Are the Nixon daughters' marriages showing signs of stress? In the February issue of McCall's, David Eisenhower concedes that Watergate is taking its toll in his marriage to Julie. "It's hard on Julie," he says. "In her public appearances she always has to be friendly. At home she will bark at me now and then." Mostly, it seems, about sharing the housework. "No matter how hard I try to reassure her that letting down on household chores doesn't mean I feel any less affection, I get the sense she can't understand that." Meanwhile, Tricia and Eddie Cox have had to endure a three-week geographical separation. From Christmas Day until last Tuesday, Tricia was with her parents at San Clemente and at the White House, while Eddie stayed in Manhattan to work at his law firm. Returning last week to their apartment, Tricia quashed the rumor that they were on the outs. Through her mother's press secretary, she said: "It's a deliberate lie."
"It is just not acceptable that a director of a major commonwealth enterprise should be on pillow-talk terms with the head of government," sniffed the Melbourne Herald, Australia's largest evening paper. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, 57, had not been caught in flagrante delicto; rather his wife Margaret, 54, was being heckled about her latest job. A trained social worker, Margaret Whitlam is a director of the Commonwealth Hostels Ltd., an organization that administers government housing. "Drop it, Meg," was the Herald's blunt advice. But Mrs. Whitlam, whose liberal views on abortion, sex and marijuana have shocked Australians in the past, held on. "I've subjugated myself for an entire year," she said, adding that even official trips were a bore. "Your visit as a Prime Minister's wife so often entails nothing but saying 'how do you do' to 500 people."
Sally Quinn is leaving CBS—sadder, apparently, but wiser. "We hope she's happier than she was here," said Hughes Rudd, Sally's co-anchor on the CBS Morning News. Just five months after the network had hired her away from the Washington Post to make trouble for Barbara Walters of NBC's rival Today, Quinn quit. The victim of a premature publicity buildup and her own inexperience, Sally had also an unfortunate style: she picked over the news as if she could not decide which fork to use. She will join the New York Times's Washington bureau in March. Miss Quinn, 32, was cautious about plans to marry her former boss, Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, 52. "That's open to a great deal of speculation," said Sally, about that fork in the future.