By E. Graydon Carter

The name somehow lacks the imperial grace of such reigning fragrance houses as Chanel and Lanvin. But images can change, and indeed they will have to if Actor Ernest Borgnine, 65, is to become the improbable pitchman for Tova, a semi-namesake scent being marketed by his wife Tove, 41. The Borgnines boldly contend that Tova is "the most expensive perfume to make in the world." The sale price: $55 a quarter ounce (compared with $37.50 for the same amount of Chanel No. 5). Quite a step up for the guy who made his name as a butcher in the 1955 film Marty. Come to think of it, "What perfume are you going to wear tonight, Tove?" "I dunno, Ernie. What are you going to wear tonight?"

If any celebrity endorser had seemed snug in his position, it was oracular, orotund Orson Welles, 66, who boasted that Paul Masson Vineyards let nothing go "before its tune." But the winemaker let Welles go, and has now replaced him as spokesman with that quintessential enunciator Sir John Gielgud, 78, whose first two ads put him in an art gallery and amid a forest of pro football players. Gielgud, who has been cashing in just a teensy bit on his posi-Arthur cachet, would seem more at home with a Mouton-Rothschild than a Masson party jug. But the vint ner insists that he "knows our wines and uses them."

Spreading a blush over the pastel patina of Palm Beach, Fla., the titillating divorce-court battle between Newspaper Heir Peter Pulitzer, 52, and his estranged wife Roxanne, 31, drew to an end last week. Pulitzer, accused of having an incestuous relationship with his 26-year-old daughter, counterpunched with testimony from a family retainer suggesting that Roxanne had had a lesbian affair with Jacqueline Kimberly, 32, the wife of Kleenex Heir James Kimberly, 76. Steve Anderson, a crewman on the Pulitzers' 75-ft. yacht, stated that he had once spotted four female legs protruding from the end of a bed in their house. "One set of legs slid off, and up stood a woman totally naked," said Anderson, who later identified Jacqueline as the owner of the limbs. "Then the other set of legs stood up. It was Roxanne in a very sheer nightgown." Jacqueline, who was to have taken the stand, sent regrets through her doctor, who stated that she was suffering from "total exhaustion." Final summaries by attorneys portrayed their clients as Godfearing homebodies who had been reluctantly dragged into the fast lane by their spouses. Specifically, Roxanne's lawyer portrayed her as a rural innocent, whom Pulitzer "switched from milk to champagne and finally to drugs." Circuit Court Judge Carl Harper announced that it would be mid-December before he ruled on the dispute over custody of the couple's 5-year-old twin sons and Roxanne's demand for $246,000 a year to meet her expenses. "What I do here is not going to meet with the satisfaction of everyone," said the judge in parting. "Solomon couldn't do it, and I certainly can't." Was that his way of saying, "A plague on both your houses"?

Marching as to war and enjoying every minute of it, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, 49, leader of the Moral Majority, last week came down from the "hills of Appalachia" to the halls of academe. The accused apostle of know-nothingism was at Yale, that alleged center of know-it-allism, to respond to the university's president, A. Bartlett Giamatti, 44. Last year Giamatti charged that the New Right religious alliance was "threatening the values of the nation through intimidation and political pressure." Falwell was invited by the Yale Political Union. Giamatti declined the union's offer to make it a debate, but he did invite Falwell into his office for a private discussion, and to join in a hallowed ritual among gladiators whose weapons are mightier than the sword: they exchanged autographed copies of their most recent books.

--By E. Graydon Carter

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