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Elliot Richardson's carriage ride to Buckingham Palace to present his credentials to Queen Elizabeth was nothing compared to the landslide reception the new Ambassador to Britain received a few days later. On a brief skiing holiday in Austria with his wife Anne and his two teen-age children, Richardson, 54, was leading his family down a steep slope near St. Anton when he "felt a powerful blow in my back, as if another skier had hit me." No skier, but a small avalanche swept Richardson some 50 ft. downhill, ripping loose his goggles, cap and ski poles. His family, who had avoided the full impact of the slide, looked on in relief as the familiar face soon emerged from beneath the snow. Was this an omen of hard times ahead in his new post? "Not at all," scoffed the ambassador later. "Just the other way around—we were very lucky."
"I am not going to allow a degenerate who could powerfully influence the young and weak-minded to enter 'this country and stage this sort of exhibition here," declared Australian Labor and Immigration Minister Clyde Cameron after banning a tour Down Under by eye-shadowed Vaude-Rocker Alice Cooper. "Isn't that crazy?" said Alice. "People still think I kill chickens onstage." Now on a 65-city tour through the U.S., Europe and Japan with his new act, Welcome to My Nightmare, Cooper vows to press on to Australia in September. His show, which will be shown as a 90-minute TV special later this month, features dancing skeletons, 7-ft. fake spiders and a 20-ft. spider web. Alice's defense of his props is somewhat cobwebbed too: "I have never done anything nearly as bloody as King Lear or Macbeth, and that's considered required reading in every high school in America."
"It solves the problem of having to rent a locker on the beach," boasts Designer Rudi Gernreich of his latest creation, the "self-cabana." The new outfit was demonstrated in Los Angeles by Model Peggy Moffitt, who introduced Gernreich's eye-opening topless bathing suit eleven years ago. Unlike the topless, the self-cabana will be a boon to the timid. It consists of a detachable canvas shower curtain suspended from a ring around a coolie hat, and can be closed while the wearer peels down to the essentials. "It was a light-hearted idea, but at the same time it makes sense," says the designer of his $90 portable pagoda. One further advantage: one size fits all.