People, Jul. 5, 1971

Featuring THE BEAUTIFUL BURTONS in their DEATH-DARING DEFIANCE of the FLASHING KNIVES! First Time Under the Big Top! The way Elizabeth and Richard Burton were telling it in London last week, they dropped in one night recently at a little local circus near their Mexican vacation house in Puerto Vallarta. Suddenly one of the performers was saying things in Spanish and smiling at Elizabeth, so she stepped graciously into the ring, thinking she was going to be introduced. “The next thing I knew, he was throwing daggers at her,” said Richard. “What we didn’t know,” said Elizabeth, “was that the knife thrower was saying: Is anyone brave enough to take a chance with my daggers?’ Those knives really thumped around. Richard suddenly jumped over the barrier into the ring. I shouted to him to stop. I don’t know what he thought he could do.” What he could do was get into the act —with a balloon in his mouth and another in his hand for the man to burst. “That knife thrower must have got a lot of publicity,” said Richard. He wasn’t the only one.

Chicago-born Main Rousseau Bocher retired last week at 80, and the world of fashion lost its Grand Old Man —Mainbocher. The first and only American to make it to the top in Paris haute couture, Main, as he was called by the likes of the Duchess of Windsor, moved to Manhattan in 1940, where he became famous for the superelegant simplicity of his very expensive clothes. “I don’t like to see people ‘dressed up,’ ” he says. “I’ve always made dresses for ladies.” The ladies he made them for will always remember the Main,

She is only 15 and has never had a drink. But Yolanda King, daughter of the late Martin Luther King Jr., raised a thunder of applause at her debut last week as the dirty-mouthed whore in The Owl and the Pussycat at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater. The story line did not seem to bother her mother Coretta. But Grandfather Martin Luther King Sr. and the more conservative members of the Ebenezer Baptist Church were outraged. Yolanda managed to mollify them. “Though I didn’t like the language,” she said, “I felt that the play had something very important to say: that we can all learn from each other, black or white, rich or poor, saints or sinners—and that we all need each other.”

The headline in Tel Aviv proclaimed:

DAUGHTER OF CHARLES CHAPLIN SAYS’.

“MY FATHER is JEWISH.” On set at the Red Sea port of Eilat, where she has just completed a film called Carlos, Movie Star Geraldine Chaplin fudged it a bit. “My father never admitted it, but then he never denied it,” she said. “I don’t think he really knows what he is.”

“It’s not for me—it’s for my daughter,” insisted American Art Dealer Julius Weitzner, tongue firmly in cheek. With that, he anted up $4,032,000 for Titian’s 16th century masterwork, The Death of Actaeon. It was the second highest price ever paid at public auction for a work of art. (Velasquez’ portrait of his mulatto assistant brought $5,544,000 last November.) The sale at Christie’s in London climaxed last week’s record $8,735,580 auction of such Old Masters as Rembrandt, Van Dyck and Veronese. Just who would get Actaeon was not entirely clear. Said Daughter Marjorie: “It will fit perfectly over my fireplace.”

West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who drew admiring glances in his bright plaid swimming trunks during a recent visit to Jamaica, failed to make as much of a splash last week at his annual garden party. Obviously convinced by his own campaign for national economic stability, Brandt eliminated the champagne, the delicate cheeses and the star performer featured in last year’s bash. Instead, the 1,200 diplomats, film stars and other guests were faced with an agonizing choice of Bratwurst, Siedewurst, or Landjäger (fried sausage, boiled sausage or smoked salami), plus hamburgers—all served on paper plates and washed down with beer and unpretentious wine. Asked in advance about the menu, a member of the food committee replied laconically: “We have no menu.”

“I will not as a writer allow them to jail a publisher without raising a stink,” promised Writer Sloan Wilson (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit). The publisher he was talking about was Ralph Ginzburg, who had just been denied a hearing by the Supreme Court on his three-year prison sentence for sending obscene material through the mail. Ginzburg, 41, is quite capable of raising his own stink—as he demonstrated with his defunct sensation monger Fact (which lost a $75,000 libel suit to Barry Goldwater), not to mention his sex-centered Liaison Newsletter and Housewife’s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity. The $10-a-copy magazine Eros, however, which was featured in his conviction, was far more art than pornography—at least by today’s standards. “This is the era of the gang-rape of the free press,” exploded Ginzburg. “First it was Agnew on CBS, then the Defense Department on the New York Times, and now the Supreme Court on Eros and me.”