People: Mar. 9, 1970

• Share

A man is only 54 once, so Jackie Gleason got together with 800 or so of his closest friends for a monster birthday party at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Fla. It cost $25 a plate, but it was worth it; amid the celebration came a phone call from the President. The White House gagwriters had obviously been at work: "The operator said we had a bad connection," Richard Nixon told the Great One. "I was afraid your Norton [Jackie's bumbling TV sidekick] had gone to work for the telephone company." Replied Gleason: "If you'd like to be on my staff, Mr. President, you're more than welcome." Nixon had the last and best laugh at a Washington dinner for broadcast correspondents. In a sly allusion to the dropping of Gleason's regular show from next year's TV schedule, he remarked: "I told Jackie, 'This is the President'—and you should have heard his language! He thought it was the president of CBS, Frank Stanton." . . . Two years ago, when life in polluted New York City got to be too much for Humorist H. Allen Smith, he packed up his wife and headed for Alpine, Texas. There he built a house and settled back to enjoy the good pure life. Now, Smith says, he is suffering mightily from "people pollution." The angry humorist insists that he has never seen "such a goddamned bunch of bigoted, pious, lying, cheating bastards in all my life." . . . The lovely vocalist was on her way to receive Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club Award as Woman of the Year when she was besieged by fans and autograph hunters. One young man had no paper, so he held forth the book he was carrying. The singer hesitated a moment, then signed, handing back what is probably the world's only copy of Portnoy's Complaint autographed by Dionne Warwick. . . . At one point during rehearsals for a satiric revue at Cambridge University, the young man got carried away and fell off his chair. Then, during a TV takeoff, Prince Charles fluffed a line and adlibbed: "What the hell comes next?" With that, he got one of the evening's biggest laughs. . . . The boy's hobby was stamp collecting, and who should help him with his hobby but President Franklin D. Roosevelt. That called for a thank-you note. Last week it was discovered among the President's papers: . . . Clairvoyant Maurice Woodruff makes the following predictions in the current McCall's: Jackie Onassis will have a son this year, but her marriage "won't last more than another year and a half or two years." (It is Ari who will leave, according to the seer.) Ethel Kennedy will go into politics; Ronald Reagan will lose the California gubernatorial race; and "I doubt Spiro Agnew will serve his full time in office." . . . She looked more like a heroine of the Bolshevik Revolution than the reigning monarch of Britain. But it was Queen Elizabeth II all right—facial blemishes and all—who stood so sternly in Pietro Annigoni's new portrait. Said the Italian artist, who painted a much more flattering portrait of the Queen 15 years ago: "People change over 15 years, and the Queen is no exception." The Queen's comment, according to Annigoni: "She told me it looked better varnished." . . . The house lights dim over New York Philharmonic Hall. A hush falls upon the white-tie audience as Conductor Andre