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Teddy Roosevelt's advice to statesmen, "Speak softly and carry a big stick," has been put to good use by Britain's Prime Minister Edward Heath. The stick he wielded was big in prestige —the baton of the London Symphony Orchestra—and his soft words were admonitions like "Ssh!" when he thought things were getting a bit too loud in the musicians' rousing rendition of Sir
Edward Elgar's 15-minute Cockaigne overture. "A thoroughly professional job," said the Daily Telegraph critic. "Genuine creative interpretation," said the Guardian's man, who particularly admired "the shading of the rallentandos in the romantic passages." The P.M., a former Oxford organ scholar, has long conducted the Christmas carol concert in his home town of Broadstairs, but the concert at London's Royal Festival Hall, for which he meticulously rehearsed, was his debut with a professional orchestra. "The fulfillment of a life's ambition," he beamed. "I must be one of the most fortunate men alive." Commented the London Symphony's regular conductor, Andre Previn: ''It is not true that I am shortly to be guest Prime Minister for 15 minutes."
To Women's Liberationists it seemed too good to be true: a beauty queen —Miss World, no less—publicly renouncing the whole chauvinist charade. After Brazil's beauteous Lucia Petterle learned in London that she would be at the beck and call of the contest sponsors throughout 1972, she summoned her lawyers. Her mail was being opened, she complained; she was being wakened at 7 a.m. for appointments and was under constant supervision. "I don't want to be enslaved by this title," flounced the third-year medical student at a press conference back in Rio de Janeiro. "I'm not going to lose a year of study because of any crown." She said that she had refused to sign her contract, had turned down a modeling tour of France and Bob Hope's Christmas trip to Viet Nam. But alas, a day or two later, liberated Lucia slipped back into those golden chains. Her final year at medical school would be "postponed," she said, and everything was going to work out according to the sponsors' idea of the best of all possible Miss Worlds.