He is "terribly subject" to those New York winter chills, and he has already tried the Sahara and the Caribbean. Miami was a thought, "because it's so infinitely sordid and untempting." So now Author Truman Capote is settled in Palm Springs, Calif., working away on his first book since In Cold Blood. It's to be called Answered Prayers, said Truman, striking that languid reclining pose that he made famous on the jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms 21 years ago. His new book will have lots of characters and "some of them will be recognizable." That is, if he can find time away from his millions of friends. "Mrs. Winston Guest was here for a week. Senator Javits. Kay Graham. Christopher Isherwood from Los Angeles. I like my friends because they are beautiful, bright and amusing. And I think I'm the same."

. . .

Everybody talks about the good old days in the U.S. at the turn of the century. One gentle but impassioned lady, Dr. Alice Hamilton, remembers it differently--as a grim time when men were immobilized by carbon monoxide gas in steel mills, women suffered brain damage from lead used in the pottery trade and thousands of workers were crippled and died from the inexorable accumulation of poisons in dozens of industries. Almost singlehanded, Dr. Alice drew state and federal attention to the horrors, aroused public indignation and campaigned across the nation until--finally--a body of laws was passed to protect workers. Last week the good doctor, now grown fragile with age, observed her 100th birthday amid family and friends at her home in Hadlyme, Conn. The U.S., she believes, is a much better country now than when she began her crusade. "It has shed many injustices, much blindness, ignorance, arrogance, even ruthlessness." If that is true, she shares the credit.

. . .

It was raining buckets outside the gym at George Washington University. And inside too, it seemed, as Senator J. William Fulbright sat on the bench watching his team battle it out. "It looked to me like the opposition had all the big guys," he said, when it was all over and his team had come in on the uninspired end of a 53-38 score. But why this sudden interest in basketball for an old football fan? It turns out that one of G.W.'s intramural squads has christened itself "the Fulbrights"-complete with red shirts emblazoned with a white dove on the front--and J. William was there to cheer the boys on. After all, he reasoned, "If I got up at 5 a.m. to see the President leave, why shouldn't I show up here?"

. . .

"If he doesn't want to be king, he can always fall back on acting," said one of the ladies in the audience. That might be stretching it a bit. Yet there was no doubt that Britain's Bonnie Prince Charles was the wow of the annual Trinity Revue at Cambridge. He played a dozen roles in the romp, from parson to pop singer, at one point had himself wheeled onstage in a garbage can to mimic the local dustman, who won fleeting fame by waking Charles with his singing at 7 a.m. each morning when the prince first came to Trinity. For gags, Charles tossed off some real grabbers--or at least his listeners thought so. "Why, why, why do cows have bells?" asked Charles, and replied, "Because their horns don't work." Then, at the finale, he strode offstage with a pretty girl and the line: "I must admit I do like giving myself heirs."

. . .

"Talking about short stories is all right and writing about them is all right, but dropping a rock on an egg isn't hatching one. And having a rock to drop isn't the equivalent of having an egg." Once through that scrambled logic, William Saroyan, one of America's more prolific short story writers, continued with a more hard-boiled dissertation on the state of the art in the current Kenyan Review. Never let it be said that the short story is dying, wrote Saroyan. "The comedians of nightclubs and television tell short stories almost without exception: Jackie Gleason, Bill Cosby, Jackie Vernon, Flip Wilson. Are these told stories any good? Well, they're funny, and that's always good."

. . .

Amid all the anti-heroes and heroines, it's refreshing to see someone taking their stardom seriously. In London for her version of Mame, Ginger Rogers holds the kind of court they used to in the 1930s--which, of course, is when she learned the game. Her dressing-room walls and ceiling are lined in pale-pink raw silk; 6,000 pieces of inset mirror glass glitter like diamonds. There, across a deep, cream-colored carpet, Ginger receives friends, fans and the press, while reclining on a canopied couch flanked by white pedestals supporting silver lamps. Says Producer Harold Fielding: "I felt that visitors would expect to see an aura of glamour, something that spelled Hollywood." It spells something else, too: Success. That kind of hoopla helped Mame to reach advance bookings of almost $1,000,000, the biggest ever in the British theater.

. . .

When he began directing the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theater's production of Woyzeck, Ingmar Bergman decreed rehearsals be open to the public. And critics as well? That depends. After one rehearsal, Bergman spotted Bengt Jahnsson, drama critic of Stockholm's Dagens Nyheter and a man who has been none too kind in the past. Without a word, Bergman cut off the critic's retreat and--socko!--floored him with a punch on the jaw. "I wanted to do it for a long time," said Bergman. "It felt good." Said a startled Jahnsson: "He was surprisingly strong. If we must discuss theatrical criticism, there are more effective ways to do it, though perhaps not quite so original."

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