People: Aug. 1, 1969

“The Pied Piper of physical fitness” is how he styles himself, but the man of Hamelin could never hold a flute to the Rev. Bob Richards. At 43, the former Olympic pole-vault champ and Wheaties pitchman is jogging and biking 3,000 miles across the U.S. in a one-man campaign “to get Americans off their duffs,” as he puts it, and impress upon them the need for health-giving exercise. Last week, having already swum the turbulent Colorado River and trotted across the Rocky Mountains, he was in Indiana, heading relentlessly eastward toward New York. “At every stop,” says he, “I talk about America—about strength, courage, challenge, clean living, faith, the American dream.”

A western to end all westerns, the film has George Armstrong Custer, Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill among its characters. But they all seem tame compared with the types portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, Martin Balsam and Faye Dunaway. In Little Big Man, from Thomas Berger’s picaresque novel, Dustin plays the hero, Jack Crabb, who survives every imaginable peril until the age of 121, which ought to put the makeup men on their mettle. The putty looms large in Balsam’s role as well; he plays a sly con artist whose enraged victims relieve him at various times of a hand, an ear, an eye, a leg and his scalp. And Faye? No makeup required. In her role as a gospel-spouting nymphomaniac, she performs in several stages of undress —once on the floor and once on a bed, where Hoffman pours gold coins on her belly.

Novelist Jacqueline (The Love Machine) Susann was propped up in bed in her Manhattan apartment sleepily watching Johnny Carson chat with Author Truman (In Cold Blood) Capote on the Tonight Show. Suddenly she realized that they were talking about her. “A truck driver in drag,” Capote was saying. “A born transvestite” who wears “marvelous wigs and sleazy dresses,” he continued, “would have been so great” as Myra Breckinridge. Before the angry authoress was out of bed next morning, she had lawyers on the phone discussing damage suits against Capote and NBC. As for why Capote chose to attack her, she told reporters that “poor vulnerable Truman” was probably miffed about an imitation of his high, lispy voice that she had done on a recent Joey Bishop Show.

It does not pay to jest with a Russian —at least not with Defense Minister Andrei A. Grechko. One of the highlights laid on for Hubert H. Humphrey’s current 13-day tour of the Soviet Union was a wild-boar hunt, for which the old game-bird hunter quite freely admitted that he was unprepared by either instinct or experience. As Humphrey told it, he jokingly brought up the subject with Grechko in Moscow six years ago. “I was just pulling his leg,” says H.H.H., but Grechko took him at his word. So off he went to the Defense Ministry’s game preserve, and when the fusillade ended, Humphrey was wondering what to do with his 154-lb. tusker. “If anyone wants some boar meat, I’ve got some,” he offered cheerfully. The choice carcass was delivered to the U.S. embassy.

The vicissitudes of Soviet Russia’s literati continue. The word from Moscow is that Poet Evgeny Evtushenko, 36, has been dismissed from the editorial board of the influential magazine Yunost (Youth) because of some controversial poems and imprudent comments on the invasion of Czechoslovakia. But there was one moment of cheer last week for Moscow’s literary circles. The news got around that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who incurred the wrath of the regime for his allegorical novels (The First Circle, Cancer Ward), has been elected to honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He thus joins Dmitry Shostakovich and the late Boris Pasternak, the only other Russians to receive the honor.

While two singers clutched each other in classic Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy fashion and crooned out the endless “you-hoo-hoo-hoo’s” of Indian Love Call, all eyes in the Chautauqua, N.Y., audience were on the animated accompanist at the piano. At 89, the song’s composer, Rudolf Friml, was a lively reminder of the day when schmalz was king. His hair was still brown (“It’s all mine, and the color is not out of a bottle”), his step was still sprightly as he presided over the program staged in his honor, playing bits of Liszt and Chopin between such Friml favorites as Donkey Serenade and Only a Rose. What’s more, the composer of 33 operettas thinks he may still have a trick or two up his sleeve. “One fellow wants to do a show with me called Castle in Spain,” he said. “Maybe I will. I have lots of music ready.”