"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.