Actor Richard Burton was rather nervous about his new role ("the most responsible and challenging of my career") as Yugoslavia's President Tito in the movie Sutjeska. So was Tito. "I think he was afraid of being embarrassed," Burton explained. Both of them relaxed a bit, though, after some lengthy confabs about what it was like in World War II, when "Tito" was the code name for Partisan Leader Josip Broz, who gave the Germans a rough time in the Yugoslav mountains. How about a part in the film for Wife Elizabeth Taylor? "She could have played a woman doctor, a partisan who was badly wounded, had both legs amputated and died later," said Burton. But nothing came of it for some reason--sparing audiences the unsettling experience of a legless Liz.

Weddings always bring problems. For the marriage of Pakistan President Yahya Khan's son in Karachi last week there was the need to flush the cobras out of the garden. The task required the blandishments of eight snake charmers. Three cobras were captured--one of them eleven feet long.

In Nigeria, Muhammad Ali finally caught up with Joe Frazier--verbally, at least. "In our last fight," he told cheering Nigerian fans during his second tour of the country, "I gave Joe Frazier such a beating, he was in the hospital for four weeks." It was the referee, he complained, who had robbed him of the heavyweight championship. "I would prefer only international officials from France, the United Kingdom and Nigeria to handle a rematch." Presumably the fight would be held in the auditorium of the United Nations General Assembly.

That protean public performer, Norman Mailer, 48, shuffled through three two-minute rounds with former Light Heavyweight Champion Jose Torres on TV's Dick Cavett Show. After Mailer got his breath, Cavett brought up the subject of the brain damage boxers sustain in the ring compared with that of writers at the bar. Mailer was predictably glad to expound from experience. "The brain damage I suffered here just now," he said, "is far less than I suffer after a night of heavy drinking. My brain isn't as good as it was years ago, but I didn't do any boxing to speak of since then. It was the drinking I did over the years that wrecked half my brain."

"I think there could be a black Vice President," said one man who should know. "I think," said Vice President Spiro Agnew, "that Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, for example, could be elected Vice President."

Is straight the new look for freaks? Charter Freak Abbie Hoffman, 34, seems to be repackaging his anarchism along clean-cut lines. "Every time I turn on the television I see another movie star with long hair," he told an audience of Drew University students. "The counterculture has been co-opted by Warner Bros." So saying, Abbie flicked out his trusty switchblade and hacked off four or five of his own long locks. "Long hair has become an affectation of children of the rich, rather than a form of honest social protest," he explained later. Abbie is also urging students to register and vote. "Perhaps it is possible to have a socialist revolution peacefully through electoral change," he suggests. As for himself, he is going abroad with his wife Anita and will spend his time diapering their 2 1/2-month-old son, america, and writing "a hardcover, theoretical book--an answer to The Greening of America."

Ah so. Emperor Hirohito of Japan, in whose holy name so many suffered so much, was bound to encounter some sticky situations in his good-will tour of the West. All in all, though, it could have been worse. In Paris the reception was a bit chilly, but the program was still so crammed that the exhausted Emperor briefly dropped out for a stint in a chair at Versailles. In London there was a bit of muttering at the motorcade, and someone chopped down the 10-ft. Cryptomeria japonica that Hirohito had just planted in Kew Gardens. But the pointed absence of Earl Mountbatten of Burma from the festivities was smoothed over by a private talk between the Emperor and the Earl, onetime Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia. Hirohito even permitted himself a broad grin at a fellow Oriental--Chi-Chi, the London Zoo's giant panda, who seemed equally glad to see him and his Empress Nagako. In The Netherlands, which has not forgotten the thousands of Dutchmen who died in Japanese prison camps, the authorities took unprecedented precautions; army helicopters constantly hovered over the Emperor's bulletproof auto, and hundreds of Dutch and Japanese security men lined the roads. Demonstrators there were aplenty, but, except for one flying thermos bottle that mottled the windshield, the protesters did no permanent damage to the delicate machinery of protocol, which at week's end sent their Imperial Majesties off to Geneva.

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