That vampish young lady in black hardly looks like the type to drive a race car or ride a bucking bronco. Nevertheless, Susan Sarandon is an actress who takes pride in doing her own stunt work on the set. In The Great Waldo Pepper she climbed out on the wing of a biplane, and in her latest film, The Other Side of Midnight, she pretends to drown in a lake in Greece. "I had to spend three days in a tank with six men working agitators to make the waves high enough," says Sarandon. "It was very frightening because once you fell in the water, you didn't know which end was up. I was afraid I'd get hit by the boat when it capsized." Adds Susan the Stunt Expert: "It's kind of a cathartic way to end a movie. You really feel as though you've survived."
"The fashion world has never used me. I have used it to show what I wanted to do," says former model, Countess Vera von Lehndorff, commonly known as Veruschka. What she wants to do, it turns out, is "get in other skins, whether through acting or painting." But she is no ordinary painter. For more than a decade her canvas has been her own body, which she decorates to look like an animal, a businessman or a rock star, as the fancy strikes her. She is now in the process of compiling photographs of her painted selves into a book and even organizing an exhibition. As for acting, Veruschka, 33, plays a stripper in Belgian Director Francis Weyergans' new film, Flesh Color. Her next movie will also be a Weyergans because, says Veruschka, "it's so good to work with the same person. Liv Ullmann without Ingmar Bergman would never be where she is now."
Was it possible that the great Communist conspiracy trial of the '40s that so divided the nation, the crucible of so much accusation and anguish, had been reduced to mere kitsch—a typewriter-shaped cake, pumpkin pies and Pop Hiss? Yes, it was, at a party celebrating the publication of Laughing Last (Houghton Mifflin; $8.95), Son Tony's glib portrait of Alger Hiss as a prank-loving, jovial kook. "I still feel confused about how he could be thought a Commie," says Tony, 34, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a part-time bartender on Manhattan's West Side. "He's a Harvard-Baltimore conservative. He befriends a hippie [Whittaker Chambers, the man who charged in 1948 that Alger Hiss had passed secret State Department documents to Soviet spies], lends him his typewriter, and look what happens." The fact that the senior Hiss, now 72, spent 44 months in prison on charges of perjury for denying the Chambers story does not seem to put a damper on Tony. In fact, in a gaucherie topped only by the cake, he mixed up a special highball for the party: a "Hiss cocktail," sloe gin tinted with grenadine to turn the drink what Tony describes as "Commie Red."