Even for "The Voice," as local newspapers dubbed him, it was big box office. Some 120,000 Brazilians bought tickets to hear Frank Sinatra sing in Rio de Janeiro's Maracana stadium. On four nights before his stadium appearance, capacity crowds paid $450 a head to hear Ol' Blue Eyes warble The Coffee Song and The Girl from Ipanema along with his golden oldies while they dined on lobster salad, beef heart and French champagne at the opulent new Rio Palace Hotel. But as usual the boy from Hoboken did the gig his way. Flying down to Rio with a surprise fellow traveler, Spiro Agnew--"I'm here on business" muttered the former Veep--Sinatra helicoptered to the hotel, shouldered his way through adoring throngs, and thereafter ventured out of his $750-a-day suite only for rehearsals and performances. Sniffed his pressagent: "If he wanted to be treated like an animal, he could have gone to any California zoo rather than coming to Brazil."

Anita Bryant: My Little Corner of the World is the upcoming TV special's title. Bryant, 39, both star and angel of the two-hour show, hopes the little corner will gather big ratings. It marks a comeback of sorts for the lady, who became a target of Gay Lib and comics' glib three years ago after mounting a righteous antihomosexual crusade that gained national attention. The singer, who lives in Miami Beach, retained her $100,000-a-year contract to promote Florida's citrus industry, but her orange juice commercials were yanked temporarily, and other jobs proved scarce. "I was blacklisted and put down for what I believed in," she says. "People finally realized that I was being mistreated." The TV show, produced by Anita Bryant Ministries, blends "wholesome entertainment, God and country" and ranges from West Point to a wheatfield in Bryant's native Oklahoma to Valley Forge, where she sings The Battle Hymn of the Republic in pouring rain.

It was cupcakes at 50 paces. One duelist was Dewi Sukarno, 39, the sloe-eyed, Japanese-born widow of the Indonesian strongman and a relentless Paris partygoer for the past half a dozen years. Her antagonist: the legendary Regine, 50, who has parlayed her soignee Paris boite into a chain of expensive nightclubs reaching to New York and eight other cities. Three years ago, Regine barred Dewi from the Paris motherhouse for slapping another customer. Dewi sued in court, and now she has won a clear, if toothless, decision: the joint, ruled a French judge, is a public place, and Dewi may not be barred from it. Regine was ordered to pay one franc (250) in token damages. "I declared war and I won," crowed Dewi. "A futile and idiotic affair," retaliated Regine. "One franc will not take her very far." Certainly not in her place, where champagne sells for $20 a glass.

How times change. When he was starting up The New Yorker in 1925, Editor Harold Ross declared in his prospectus that his magazine would be much too sophisticated for "the old lady in Dubuque." If that instantly famous putdown ever had any accuracy, it surely does not now. Dubuque (pop. 65,000) has a lady mayor. And at 44, she is neither old nor unworldly--even though her honor, Carolyn Farrell, is a nun of the Sisters of Charity. Dean of continuing education at Dubuque's Clarke College, Farrell (she prefers not to be called "sister") has sat on the five-member city council since 1977. Sophisticated? Well, she enjoys an occasional Manhattan, plays golf, and as a Jimmy Carter Democrat, comprehends the intricacies of Iowa politics. Says Farrell, whose program includes better highways, a downtown shopping mall and an industrial park for Dubuque: "You can do as much or as little as you want in my position. I plan to keep moving."

No actor enjoys being typecast. But how to avoid it when you're a shark? Pity poor Bruce, the mechanical monster who cut his teeth on his first starring role--and various fellow players--four years ago in Jaws. Since then it's been mostly downstream for the studio fish: Jaws II, a bummer; a swim-on in a TV series; contract work in a pool on Universal's back lot eating an ersatz fisherman whenever a tour train went by. Now Bruce is in front of the cameras again in the upcoming spook spoof The Nude Bomb. Don Adams, a.k.a. Maxwell Smart, tries in his klutzy way to disarm a KAOS bomb that disintegrates clothing and leaves people naked. Adams and Villain Vittorio Gassman fall into Universal's Jaws pond at one point, and Bruce tries unsuccessfully to eat them. Fangs a lot!

Old Abner Doubleday, who, legend has it, invented baseball about 140 years ago, would probably have been proud. Last week the mustachioed Union general's great-great-grandnephew Nelson Doubleday, president of one of the U.S.'s biggest book publishers, completed a family sporting circle by leading a syndicate that bid successfully to purchase the National League's last-place New York Mets for $21.1 million. Said Nelson in the new owners' first hot-stove-league pronouncement: "Running a baseball team is like selling a book. If you put a good team on the field, the fans will come." Some fans thought Nelson knew more about pricing books than baseball teams. After all, before spirited bidding by several would-be buyers shot the Mets' price skyhigh, the American League Champion Baltimore Orioles recently changed hands for $12 million, or about half the Mets' ticket.

"Dear Lord I Pray, Help the Cook Another Day." So reads the prayer put in the kitchen of the London mansion occupied by the Vatican's Ambassador to Britain, Swiss-born Archbishop Bruno Heim, 68. The supplicant chef frequently turns out to be Heim himself, who likes to slip an apron over his cassock to whip up sauces or stir his favorite golden champagne cocktails (ingredients: good champagne, a soupc,on of pineapple juice, a splash of Cointreau, 12 oz. of soda and a tsp. of sugar). Heim, who speaks 14 languages, newly enjoys, as apostolic delegate, diplomatic status granted by the British government, healing a breach opened with the Roman church by Henry VIII; his credentials as a gourmet have been accepted by such distinguished dinner guests as Donald Coggan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Foreign Minister Lord Carrington and Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Heim's homily to all his guests: Use only white wine in your recipes.

On the Record

Robert Benton, Kramer vs. Kramer director, on an encore: "On a good day while making any movie, they talk about a sequel. I guarantee you, on a good day making 1941, they were talking about 1942."

Stanford Blum, who holds merchandising rights on both the Moscow Olympics and Bo Derek posters, on the $100 million sales loss he faces from a boycott of the Games: "I'll survive. I've got Bo."

Dr. Prudence Tunnadine, author of Sex and Nonsense About Sex: "Sex is not something you approach as if you were qualifying for the Olympics."

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