People, May 3, 1971

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The plangent Southern accent coming through the telephone receiver was familiar. The political philosophy was downright unmistakable. "The Supreme Court should be abolished," Martha Mitchell told the Washington Evening Star last week after the court had rejected the arguments of Husband John Mitchell's Justice Department against desegregation by busing (see THE NATION). "We should extinguish the Supreme Court," she decreed. "We have no youth on the court, no Southerners, no women—just nine old men. I have never been so furious. Nine old men should not overturn the tradition of America."

Author Erich Segal may have been a longtime No. 1 on the bestseller lists with Love Story, but you can't win them all. He panted in 489th out of a field of 887 in last week's Boston Marathon. But, as Harper & Row's pro motion manager must certainly agree, it wasn't a total loss—the 26 miles, 385 yards seemed to be lined with Love Story lovers. Said No. 489 afterward: "The muscles that hurt the most are in the mouth, from smiling back at the people." For Segal the marathon also disproved those who claimed success had made him soft. "They say Segal is off sipping champagne from girls' slippers." he boasted. "You can tell them I sip Gatorade from girls' track shoes."

"I want him to quit, really," said Florence Frazier, wife of the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. "It takes so much out of your life." But Husband Joe Frazier, emerging from a visit with President Nixon, shrugged: "All wives are like that—quit being a fighter, quit being a President."

Inside the Third Reich, the memoirs of Hitler's protege and confidant Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments and War Production, is being translated into Hebrew. Profits from the book's sale in Israel, Speer hastened to announce last week, will be donated to a youth-oriented German organization called Action Sign of Atonement.

"At 15 I visualized myself as a world-famous author of 70 with a mane of wavy white hair. Today I am practically bald." This balding, world-famous author. Vladimir Nabokov, celebrated his 72nd birthday in Switzerland last week by working on a new novel that may be called Transparent Things. The new work, he explained to the New York Times, is being composed on his usual "scrambled index cards, which I gradually fill in and sort out, using up in the process more pencil sharpeners than pencils." Nabokov described his success at beating the biblical quota of 70 years as "a feat of lucky endurance, of paradoxically detached will power, of good work and good wine, of healthy concentration on a rare bug or a rhythmic phrase. Another thing that might have been of some help is the fact that I am subject to the embarrassing qualms of superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect me obsessively—though not in the sense of absurd fears but as fabulous, and on the whole rather bracing scientific enigmas incapable of being stated, let alone solved."