Only eight weeks ago, Harold Wilson was riding high; he was leader of his country, had a house with a prestigious address and drew a salary of $36,600 a year. Then, in one short election day, he lost his job, his house and much of his income. Now things are looking up again for the liberal statesman. For the inside story of his ruling years, Wilson will receive close to $250,000--more than he made during his six years as England's Prime Minister.

Believe it or not, she is an experienced horsewoman. But while filming Soldier Blue in Mexico, her mount proved more than Candice Bergen had bargained for, and it tossed her end over end. Gamely, the actress--who has her own Arabian thoroughbred home in California--got right back on and finished filming.

A special fate must have been selected to supervise Joe Louis' bad luck. Endlessly broke, despite his world heavyweight boxing championship, he had to stand by helplessly and watch his ex-wives and the Internal Revenue Service compete for his paycheck. For the past three months Louis, 56, has been hospitalized in Denver with an emotional disorder. This week brought a glimmer of cheer at last. Louis' friends and admirers--among them: Mahalia Jackson, Bill Cosby, B.B. King and Redd Foxx --plan a benefit "Salute to the Champ."

They seek him here, they seek him there, but Jesuit Priest Daniel J. Berrigan, 49, has become a sort of Scarlet Pimpernel of the antiwar underground. Last week he popped up--uninvited but welcomed--at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, Pa., to preach peace. The renegade reverend, who last April was supposed to start a 3 1/2-year sentence for destroying draft records, urged the churchgoers to "refuse to pay taxes, and to aid and abet and harbor people like myself so that a solid wall of conscience confronts the warmakers." Before federal agents got wind of his whereabouts, he got away.

The busy year started with queues still forming for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Then came M*A*S*H, the most talked-about movie of 1970. Getting Straight and Move were disappointing, but that did not slow him down. I Love My Wife is already in the can, and three weeks ago he finished filming Little Murders. To cap it all, Elliott Gould, 31, will star in the first English-speaking film (The Touch) by the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. It took only one film--Getting Straight --for Bergman to decide on the American actor. "I fell for him immediately. He's fantastic." Gould has yet to meet his new director, but a phone conversation with the maestro was enough to overwhelm the easygoing actor: "I felt like I was talking to Abraham Lincoln."

A patient angel who tamed an irascible king while teaching many of his 82 children? Anna Leonowens, the fabled Welsh widow whose problems with Siam's King Mongkut in the 1860s were written into a bestseller of the 1940s, Anna and the King of Siam, was no such heroine. Never mind the book or the stage and screen versions, says Ian Grimble, a Scottish historian. He startled BBC listeners by describing Anna as a bigot, "one of those awful little English governesses, a sex-starved widow." Grimble says he bases his ungallant appraisal on a study of Anna's own books, The English Governess at the Siamese Court and The Romance of the Harem. They were, says Grimble, "pornographic," and "rubbish" --"the sort of books that Calvinists read beneath bedcovers."

Very much the disgruntled husband, French Film Producer-Director Roger Vadim, 42, frankly described his marriage to Jane Fonda, 32, as "not a very satisfactory arrangement." The onetime husband of Brigitte Bardot and father of Catherine Deneuve's son said he really "prefers the company of men. If I had to choose three persons with whom to make a round-the-world cruise, they would all be male if we spent at least one-half of the time in the harbor." Despite his disapproval of Jane's crusading for Indians and against the Viet Nam War, Vadim said they had "not yet discussed divorce." However, he added, "If you feel politics is the most important thing in the world to you, then you must make that choice."

Awash with self-sacrifice and contempt, the New York Jets' defensive captain, Al Atkinson, 27, last week ended his five-year professional football career. But not exactly because the hefty linebacker wanted to chuck football. "What really disgusts me is this quarterback, not thinking for a minute about the average little guys who have families. Right now they're wondering where their leader is." It seems that "this quarterback" (and actor), Joe Namath, 27, had infuriated his teammate by failing to show up for opening practice sessions, a pattern the peripatetic star has followed for three years. Namath, who is also considering retirement, went through the motions of being contrite: "I don't try to hurt anybody in any way. If I have I'm sorry."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.