Swathed in yards of pearl gray stone marten and crowned with a purple turban, Elizabeth Taylor rode through the streets of Cambridge, Mass., in a 1948 Lincoln convertible like Queen for a Day. The rubric, however, was Woman of the Year, bestowed on Liz last week by Harvard's 133-year-old Hasty Pudding theatrical society. Recalling that in 1951 she had been voted "worst actress in the world" by the Harvard Lampoon, Liz, 45, chuckled: "They didn't have to tell me." This time around, she received tributes to her "great artistic skills and feminine qualities"; the latter presumably commemorated her matrimonial stardom. As Sixth Husband John Warner looked on proudly, the actress accepted an enormous Hasty Pudding spoon "for making a big stir wherever she goes" and a 6-in. hunk of Lucite cut in the shape of a diamond. She held it next to her beringed finger, then gasped in mock alarm: "It's a fake!"

"I've built it into my schedule. I do everything else around it," says Illinois Governor James Thompson, 40. The all-important "it" is his exercise routine. The 6-ft. 6-in., 210-lb. Governor makes three trips a week to the Nautilus health club in Springfield, Ill., to pump iron, jog, and work out on elaborate stretching machines. Says he: "This job is a man killer. You can absorb only so many budgets, meetings and job seekers without saying 'I've got to do something where I don't have to think.' " But after an hour in the gym, he insists, he can "go back to work in the evening and tackle three more hours of budgets with a clear head."

The candlelit setting looked like something out of a sultan's palace. The guests at Washington's Iranian embassy, however, were not princes and potentates, but Artist Jamie Wyeth, HUD Secretary Patricia Harris, Fashion Doyenne Diana Vreeland and a hundred other partygoers invited to Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi's Valentine's Night bash. The guest of honor: Pop Artist Andy Warhol, who earlier in the day had met President Carter at the White House. "Terrific, terrific," was Warhol's response to everything, including the centerpiece on the red satin tablecloth: a 3-ft. floral heart adorned with an oversized Campbell's Soup can.

"It's like working for Napoleon. She's a great general," says Actress Candice Bergen of her latest director, Lino Wertmuller. Bergen and Giancarlo Giannini are in Rome filming A Night Full of Rain, Wertmuller's first movie in English. To make it, Wertmuller says, is like "flying blind." Giannini spent six months studying the language for his part as an English-speaking Italian journalist. As for Bergen, cast as a former American college radical who falls in love with Giancarlo, she has different language problems. "At this point, my English is beginning to break up," she says. "I find myself saying things like 'We go for to eat something in the bar.' "

When Mark Twain visited Vassar in 1885, he had, he said, a "ghastly" time and thought the college president "a sour old saint." But now, whether Twain's ghost likes it or not, he is at Vassar to stay. The college has joyously accepted from the daughter of Twain's grandniece Jean Webster McKinney, '01, a collection of the 19th century humorist's letters and notebooks. They contain their share of Twainian "stretchers," or exaggerations. From the gold camps of the West he wrote: "I have had my whiskers and moustaches as full of alkali dust that you'd have thought I worked in a starch factory and boarded in a flour barrel." Twain might have been less than joyous about the whole affair; he once said that "all private letters of mine make my flesh creep when I see them again after a lapse of years." -

He's twice her age, but the match is perfect. Making an ABC-TV special are Olympic Champion Dorothy Hamill, 20, the ballerina of figure skaters, and the superbly athletic star of the New York City Ballet, Edward Villella, 40. To be shown March 2, the show is being filmed in Quebec as part of the city's Winter Carnival. In one spectacular sequence, Hamill and Villella appear to swirl and spin together on the frozen river below Le Chateau Frontenac. During the filming, Hamill skated alone over mirrorlike black ice; then Villella pirouetted across a translucent sheet of Plexiglas covering the ice. The shots were later combined. The result, Villella says, "is like a dream."

ABC's million-dollar newscaster, Barbara Walters, is "miscast in the anchor spot" and should "withdraw from the news show," declared TV Guide in an editorial. Has Barbara really been doing all that badly? After all, ABC's Nielsen rating has gone up half a point in the nearly five months since Walters went on the evening news. Still, news viewing is up in general, and ABC'S share of the total three-network news audience has not changed. Rallying to Walters' defense, the Washington Post's Sally Quinn argued that Walters' coanchor, Harry Reasoner, should be the one given the boot: "He's insulting her on the air. He's being rude and sarcastic and putting her down." Richard Salant, president of CBS News, is also sympathetic. Says he: "She's taking an awful licking." Walters herself seems unruffled. "The reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated," she maintains. "The only ones who don't seem to be concerned are ABC and me."

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