Margot Fonteyn danced the pas de deux from Swan Lake while Isaac Stern played the violin. Van Cliburn knocked off a Hungarian rhapsody. Shirley Verrett brought down the house with Donizetti. Sol Hurok was celebrating his 60th year as an entrepreneur with a salute from his stars. The audience that packed the Metropolitan Opera House at up to $100 a ticket in tribute to the 85-year-old Russian immigrant was stellar too. In the crowd: Vanderbilts, Astors, Roosevelts, Whitneys, Cristina Ford, Jackie and Aristotle Onassis, and the Prince and Princess Alfonso de Borbon of Spain. A visitor to Hurok's office before the gala remarked that it was too bad that all the profits were going to the arts research library in Lincoln Center instead of to Sol himself. "But you can't take it with you," the caller observed. "I'm not planning to go anyplace," replied Hurok without pause.
A Tory sportswriter? David Eisenhower, stepping up to bat with his first weekly column for the Philadelphia Bulletin, sounded a bit like one. "The rhetoric of change tingles the modern American," he noted, but baseball should look to its traditions. "Fans want a pleasant afternoon in a pleasant spot in the city, time to reminisce and," added David awkwardly but enthusiastically, "a rooting part in exhorting their players on to the legendary heights that came before." Hired by the Bulletin at an undisclosed salary, David, 25, will track the Phillies on tour and report other sports as well. This will give him a chance to warm up his typewriter. Said the President's son-in-law: "I intend to write about more serious subjects."
"I fell in love with this man, and I am pleased to say he fell in love with me," Liza Minnelli, 27, the Oscar-winning singer-actress, announced, batting her spiky eyelashes. The man: British Actor Peter Sellers, 47, whom Liza had been visiting for a week or so on the set of his new film Soft Beds and Hard Battles. "I suppose we shall live in London now," Liza added, declining to say whether they would get married. One hitch, of course, is that Sellers is currently wed. Meanwhile, there was Liza's previous engagement to Desi Arnaz Jr., 21, to dispose of. According to Liza, it just melted. Actress Britt Ekland, the second of Sellers' three wives, was not impressed. "He must have used one of his disguises on her," she told a London gossip.
If Actor Burt Reynolds could do it, why shouldn't Comedienne Phyllis Diller? Last year Burt, wearing nothing more than a broad grin, turned up as the two-page pinup in a woman's magazine.
Now Phyllis, choked in rhinestones and shod in gold boots and waders, has been chosen as Field and Stream's first centerfold to celebrate the magazine's 78th anniversary. Her measurements? "Approximately those of a striped bass."