People, Feb. 25, 1974

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Playing the sophisticated lady in Noel Coward's 1932 commune comedy Design for Living, Vanessa Redgrave, 37, lights up London's West End every evening with brittle charm. Come morning, however, she is out on the hustings.

As the Workers Revolutionary Party (a minuscule Trotskyite group) candidate for Newham Northeast, a London working-class constituency, Comrade Vanessa faces a stiff four-way fight in the upcoming British general election against the incumbent Labor candidate and Tory and Marxist contenders. Although her victory chances are small, Vanessa is emphasizing what she calls "the real issue" of the campaign—"the oppression of workers by the ruling classes." As yet, however, she has not officially agreed with her party leader Gerry Healy's claim that British airfields are now being converted into concentration camps.

Out on parole in Manhattan last week after serving nearly 18 months for the Great Howard Hughes Hoax, an apparently reformed Clifford Irving said he might write a book about the need for prison reform. "Prison is a farce and a disaster," he declared sententiously. "If you are treated as an untrustworthy person, you become one." He added that "I felt my decision-making abilities had become affected." Then he hurried off to meet Sons Nedsky, 5, and Barney, 4, who were being flown from London to live with him in the U.S. Acknowledging that his wife Edith may divorce him when she is released in May from a Swiss jail, and that he has debts of nearly $1 million, Irving is, however, back at work, lining up interviews with "people high in government" for publication in New Times.

On location in Japan to play a detective in Sydney Pollack's Japanese mobster movie The Yakuza, Old Pro Robert Mitchum, 56, himself was mobbed. Strolling through the Gion, Kyoto's geisha district, the star found himself surrounded by geisha pleading, "Please, Kirk Douglas-san, your autograph." Regretfully rubbing his chin, which is as deeply dimpled as Kirk's, Mitchum resolved that future excursions would have to be incognito. Next day on the set, he inspected a possible disguise: the beehive headgear originally worn by jobless, mendicant samurai trying to hide their shame.

A mere four weeks after the New York Times announced that Sally Quinn would join its Washington bureau, the Quinn byline turned up on a Washington Post interview of Nonagenarian Alice Roosevelt Longworth. It seems that Sally is returning to her old beat, the Post's style section, after all. "One day," she said dramatically, "you'll know why I made the decision not to join the Times and why I couldn't tell you." Veteran reporters thought they already knew. Sally was persona non grata among Times staffers because of the allegedly inflated salary of $35,000 she was said to be getting. She would be a double risk if she becomes the wife of the rival Post's Executive Editor Ben Bradlee—another current story about Sally.