Can anyone with a Nobel Prize and a novel currently on the bestseller lists be financially "desperate"? That is Russian Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn's own word for his own situation. His books are banned in the U.S.S.R. and his royalties are piling up in Switzerland, where he cannot get at them. As word of his plight spread, some unusual Samaritans offered to help. First came Hollywood Writer Albert Maltz, once jailed and blacklisted for refusing to tell a congressional committee whether he was a Communist. Maltz said that the Soviets owe him some $34,000 in royalties on his writing (The Cross and the Arrow), and should pay it all to Solzhenitsyn, "an incredible human being, one of the moral giants." Then came two Pulitzer-prizewinning novelists, Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men) and Bernard Maiamud (The Fixer), who also announced that they wanted their Russian royalties paid to Solzhenitsyn. But the Soviets do not have any copyright treaties with the West, and they deny any obligation to pay royalties to Americans. Besides, said one top official, Solzhenitsyn doesn't need any help because he is "well off." Actually the Russians allow the novelist to get a trickle of money from Switzerland (taxed at 40%), but he has to live very modestly. As for the Soviets turning over money from other writers, Solzhenitsyn said, "I'm convinced they won't give me a single kopeck."

"So they sent it and I read it and I thought eccccchh." Barbra Streisand was recalling the script of Up the Sandbox, the just-released film in which she plays a daydreaming housewife who flirts with Fidel Castro and blows up the Statue of Liberty. Barbra soon changed her mind, accepted the part and went off to Kenya to film one of the daydreams. While there she had a blue flower painted on her cheek, put together her own Samburu tribal costume and sat for a chat with an African and his two wives. "How would you like Barbra as your third wife?" asked one onlooker. The African said nothing but looked apprehensive.

She wasn't suggesting for a minute that the law be changed, but Bess Myerson, onetime Miss America and now New York City Commissioner of Consumer Affairs, did sound a bit wistful as she told a Daily News columnist how the medieval French used to keep merchants honest. A royal edict of 1481 held that "anyone who sells butter that contains stones or other things to add to the weight will be put into our pillory; then said butter will be placed on his head until entirely melted by the sun. Dogs may lick him and people offend him with whatever defamatory epithets they please without offense to God or king." Alas, the commissioner concluded, "we are more gentle toward transgressors today."