By Claudia Wallis

"It's really nothing," said the tourist; she had merely tumbled down a staircase while visiting Israel. But after a trip to Hadassah Hospital, Jane Fonda was on crutches with a cast up to her knee. The broken left leg did not prevent her from giving several benefit performances for the Haifa Theater, nor from taking her first tour of Old Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the star-struck local press easily matched her pace every limp of the way. Plagued by reporters at Jerusalem's monument to the Holocaust victims, the actress exploded: "You won't even let me cry by myself! People don't follow me around in the U.S."

With his field-tested flair for showmanship, and commercials for American Express behind him, Edson Arantes do Nascimento is chasing another goal: film acting. Pele's role in Escape to Victory, now being shot by Director John Huston in Budapest, is classic typecasting. The former U.S. and Brazilian soccer star plays a former Trinidadian soccer star imprisoned in a German P.O.W. camp along with Michael Caine, who, as luck would have it, played on the British national team, Sylvester Stallone, a brash American captain with promise as a goalie, and other prisoners of unquestionable talent--the cast includes 18 pro players. Pele's biggest problem occurs off the set, where he is constantly mobbed by rabid soccer fans. In the place Hungarians call Hollywood on the Danube, the "Black Pearl" outdraws even the "Italian Stallion."

It was Gene Autry week in L.A., and the original singing cowboy was back in the saddle again--in reruns of his '40s movies and in a documentary titled Gene Autry: An American Hero, shown on a TV station owned by the millionaire star. The California Museum of Science and Industry was marking the 50th anniversary of Autry's start in show business with an exhibit of the old cowpoke's spurs and guns, a guitar, hit records, including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and uniforms from the Autry-owned California Angels. Appearing there in full ten-gallon regalia, Autry, 72, declared, "I really don't deserve all of this, but I had arthritis, and I didn't deserve that either."

"Women who are satisfied with. . .light and easily broken ties. . .do not act as I have done," wrote Novelist George Eliot of her 24-year, live-in liaison with another woman's husband. "They obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner." However, Eliot suffered for her devotion to Writer Henry Lewes. Not only was the author of Middlemarch scorned at many a Victorian's table, but she was denied her final desire: burial in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, where writers from Chaucer to the Brontes have a monument or tomb. A week ago, Eliot at last got her place among the poets. In a centennial observation of her death, a black memorial stone was set in the Abbey floor and dedicated to Mary Ann Evans (pen name George Eliot), the maverick Victorian in whose hands, said one speaker, "the novel became a moral force."

Who could forget Audrey Hepburn's American film debut in Roman Holiday, playing a cloistered princess on a brief romantic escapade? Director Peter Bogdanovich could not. With Hepburn, 51, in mind for the leading role, he wrote and directed They All Laughed, a film involving the sheltered wife of a European tycoon, who goes to New York City and has, yes, a brief romantic escapade. There were, of course, a number of differences the second time around. But Manhattan was a pleasant change, says Hepburn, who lives in Switzerland and Rome. "New Yorkers are very warm; they come right up and talk to you." There also were no Givenchy gowns for the high-style star to wear. In fact the actress wears jeans throughout. Still, she managed to plug her favorite designer by slipping on a Givenchy scarf in one scene. "You see," she says with her trademark twinkle, "I got one in."

--By Claudia Wallis

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