Jack Nicholson was on the Riviera for some R&R when he became embroiled with a waiter in St.-Tropez. Though that town's supposed to be blasé (its most celebrated denizen, La Bardot, turns hardly a head basking in the buff), Nicholson found himself besieged by a camera-clicking claque. Jack tried to tame the locals with some choice Anglo-Saxonisms but found that his fans ne parlent pas l'anglais. So, as he retreated to his digs aboard producer Sam Spiegel's yacht, he switched to international sign language. Nicholson dropped his trousers, leaned over and threw the multitudes a moon.
And Read All Over
His worldwide sales have just passed 53 million books and John D. MacDonald is recognized even by his publisher as the class of the pulp traffic: his works now come out first in hardcover. But at 66 tomes and 60 years, MacDonald is without pretension. He confesses to having "packing crates full of bad manuscripts that no publisher is going to see. My son once spent a day burning two million words. I'm going to burn them all before I die," he vows, to keep them out of the hands of "some smart-ass executor." Of course, MacDonald has help in keeping his perspective. One reader, he reports, sent a rather sour-mash note: "I've been a loyal fan for all these years. Originally I was paying 25¢, then a buck and now $6.95. I'll tell you one thing, you ain't that much better."
Futureworld
"We owe something to the earth," declares Peter Fonda. "We take from it all our lives, right? In the end, we should give something back." Peter's something will be himself. Fonda, now 37, has decided that when his years are up, he'll go the dust-to-dust route. "They won't get me into any lead-lined box," he says. "No way. My friends have been instructed exactly what to do. They are going to take me out and dump me naked into the earth without a marker of any sort." And in that potter's field, hopes Fonda, "one day, maybe, a tree will grow out of me, and the cycle will be complete."
By the Book
"An element of grave difficulty" has crept into the dialogue between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, warned Pope Paul VI in a recent letter to Dr. Donald Coggan, the Archbishop of Canterbury. That omen: the Archbishop's indication of a "slow but strong growth of a consensus within the Anglican Church to the ordination of women." Argues the Pope: Jesus chose only men as His apostles, and women in the priesthood are not "in accordance with God's plan for His Church."
Angel on the Loose
Her TV series The Rookies is dead, but Kate Jackson isn't. She'll be back this fall in ABC's Charlie's Angels and, more important, she's "gone through quite a personality change in the last six, eight months. I'd been with people who were dragging me down, I was losing weight, things weren't going good." Kate's too polite to name names, but six, eight months ago is when she moved out on her longtime roommate, actor Edward (Butterflies Are Free) Albert.
Furthermore
•At a time when even high rollers like Francis Ford Coppola are sounding like baseball's Charlie Finley with their complaints that bankable stars are breaking the bank, Mel Brooks is crowing that he corralled Paul Newman, Burt Reynolds, Jimmy Caan and Liza Minnelli for $138 a day on his last picture. They could scale more playing Mike Douglas, but, of course, for Silent Movie they didn't have to learn any lines.
•The country singer-composer born Donald Lytle never thought his patronymic measured up to his self-image and kept changing it until he finally made his name as Johnny Paycheck. Sure enough, he grossed $175,000 last year, but with road expenses, $40,000-plus in gambling losses and half a million in previous debts, Paycheck has filed for bankruptcy.
•At 13, Jodie Foster has already portrayed, with stunning success, a jail-bait hooker in Taxi Driver and a precocious gun moll in the forthcoming Bugsy Malone. But then, Jodie doesn't appear to be your average pubescent gum-popper. "I hate dresses and jewelry," she confides, "and the only doll I ever played with was a G.I. Joe."
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!
