People, Sep. 15, 1980

• Share

Elizabeth Taylor, playing Mary, Queen of Scots, is peremptorily directing her director: "Jason, will you get that creep out of eye line?" "Who, me?" snarls Kim Novak, elaborately gowned as Queen Elizabeth I. "Jason," Taylor continues, violet eyes flashing, "would you put the Virgin Queen back in her cage?" A feud on the set between two aging prima donnas? Yes and no. The sniping is all in the script for The Mirror Crack 'd, a film based on a 1962 mystery novel by the late Agatha Christie. The two '50s movie queens portray two '50s movie queens who are cast, to their mutual misery, in the same motion picture. Though not intimate in their real-life heyday —"We knew each other only to wave to," Novak recalls —the actresses go at it as if they had despised each other for centuries. "They both leaped into the bitchy dialogue with joy and glee," says Director Guy Hamilton, and, he confides, "it strikes home—lots of 'fat'jokes."

Beth Heiden's skates may be bronze, but her ten-speed is golden. At least that is the way it looked after the 20-year-old blade and bike speedster finished first in the women's world cycling championships in Sallanches, France. Beth, who placed third in the women's 3,000-meter speed-skating competition at the Lake Placid Winter Olympics, began bicycle racing only three summers ago, along with her quintuple-gold-medalist brother Eric, 22, as a way of keeping in condition for skating. Now she enjoys the sport as an end in itself—and as another means to Olympic gold: women's cycling has been added to the 1984 Los Angeles Games. "Cycling is exciting because anything can happen," she says, adding modestly: "The best rider doesn't always

"If they won't follow Dolly Parton to Tennessee, they won't follow anyone," declared Governor Lamar Alexander as he

watched the well-endowed singer kick off a campaign to lure tourists to her home state. According to the plan, 7-ft. (nearly lifesize) likenesses of Parton's formidable figure will grace the sides of 30 or more 18-wheelers, along with the Slogan FOLLOW ME TO TENNESSEE. Parton was on hand at a Nashville truck stop to christen her first rolling billboard. Hefting a bottle of champagne over her head, she took a ladylike swipe at the monster rig and ... nothing happened. She swung again. No luck. And again. This time the bottle shattered on the asphalt lot. Coolly, Parton borrowed a wineglass and splashed some bubbly on target. The truckers all cheered, and one asked if she had a CB handle. "Not really," chirped the interstate pinup. "What do you think of 'Booby Trap'?" "I started out studying music, but very quickly went downhill and into politics," laments for mer British Prime Minister Edward Heath.