befits the object, seemly and stately, and last week the biggest publishing rush in memory came to an end. Henry Kissinger signed an agreement giving Boston's Little, Brown, a subsidiary of Time Inc., rights to publish his account of his eight years as an architect of U.S. foreign policy. The scene stealer at the signing was Tyler, Kissinger's yellow Labrador, who chomped on the champagne cork that Arthur H. Thornhill Jr., chairman of Little, Brown, helped pop to celebrate his company's coup. Afterward, an ebullient Henry and Wife Nancy flew off to Acapulco for three weeks in the sun.

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