"It's a rare photograph of the late Howard Hughes taken during his Chinese period," cracks Peter Sellers. Actually, it's Sellers in his newest movie, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Sellers, ranging between the Himalayas (actually the French Alps) and London's Limehouse district, plays the legendary Sax Rohmer villain as a 168-year-old man who steals jewels to crush them into an elixir of life. No, the chefs attire wasn't necessary to cook up such an outlandish plot. It's for the Chinese feast he's preparing for the Tower of London guards, you see, so he can bribe his way into the diamond room.

The Muppets grow ever more couth. First they danced Swine Lake with Ballet Superstar Rudolf Nureyev. Now, on Nov. 12, they will sing Pigoletto with the incomparable Beverly Sills going trill to trill against the divine Miss Piggy. So far, surprisingly, there have been no pyrotechnics of temperament between the two famous divas. "She may be a pig," says Sills of her costar, "but she's not a boar, although she is a theatrical ham of no small dimensions." Miss Piggy has said nothing about Bubbles; all she does is inscrutably smile about their upcoming duellet. But you can't make Sills purse from a sow's leer.

"There's a Ford in your future," ran the familiar ad. For retired Heavyweight Muhammad Ali, 37, Ford is in the past; it is a Toyota that beckons. Window-shopping in Beverly Hillsi Calif., Ali tried the driver's seat of a 1909 Ford Tour-About. Meanwhile, for Toyota, personal appearances and Ali plugs in Arabic are being planned for the champ in Saudi Arabia. The auto company hopes his well-known face and Muslim religion will persuade Saudis to go Toyota.

You've got to hand it to Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill. Well, actually you don't, if you've got a DEMS, or Diver Equivalent Manipulator System, developed for underwater work by General Electric. DEMS makes its movie debut in ''Raise the Titanic!'', a film likely to become memorable only because it seeks to salvage the ill-fated liner for a change--rather than deep-six her again. In the movie the DEMS drops into waters unsafe for divers to repair the Titanic's hull. On the set, its operators insisted, DEMS was so sensitive it not only could pour tea but even unzip zippers. At that point, Her Ladyship decamped.

"Hick, darling. I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close." The year was 1933. The writer: Eleanor Roosevelt. "Hick" was Lorena Hickok, a burly A.P. reporter assigned to cover Mrs. Roosevelt.

Their friendship would continue for 30 years and involve more than 3,300 letters 2,300 of them to Hick in Eleanor Roosevelt's scrawling hand. The letters, at Hickok's direction, ended up in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library with the proviso that they would not be opened until ten years after her death, which occurred in 1968. Many of them are included in The Life of Lorena Hickok, a biography by Doris Faber to be published by William Morrow & Co. in February. As a whole, they suggest an intimate relationship never previously considered.

"Funny I couldn't say je t'aime et je t'adore as I longed to," the First Lady wrote after one meeting. "But always remember I am saying it, that I go to sleep thinking of you." From Hickok, in December 1933: "Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of reassuring smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips."

Family and friends deny a lesbian relationship. "Remember," insists Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., "my mother was brought up in an era when children read the Brontes and Jane Austen, and they adapted that effusive style of writing."

Not even the finest white house in Henning, Term. (pop. 550), had a library and a music room 50 years ago, but that house did--and a porte-cochere to boot. And when Bertha Palmer, daughter of prosperous black Lumber Merchant W.E. Palmer, sat down at the piano on Saturday afternoons to play and sing, black and white alike gathered on the lawn to listen. Author Alex Haley remembers it well. Bertha Palmer was his mother. In the white frame house, Haley heard from Grandmother Cynthia Palmer the family history that germinated into Roots. Haley, 58, has now purchased the abandoned house, which had become a target for vandals. He has also established a maintenance fund for nearby Bethlehem Cemetery, where his forebears lie, even unto the memorable Chicken George, who took the family out of North Carolina to Tennessee after the Civil War.

"Sandy," she asked idly one day in 1946, "why haven't you made my bed?" Free-living Peggy Guggenheim was coaxing Sculptor Alexander Calder to create a unique bed head for her. Calder finally did, in solid silver, and Guggenheim, now 81 and mostly bedridden at her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, can glance up at it as she contemplates the years. The New York heiress who became a patron of the modern art movement has worked her contemplations into memoir, Out of this Century; Confessions of an Art Addict (Universe Books; $17.50). The book is largely a catalogue of both art and artists Guggenheim unabashedly collected beginning in 1923. There was Marcel Duchamp; when they finally went to bed, "after 20 years [of friendship], it was almost like incest." Max Ernst advanced from lover to second husband, but "marriage did not stop our rows as I had hoped." Guggenheim also acquired writers; Samuel Beckett "came and went and always brought champagne to bed."

It was not anything John Connally said at a luncheon tendered the Republican presidential aspirant by NBC that stuck in John Chancellor's throat. Rather, the network's evening anchorman suddenly choked on Gouda cheese. "He turned very red and then very gray," recalled Today show Host Tom Brokaw. "That's when I knew I had to help him." Brokaw helped with the Heimlich maneuver for choke victims that had been demonstrated on his show. He embraced his gasping colleague from behind, knotted a fist into Chancellor's stomach and pulled the fist. Out popped the Gouda. Five hours later, Chancellor was on the air as though nothing had happened.

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