That vampish young lady in black hardly looks like the type to drive a race car or ride a bucking bronco. Nevertheless, Susan Sarandon is an actress who takes pride in doing her own stunt work on the set. In The Great Waldo Pepper she climbed out on the wing of a biplane, and in her latest film, The Other Side of Midnight, she pretends to drown in a lake in Greece. "I had to spend three days in a tank with six men working agitators to make the waves high enough," says Sarandon. "It was very frightening because once you fell in the water, you didn't know which end was up. I was afraid I'd get hit by the boat when it capsized." Adds Susan the Stunt Expert: "It's kind of a cathartic way to end a movie. You really feel as though you've survived."

"The fashion world has never used me. I have used it to show what I wanted to do," says former model, Countess Vera von Lehndorff, commonly known as Veruschka. What she wants to do, it turns out, is "get in other skins, whether through acting or painting." But she is no ordinary painter. For more than a decade her canvas has been her own body, which she decorates to look like an animal, a businessman or a rock star, as the fancy strikes her. She is now in the process of compiling photographs of her painted selves into a book and even organizing an exhibition. As for acting, Veruschka, 33, plays a stripper in Belgian Director Francis Weyergans' new film, Flesh Color. Her next movie will also be a Weyergans because, says Veruschka, "it's so good to work with the same person. Liv Ullmann without Ingmar Bergman would never be where she is now."

Was it possible that the great Communist conspiracy trial of the '40s that so divided the nation, the crucible of so much accusation and anguish, had been reduced to mere kitsch--a typewriter-shaped cake, pumpkin pies and Pop Hiss? Yes, it was, at a party celebrating the publication of Laughing Last (Houghton Mifflin; $8.95), Son Tony's glib portrait of Alger Hiss as a prank-loving, jovial kook. "I still feel confused about how he could be thought a Commie," says Tony, 34, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a part-time bartender on Manhattan's West Side. "He's a Harvard-Baltimore conservative. He befriends a hippie [Whittaker Chambers, the man who charged in 1948 that Alger Hiss had passed secret State Department documents to Soviet spies], lends him his typewriter, and look what happens." The fact that the senior Hiss, now 72, spent 44 months in prison on charges of perjury for denying the Chambers story does not seem to put a damper on Tony. In fact, in a gaucherie topped only by the cake, he mixed up a special highball for the party: a "Hiss cocktail," sloe gin tinted with grenadine to turn the drink what Tony describes as "Commie Red."

Never one to turn down a challenge, Criminal Trial Lawyer Edward Bennett Williams has defended the likes of Joe McCarthy, Adam Clayton Powell, Jimmy Hoffa and John Connolly. But his toughest case may lie ahead. At the request of exiled Russian Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Williams, 56, has agreed to defend imprisoned Soviet Dissident Alexander Ginzburg. "I decided it would be a good and useful thing to do," says Williams. It may also be a mission impossible, since the Soviets are not likely to permit an American lawyer to represent Ginzburg at his as yet unscheduled trial. Undaunted, Williams will seek a visa to visit his client in the Soviet Union and is already busy studying the Soviet criminal code to turn up arguments that can be used in Ginzburg's behalf. In fact, the wealthy Washington lawyer (estimated annual income: more than $500,000) is so fascinated by the Ginzburg case that at a meeting with Solzhenitsyn he did not raise the matter of a fee.

"I hope it won't be another 50 years before we can celebrate like this again," joked a high-spirited Bing Crosby to the audience at Ambassador College in Pasadena, Calif. The Old Showman was onstage with the likes of Bette Midler, Pearl Bailey, Paul Anka, Martha Raye and Rosemary Clooney to tape a March 20 CBS special honoring Bing's 50th year in the business. As he finished his bit, the 72-year-old singer tripped and tumbled at least six feet into the orchestra pit. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was treated for a cut on his head and bruise on his bottom, and was pronounced well enough to go home in two days. Always the type to take a fall lightly, Crosby hummed some of the songs from his show while in the emergency room and felt fit enough to chat with Raye, who accompanied him to the hospital. Quipped Bing about his fall: "This was part of the show. I didn't get it right the first time. I'll have to try again." Move over, Chevy Chase.

Muhammad Ali has always seemed a littler larger than life. Now there he is, 9 ft. tall and weighing 1,100 Ibs., in a massive metal portrait that Detroit Sculptor Don Thibodeaux welded from 100 auto bumpers. The shimmering statue, unveiled this week at the National Art Museum of Sport in New York City's Madison Square Garden, delights its subject, who is no more reticent on art than on anything else. "It's perfect," says Ali, "I love it. I'm not that ugly," he continues. "It looks more like a mixture of Joe Frazier and George Foreman, but I'm proud of it. It's an honor for anybody to put that much time and work into something of me." Neither is Ali bothered that the sculptor chose auto parts to memorialize him. "It says that I'm tough and that I've taken a lot of bumps."

From the soaps to Broadway. It's enough to make a girl say "Leapin' lizards." Which is just what Search for Tomorrow's Andrea McArdle, age 13, does in her new role as Little Orphan Annie. The Broadway-bound musical Annie, now playing at Washington's Kennedy Center, also stars Actor Reid Shelton as the magnanimous Daddy Warbucks and Unknown Canine Sandy as Annie's faithful mutt. Making his production debut with the play is Actor and Director Mike Nichols, who saw it in summer stock and was smitten. "It's a sweet show but not saccharine, and it's touching because Annie is a tough little girl who doesn't ask anything from anybody," says Nichols, adding that "all my life I've wanted to be a producer. To me, a producer is the guy who comes in once every three weeks or so and says the shoes are wrong. It's the ideal job."

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