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Giddy Gelding. This, fall Arlene will star in a new Harry (Reclining Figure) Kurnitz comedy on Broadway called Once More—With Feeling, to be co-produced by her second husband, Actor-Director Martin Gabel. She will still do both her TV shows, look after her interest in a posh Manhattan saloon called Michael's Pub, raise some cows, and try to get Cut Purse, the horse that she owns with TV Critic John Crosby,* out on the tracks ("He's been spoiled for two years. We had to geld him, he was so giddy"). Up at 6:45 a.m., Arlene breakfasts with her ten-year-old son Peter in an eleven-room apartment that she decorated herself, is chauffeured to the studio in a hired limousine ("my only luxury") for 8 o'clock rehearsals. After her 10-10:30 show, she goes over her fan mail (about 5,000 letters a week), then plunges into the endless round of business luncheons, hairdressers, interviews, benefits, art showings, recording sessions and couturiers (she has 200-odd "changes" filling her five closets). Arlene makes trips to the bank in an armored car, but insists that she likes the work more than the $250,000 annual paycheck she draws. Although the theater is really her first love, she greatly enjoys being a home appliance. "The theater is caviar." she says. "You can't count on having it all the time."
* Whose syndicated column she used last week to flail the electronic monster that created her: "Maybe the brisk climate that prodded our forebears into building a nation has become too well heated to build a network with blood coursing through its veins!"