As if there weren't enough troubles in Ireland already, now some of the folks of Newport in County Mayo are riled about an "absentee landlord" who isn't even British. She's Princess Grace of Monaco, who recently bought an ancestral Kelly family farm of 35 acres (nearly a tenth the size of her own principality). Grace, whom aides describe as "distressed" by the flap, plans to visit the Olde Sod soon. Meanwhile she's sent a letter protesting that "I don't want to take work from anybody" and promising to either lease her land or "farm the place myself."
The Final Daze
Tony Ulasewicz, the Nixon gumshoe-turned-bagman whose Runyonesque style stole the Senate Watergate hearings, wanted to get into the memoir biz like everyone else, but the special prosecutor's office told him to sit on it. Now, finally fed up making do on his NYPD pension, the ex-dick has quietly begun courting publishers. While loath to give away any of the hot stuff from his personal reinvestigating of Chappaquiddick or of his retrieving presidential nephew Donald Nixon (mistakenly feared lost on a drug-ridden California commune), Ulasewicz, 57, has his pitch wired: "The book will be how a New York detective came to be the first private investigator ever employed by a President of the United States, the highest ambition for any detective. Unfortunately, I got the wrong President."
Airport '44
Where there's a will, there's a way, or so figures just about every Howard Hughes acquaintance—except Virginia Mayo. Hughes, whose seduction scenario often included a spin in a flying machine, invited Mayo on the coast-to-coast inaugural flight of the Constellation airliner in 1944. She didn't realize she was along as his weekend date until they got halfway to New York. By then Mayo was so airsick—and Hughes had left her to spend so much time in the cockpit—that when the plane landed, the actress promptly entrained for L.A. There, Sam Goldwyn told her she was crazy for coming home, and now Virginia says she's wondering herself.
King Cong
Francis Ford Coppola's new film, Apocalypse Now, is a Vietnamization of Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness. But isn't the director overdoing the "going native" theme on the Philippine location with his black cotton pajamas and cane coolie's hat? Not at all, says Coppola, who's "wearing these pajamas for the same reason I assume the V.C. wore them—the loose clothing is the least annoying costume in a tropical climate." Even with his sheltering garb, Coppola admits that after two months of casting crises in the midst of a muggy rain forest, "I've lost 38 of my favorite pounds."
Furthermore
•As befits a senator from Louisiana, Democrat Bennett Johnston has a drawl thicker than crawfish gumbo. But Georgian Jimmy Carter had no problem appreciating Bennett's dinner table message the other day: "I must say I look forward to the day when we will again have someone in the White House who doesn't speak with an accent."
•Though MGM flew Cary Grant to Cannes as part of its That's Entertainment, Part 2 ballyhoo, the 72-year-old star had studio brass contemplating hari-Cary. "He doesn't mingle—he stars," muttered one exec about Grant's stately standoffishness. Cary did not hear the remark, but perhaps the gods did. Just then, he stepped backward and inadvertently plopped, fully clothed, into a pool.
•In the GOP primaries, Ronald Reagan has made Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger look soft on Panama (he's even mused that the Canal Zone might be made the 51st state). While the challenger may be getting mileage now from what she calls a "fallacious issue," Nancy Kissinger is so livid she's predicted to friends that "Reagan is going to end up operating the locks."
•He may be the TV pitchman for that other Gallo gang, but at home in Switzerland, Peter Ustinov prefers a modest white labeled Clos du Château which he presses himself. "I suppose you can call me a gentleman vintner," says the 300-pound (or so) actor-author. "My property is only about an acre and a half, but it produces 400 bottles a year for myself."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
