Londoners were surprised to see Mia Farrow at the opening of Opium, a one-man show starring Yul Brynner's son Roc. Mia doesn't get around much any more, for increasingly obvious reasons. No one seems to know exactly when she'll have Andre Previn's twins--but Childhood Chum Liza Minnelli, who has been named godmother for the pair, is planning to race the storks to London.

Africans went all out to accommodate vacationing King Frederik IX of Denmark. Kilaguni Lodge in Kenya's big-game country even had a special 7-ft. bed of mahogany-like m'vuli wood built for the towering (6 ft. 3 1/2 in.) monarch. Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere gave Frederik and his Queen Ingrid glasses for their coconut milk, but Nyerere himself took an opened shell, tipped back his head and showed them how it ought to be done.

Stance is important. Also grip. Keep your eye on the ball. Don't forget to follow through. Golf? Yes, and also a parable for the Christian life, as worked out by Billy Graham in a sermon distributed to British golf magazines. Follow the rules, promises the Rev. Billy, and you'll be greeted at the clubhouse by "the greatest pro of all time, Jesus Christ." At the 19th hole?

If trend-setting Couturiers Valentino, Forquet, Oscar de la Renta and others have their way, the well-dressed woman will soon look like Bette Davis on The Late Late Show. The new low, low hemline has been officially named the Midi, but many fashionplates have unkinder words for it. "Extraordinarily ugly," said Mrs. William F. Buckley. Opined a Roman beauty: "I hate it, I'm disgusted by it, I think it's horrible" --adding sagely, "If it becomes real fashion I'll adapt myself to it." Said Mrs. Gianni Agnelli: "I only hope the designers put some slits in it." As for Charlotte Ford Niarchos: "I'll wait to see what Paris has to say."

"It is a disgrace for a handful of radicals to disrupt the opportunities of others to get an education in our colleges today," said South Carolina's Strom Thurmond. Whereupon his student audience at Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University proceeded to disrupt the Senator's speech by pelting him with marshmallows. "Don't be frightened, Senator!" shouted one heckler. "They're not bombs."

After selling Novelist Philip Roth a pair of slacks, a clothing salesman in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., looked at the signature on Roth's check and asked what business he might be in. When he learned Roth's occupation, the helpful merchant told the author of bestselling (420,000 copies plus approximately $500,000 for movie rights) Portnoy's Complaint: "You want some good advice, Mr. Roth? Get out of the writing business. There's no money in it."

While President Nixon delivered his State of the Union address, his predecessor was off fishing. Tanned and fit-looking, Lyndon Baines Johnson left Acapulco for a day's deep-sea cruising in the Pacific, but not before sounding very much like a politician about to make a move. Mexico's President Diaz Ordaz was "my good Mexican friend," Acapulco "the place we enjoy," the Mexican people "the people we love." Does the ex-President really have any ambitions south of the border? A certain Texas judge was rumored to be acting in L.B.J.'s interest when he leased a hacienda and a Texas-size ranch (50,000 acres) in the mountains of Chihuahua.

Resplendent in a magenta shirt and fringed-leather jacket, Dr. Timothy Leary, 49, the guru of psychedelia, heard a Laredo, Texas, jury convict him for the second time of smuggling marijuana from Mexico in his daughter's underwear. "Stay loving and keep cool," advised the smiling impenitent, whose first conviction for the 1965 border incident was thrown out by the Supreme Court. "I am sorry the Government learned nothing in five years."

Speaking of theater critics, his least favorite people, David Merrick once snapped: "I want people to stop swallowing the pap these mediocrities are churning out." But as a prosecution witness in the obscenity trial of the raunchy off-Broadway sex-and-protest farce Che!, the Broadway tycoon churned out some pretty potent criticism of his own: "Patently offensive, vulgar, lewd and very dull." Playwright Lennox Raphael, in Merrick's view, "had no talent whatsoever and should seek vocational guidance."

Shortly before his election to France's august Academic Franchise, Eugene Ionesco, playwright of the bizarre, opened a grab-bag entertainment called Inedits Ionesco on the Left Bank. The collection of sketches and fragments was favorably received. Still, several seats were left unsold; indeed, they were not for sale. Ionesco insisted on sprinkling the audience with human-size dummies of dogs, cats and jackasses.

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