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Even if they know in their hearts that no one will ever match Calvin Coolidge in Indian headdress, the politicians can't help trying. New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, running hard for reelection, had already made one dashing appearance aboard an elephant named Sheba when he turned up at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, N.Y. Now dressed in the Rockefeller racing silks (grey business suit, white shirt, dark tie and black leather shoes), he eased himself into a sulky and spent 15 photogenic minutes tooling around the track at the fair behind a twelve-year-old pacer named Charity Song. It was worth a horselaugh anyway.
Oh Dad, Poor Dad got hung up in the can, and they're feelin' so sad. The $3.5 million film version of Playwright Arthur Kopit's comical absurdity has languished for 13 months in the vaults at Paramount Studios with no release in sight. Preview audiences seemed baffled by the movie, the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures threatened a C (for Condemned) rating, and that made Producer Ray Stark nervous. In a virtually unprecedented rescue operation, Stark announced plans to dismantle the completed film, breathe life into Jonathan Winters' "starring" role (he plays a corpse), attach a brand-new musical score, and attempt to edit the results in such a way as to get the Catholic office's B rating ("morally objectionable in part for all").