People, Feb. 27, 1978

When James Herriot writes about his animal farm, it doesn’t have the Orwellian bite. Rather, in a series of bestsellers named after the lyrics of an Anglican hymn (All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Creatures Great and Small, AH Things Wise and Wonderful), the Scots-born veterinarian has painted a bucolic picture of his life ministering to four-legged friends in Yorkshire. Herriot, 61, who started writing at 50, now is consulting on scripts for the BBC, which has just begun to air a series based on his work. With it all, Herriot, a pseudonym for James Alfred Wight, still makes barnyard calls six days a week and performs surgery in the middle of the night. “I complain about my work but if I didn’t do it, I’d go to seed,” he says. So devoted is Herriot to his profession that he is putting off starting his latest book until the end of April. Shrugs Dr. Jim: “We’re lambing.”

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For a lawyer to grouse about the low estate of the American bar is par for the course. But it is quite another matter for someone to charge that fully half the lawyers in the U.S. are incompetent, particularly when that someone is the Chief Justice of the U.S. Reports of such a remark by Warren Earl Burger hit the wires last November, and irked lawyers haled the chief before the American Bar Association meeting in New Orleans last week on charges of shooting from the lip. He had meant only trial lawyers, it turned out, and his calculation had been based on rank hearsay: Burger had chatted with various trial judges, heard competency estimates ranging from 25% to 75% and simply split the difference. One barrister labeled Burger’s remarks “preposterous and flippant,” while another cited more scientific studies pegging the incompetency rate at 8% to 30%. After a shouting delegate pleaded for an end to the embarrassing “snarling catfight” with the Chief Justice, an anti-Burger resolution was resoundingly voted down by the delegates. Said an unrepentant Burger: “Whatever their intentions, they focused attention on the problem.” Next case.

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“We don’t travel in the same circles, but Margaux told me to come along,” said Mary Hemingway. So Ernest’s widow, 69, and her stepgranddaughter the model, 23, turned up at a Valentine dance to help launch an “I Love New York” advertising campaign. “Margaux has always been a cheerful, straightforward girl, long before she got into that fashion business. Or whatever it is. I’m a quieter creature,” says Miss Mary, who will start work next month on “two nearly full shopping bags” of unpublished Hemingway manuscripts. As for Margaux, she is getting ready to be a leading lady in Carlo Ponti’s film The Naked Sun. The wraps are on her role, but, she bubbles, “I wind up with the emeralds in the end.” A step up from the pendant she was wearing: a plastic heart filled with Life Savers.

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What becomes a legend most? The lace-trimmed cotton knickers displayed by Cockney Comic Marty Feldman once belonged to Queen Victoria. A collector of 19th century furniture and art, Feldman figured that nothing would be more Victorian than the royal underpants, so when he spotted them at a London auction he laid out a bloomin’ $320 for the bloomers. Besides, patriotic to the nines, he “wanted to preserve part of England’s heritage and to keep an Englishman’s hands on Queen Victoria’s drawers.” She would not have been amused.

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On the Record

Michelangelo Antonioni, film director (Blow-Up), on watching his movies on television: “I feel like a father toward my old films. You bring children into the world, then they grow up and go off on their own. From time to time you get together, but it isn’t always a pleasure to see them again.”

Edsel Ford II, 29, an heir to the automobile fortune, on his new job as assistant managing director of Ford Australia: “There is no silver spoon in Ford. I think that’s lucky. They treat me like any other boy.”

Morarji Desai, India’s Prime Minister, urging journalists to be generalists: “An expert seldom gives an objective view. He gives his own view.”

Joseph Bonanno, denying that he is the new Godfather: “I believe in the law. I’ll face the music as best I know how, and I’ll die with my boots on.”