People, Dec. 13, 1976

Auld Acquaintances Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jr. are getting together for a little New Year's Eve celebration, and other couples are invited to join them, if they have $200 to $500 to spare. Davis, 50, who was best man at her 1974 wedding to Jack Haley Jr., will share the spotlight with Liza, 30, singing, dancing and clowning in a 1½-hour cabaret act at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Fla. Bubbles Liza: "I've been dreaming about this ever since Sammy jumped onto the stage in the middle of my act at Harrah's in Tahoe a few years ago. We had a ball." Considering the tariff, Diplomat revelers can only hope they will too.

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As a singer who used to entertain the towel-clad clientele at Manhattan's gay Continental Baths, Bette Midler can look forward to at least a dressier audience this January at the New York State Theater. Belting Bette is scheduled to appear there with the New York City Ballet in a new production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Seven Deadly Sins. Celebrated Choreographer George Balanchine chose her to play the lead role of the peripatetic showgirl Annie, a part created in 1933 by Weill's widow Lotte Lenya. Why? "She has a good voice and red hair." Says Bette: "It's a dream come true. Next year, Firebird." -

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After 17 years of drawing that freckle-faced urchin Dennis the Menace from a penthouse in Geneva, Cartoonist Hank Ketcham is going home to California. The cost of living on the Continent became too steep for Ketcham, 56, who first sketched the kid with the cowlick in 1951. Gripes he: "I don't mind paying nine Swiss francs for a jar of something labeled beurre d'arachide crémeux. But when you figure out that it means $3.75 for a jar of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, it's ridiculous." Ketcham also feared that he was on the verge of turning Dennis' all-American comic-strip household into chez Mitchell. Says he: "I may be leaving in time, just before I inadvertently put a bottle of wine on the Mitchell table and have Dennis' father come home for lunch on a bicycle with a stick of bread under his arm."

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"If boys didn't exist, I should have to invent them," writes British Novelist Christopher Isherwood, setting the tone for his new book Christopher and His Kind 1929-1939 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Debunking impressions that his interest in politics drew him to pre-World War II Germany, Isherwood reveals that he was propelled by a tip from his sometime lover and collaborator W.H. Auden about the boy bars in Berlin. Between affairs, he met Jean Ross, the prototype for his fictional Sally Bowles, and wrote of her escapades in Goodbye to Berlin. Sally turns out to be somewhat less vulnerable than portrayed by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Says Isherwood: "Sally wasn't a victim, wasn't proletarian, was a mere self-indulgent upper-middle-class foreign tourist who could escape from Berlin whenever she chose."

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