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J. Fred Muggs, where are you? TV Host Mike Douglas, in Planet of the Apes makeup, strode onstage last week at Philadelphia's KYW-TV studios to tape his daily talk show. His first guest was Trainer Bill Hampton with Marvin the Magnificent, a 100-lb. chimp. To the delight of the audience, Marvin recognized a pal right away. He stroked Mike's unusually pale paw consideringly, then sat back on his haunches and let out a few friendly howls. "The volume could have parted your hair," said Mike later. When Douglas mimicked him and let out a few howls of his own, Marvin stared stonily at his host, then wandered off into the audience. Next thing, he began swinging from the balcony. When Mike remonstrated with him, Marvin merely picked up a TV camera and shook it in Douglas' face as if it were a Brownie. Following a producer wielding a lollipop, Marvin made for the newsroom, hurled a typewriter through a partition, stomped on file cabinets and tore out acoustic tile so that he could swing on the steel beams above. His $2,700 rampage was finally stopped by a blowgun tranquilizer, and Marvin departed handcuffed to a stretcher. Said a shaken Douglas, hurriedly taking off his ape makeup: "You never know when they're going to revert."
It is a long way from street crime to Lee Radziwill's Fifth Avenue drawing room. Last week, however, WCBS-TV gambled that its New York audience was ready for social satire. It let loose Jackie Onassis' younger sister as a probing interviewer. Recently Lee taped for CBS-owned stations Interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith, Gloria Steinem, Halston, Robert Coles, Peter Benchley and Rudolf Nureyev. If successful, they could earn Lee her own talk show. For 2½ minutes on the evening news last week Lee, dressed with unrelenting chic and speaking in a throaty mid-Atlantic drawl, questioned Rudi about his life and work. The concept, explained a CBS spokesman, was to cover a single thought each time. The most provoking idea occurred to Lee in the fourth session. "Do you think you'll ever get married?" she asked a startled Rudi. Replied Rudi reprovingly: "One doesn't expect close friends to ask silly questions."
For more than six weeks the 1,700 citizens of Tylertown, Miss., waited on tiptoe for their first celebrity visitor in decades. Last week Martha Mitchell blew into town accompanied by her personal seamstress. Ostensibly on hand for the wedding of her son Jay Jennings to a local girl and fellow dropout from the University of Mississippi Law School Janis Crawford, Martha quickly took the mint out of everyone's juleps.
Dressed flamboyantly, she overshadowed even her blonde daughter-in-law, a former Miss Hospitality of Walthall County, and upstaged the wedding ceremony by arriving late because of a flat tire. As for Tylertown, it quivered at the mention of her name. One guest choked at Martha's description of Richard Nixon as "a dirty son of a bitch." Still, most agreed that years in the Northern wilderness had not spoiled her. Said Tylertown Times Editor Paul Pittman:
"We've heard of people who could charm a rattlesnake, but I've never met anyone like Martha."