People, Aug. 12, 1974

In an idle moment on the Today show, Critic Gene Shalit said he would like to be a conductor. Immediately, the Long Island Rail Road offered him a job. Then the Orchestral Society of Westchester came up with something better: it asked Shalit to lead a concert last week in the garden of Lyndhurst, Financier Jay Gould’s old estate on the Hudson River. Shalit, an amateur bassoonist, accepted with pleasure. As a child, he had taken piano lessons: “You know the kind of thing, the music teacher kisses your Fingers to see if you’re a genius.” Waving his baton, Shalit said he rehearsed William Boyce’s Fifth Symphony and Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony “like fury. I didn’t even stop when the record turned off.”

When David Viscount Linley, 12, and Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, 10, accompanied their mother Princess Margaret on a visit to the Royal Navy at Portland Naval Base, Britain’s Senior Service put on a good show. There was a helicopter flypast, and a fire drill with asbestos-clad sailors putting out a fire. David got an extra treat. He took the wheel of one of the navy’s high-powered training boats, then joined the Royal Marines in an assault on a nearby beach. Later he clapped a sailor hat on his head and was heard to pronounce the whole thing “absolutely wizard.”

Senators and Congressmen will get a chance to judge a fellow legislator this week—on photography skills. Some 50 color photographs by Tennessee Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., 48, will go on show at a Capitol Hill gallery. Signed by the Senator, the most effective pictures are stark, almost monochromatic hill country landscapes. “Sometimes my wife thinks my photography is more an obsession than a hobby,” Baker says. It seems that the wife of South Dakota’s junior Senator may soon be feeling the same way; James Abourezk has caught the bug. “Jim already has a sackful of cameras and a darkroom in his house,” said Baker sheepishly. “I have to take some responsibility for that.”

Vice President Gerald Ford and his wife Betty are definitely planning to move. But for the time being they will simply exchange their four-bedroom house in Alexandria, Va., for a larger Victorian estate on the grounds of Washington’s Naval Observatory, which has been appropriated by Congress as the vice-presidential residence. Jerry Ford, however, has a grouse: nice as the place is, it has no pool. Last week the Fords enjoyed a rare quiet day round their old pool at the house in Alexandria. Betty does not want her husband to be President, but she says, “I do understand that Jerry can’t always control what happens to him.” She then pushed the Veep into the pool for his daily 40 laps.

“He likes to see cricket and football matches,” said Joe Jagger of his son the Rolling Stone. Then he added, “I don’t want to spoil the idea his fans might have.” Joe, a lecturer in the philosophy and psychology of physical education at London University, was visiting the U.S., unaware that Mick was already changing his image. In London, he threw a Lucullan feast on his 30th birthday for some 200 friends, including Debbie Reynolds, Britt Eklund and Peter Townshend of The Who, and sported a new and different look: short back and sides hairdo and a zoot suit. Does this portend a new career? Journalist Tony Scaduto’s recent biography, Mick Jagger: Everybody’s Lucifer, implies this could be so. Mick is quoted as saying, “I’m thinking about entering politics, but I haven’t got the right wife.” Indeed, BiancA, partying in a Zandra Rhodes gown, looked more like mad Ophelia than an M.P.’s consort.

What’s it like to have Katie Hepburn in bed with you? “I have ambivalent feelings about what she did,” said Actor Lewis J. Stadlen of the Broadway musical Candide. Ten minutes before the show began one day last week, Stadlen, who plays Dr. Pangloss, had climbed into the bed that dominates the open set surrounded on all sides by the audience. To his delight, Hepburn was sitting out front. Next thing he knew, “She just sidled into bed with me,” said the startled actor. Hepburn stayed a mere 15 seconds under the covers, then murmured, “Excuse me,” and returned to her seat. Said Stadlen: “She looked great, especially her body. It was as trim and athletic as in Pat and Mike [1952].”

It was Serge Koussevitzky Centennial Day at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., and the Boston Symphony Orchestra staged a celebration in honor of its late great conductor. Participants included Koussevitzky’s most famous pupil, Leonard Bernstein, 55, who on doctors’ orders conducted only two programs. Just three weeks before Lenny had been hospitalized inBridgeport, Conn., suffering from a shortness of breath; no diagnosis of his illness has been made public. One music lover who stopped by at Tanglewood to give him a big hug: Joan Kennedy, recently returned from a rest and therapy session at Connecticut’s Silver Hill Foundation.

The fate of British Actor Robert Shaw is not pleasant. He will shortly be chewed to death by a mechanical shark called Bruce, even as his salary is chewed up by the IRS. On location in Martha’s Vineyard for the movie Jaws, Shaw is impatient with the delays that have put the film two months behind schedule; if he works more than 90 days in the U.S. he will be taxed. “We’ve got at least another month to go,” he groaned in the longueurs between takes.

“Universal might as well pay my salary straight into the IRS.” Shaw feels even worse about Bruce. The 25-foot polyurethane shark with hydraulic guts has been programmed to nip him to death —gently. But recently says Shaw, who plays the obsessed shark killer Quint, he was chasing Bruce in a fishing boat when the automated man-eater turned on his pursuers and tore a hole in the boat’s underside. “My ship almost sank under me,” said Shaw, adding: “What worries me is who’s going to keep those mechanical teeth from sinking in too deep?”

Richard Burton arrived in London, his heart still broken five weeks after his divorce from Elizabeth Taylor. “I’m still very much in love with her,” he told the London Sun. Still, Burton was comforted by the presence of Sophia Loren, 39, his co-star in the TV movie Brief Encounter. Only four months ago, they worked together in De Sica’s The Voyage, an experience preserved by Richard in the Ladies Home Journal. He described her “as beautiful as erotic dreams.” They also had had a few heart-to-heart talks. “A bit of a governess,” Burton noted. “Tends to lecture now and then, to wag her finger. Delightfully.”