People, Feb. 7, 1977

That pensive lady clutching the eerie-looking doll is Susan Blakely in Secrets, ABC’s chilling movie scheduled to air Feb. 20. Model-turned-Actress Blakely, 27, plays Andrea, a psychologically disturbed young wife who turns into a nymphomaniac. She is also possessed by the notion that her dead mother is a wicked puppet queen. Her mother’s crime? Teaching Andrea that everything she does must be aimed at attracting men. “What the mother teaches the child is almost like the normal belief system many women are taught,” observes Blakely. “The plot is something women will connect to.”

“I go for two kinds of men,” coos Mae West. “The kind with muscles and the kind without.” Now 83, she is playing her first starring film role in 33 years: a movie star just wed to her sixth spouse. George Hamilton and Ringo Starr play two of her exes, and Dom DeLuise is her hyperactive manager. Titled Sextette, the movie is based on a play written by West, whose own love life is legend. Being a star again seems to have rejuvenated her. “I feel like I’m 20,” says Mae. “No, make that more like 26.”

“I suppose there is an uncanny resemblance,” says Actor Peter Boyle about his lookalike, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. Boyle, 40, stars as the Red-baiting chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in NBC’s Feb. 6 movie, Tail Gunner Joe. The film, which also features Burgess Meredith as Lawyer Joseph Welch, Patricia Neal as Senator Margaret Chase Smith and George Wyner as Roy Cohn, spans McCarthy’s life from his teen-age years to his death in 1957. The title comes from a bizarre publicity stunt staged during his World War II Marine days. To look like a hero back home, McCarthy engineered news photographs of himself pretending to be a tail gunner. After the war, his campaign brochures announced that he was “known in the Pacific as Tail Gunner Joe.’ ”

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is “sheer nonsense,” opined Author Rebecca West. For one thing, young girls in love do not go to their first balls in a “state of lust” like hussars, she argued. The occasion: a 75th anniversary poll by London’s Times Literary Supplement of 43 writers, artists and scholars who were asked to name the 20th century authors or books they consider the most overrated—or underrated. Arnold Toynbee and E.M. Forster, it seems, have the most inflated reputations. In addition to Forster, Anthony Burgess cited Andre Gide and Hermann Hesse. J.K. Galbraith called Ring Lardner underrated, while Vladimir Nabokov found H.G. Wells’ The Passionate Friends the century’s most “unjustly ignored masterpiece,” though he had not read it for 60 years. Bob Dylan named only one book, which was, he said, both underrated and overrated. His selection: the Bible.

For many of the convicted Watergate principals, prison was a perfect place to write a book. E. Howard Hunt, however, had already written 42 short stories and spy novels. He used his cell in Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base prison as an artist’s studio, turning out 35 watercolors and acrylics that “express my hopes and despairs.” Soon Hunt, 58, will be able to paint at home. After serving 2½ years of his maximum eight-year term and paying a $10,000 fine, he will be paroled on Feb. 25. Meanwhile, his lawyer is busy trying to line up a one-man show for him near his home in Miami or in New York City. Gallery-goers will note that his initials are drawn to look like prison bars.

French Director Claude LeLouch made such a big hit with his 1966 movie A Man and A Woman that he is calling his first U.S. production Another Man, Another Woman. It is not, however, a sequel to his soft-focus romance between a French racing driver and a young widow. This time the story takes place in the American West in the 1870s. A French immigrant wife (Genevieve Bujold) arrives by stagecoach in dusty Arizona. After cleaning up in a steaming pay tub (a cold bath costs 50 and a hot bath 100), she meets and becomes involved with a young veterinarian (James Caan). LeLouch says he nearly called it A Man, A Woman and a Gun.

Exiled Soviet Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn has not been heard from much since he settled last fall in Cavendish, Vt. (pop. 1,264), with his wife and children. The Nobel-prizewinning author rarely emerges from behind the wire fence protecting his secluded 50-acre estate. He did, however, request a luncheon with Vermont Governor Richard Shelling in Montpelier. Over Chateaubriand, Solzhenitsyn announced his plans to stay in Vermont—until the day comes when he can “return to a free Russia.” Meanwhile he has been doing some writing in Cavendish, and plans to start a publishing house of his own, which will distribute works on Russian history and culture, some by his own pen.

The course title—U4830Y, American Foreign Policy, 1945-1975—sounded ordinary enough, but the auditorium was S.R.O. at Columbia University last week. Reason: George McGovern was teaching again for the first time since he left his podium at Dakota Wesleyan University in 1953. His first lecture was about the role of Congress in foreign policy, but the Senator from South Dakota found that all the students’ questions were on the subject of Viet Nam. Which was understandable enough. Said he: “Viet Nam has been the dominant factor of American life for the past 15 years. It would be a strange class that wouldn’t bring up the subject.” The students applauded when McGovern hailed President Carter’s pardon of draft evaders, then wondered aloud whether “the men who conducted the war in Viet Nam may be the ones in need of a pardon.”

Poor Kris Kristofferson. The former Pomona College football star, now 40, pulled a hamstring muscle while playing Shake Tiller, a good ole boy and pass-catchin’ end in the movie being made from Dan Jenkins’ novel Semi-Tough. Burt Reynolds, a onetime running back for Florida State, is cast as Shake’s pal, the hard-drinking, womanizing hero, Billy Clyde Puckett. During the filming in Dallas Reynolds was constantly surrounded by groupies. What to do? Taking a tip from Puckett, he claims he “got ’em upstairs as quick as possible.”