Quick to hop on the Watergate wagon, Columbia Records corralled the Senate select committee chairman to make a record for them called Senator Sam at Home. Result: a coup running over with homilies. Bloviating through 77 years of memories, Sam Ervin laces his bourbon with saccharin and recites his favorite lyrics—Grow Tall My Son and Through the Years. Moving to sterner stuff (our national anthem, the First Amendment and Rudyard Kipling's ode to the governing class: "If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs"), Uncle Sam then opines that the King James Bible is the best "road map to travel by through this world." Finally he pays tribute to his wife Margaret, declaring: "I've had the same girl walking beside me for 49 years and she's never made a misstep during all that time."
Succumbing to the Ten Best syndrome, Feminist Gloria Steinem totted up her list of liberated men for Today's Health magazine. Her choices: the late Senator Robert Kennedy (he listened to women), Economist John Kenneth Galbraith (he changed his mind about women), Crusader Ralph Nader (he is interested in issues regardless of their progenitors' gender), Congresswoman Bella's husband Martin Abzug (he is supportive), Athlete Rafer Johnson (he is gentle). There were also the farm workers' Cesar Chavez (for his belief in nonviolence), Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme (he said if there is hope for peace, it lies in depolarizing sex roles), Franklin Thomas (president of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant restoration project), U.S. Congressman Ron Dellums (he appeals to a coalition of havenots) and Black Panther Bobby Seale, who made the pantheon with his statement that "real manhood depends on the subjugation of no one."
One Jew the Russians seem determined to keep around is Valery Panov, 35, once a leading dancer with the Kirov Ballet. In March 1972, Panov applied for exit visas for himself and his wife Galena, 24, to emigrate to Israel. Reaction was vicious and immediate. Panov was dismissed from the Kirov, while Galena was demoted from soloist to the corps de ballet. Since then, Panov has been continually harassed. His phone has been cut off, he can receive no mail from abroad, and he has been roughed up by the secret police. Now confined to the city of Leningrad, the Panovs said last week that they had gone on a hunger strike "to the end." In New York, an emergency committee, including Mike Nichols, Beverly Sills, Joanne Woodward and Hal Prince, has set out to use concern over the Panovs' fate to influence the Russians to release them. One obvious leverage point is the proposed 1974 visit of the Kirov Ballet to the U.S., which could be boycotted by an aroused public.