The Dallas Cowboys' Roger Staubach turns out to be as fast with a theological hot potato as he is with a football. At a post-Super Bowl press conference Roger was expatiating on his Christian principles when a reporter asked him if he thought there were zone defenses "up there." Staubach: "From what I understand, every pass is a touchdown up there." Reporter: "If you're a defensive back, every pass wouldn't be a touchdown." Staubach: "They don't have any defensive backs up there." -

"Less," said the late architect, Mies van der Rohe, "is more." Folk Singer Joan Baez and Husband David Harris--so happily married when he was in jail on a three-year sentence for refusing induction into the Army--have found since his release ten months ago that more marriage is less happiness. "Living together is getting in the way of our relationship," David has told his friends to explain the split. "I agreed with that," says Joan. "We're continuing to work together, and our son Gabriel is thriving, and that's all that matters anyway."

While making Exodus in Israel in 1960, Movie Producer Otto Preminger found himself so in love with his costume coordinator, ex-Model Patricia Hope Bryce, that he wanted to marry her there and then. There was a problem, though: marriages between Jews and non-Jews are impossible in Israel, and Hope's Jewishness was not exactly easy to establish. Otto's solution, says Meyer Weisgal, then head of Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, in his just published autobiography, was to promise the Weizmann Institute a $1,000,000 share in royalties from Exodus in return for Weisgal's vouching for Hope's Jewishness. Not surprisingly, the Rabbinical Court found Weisgal's book fascinating. It has launched an investigation and subpoenaed Weisgal, who is taking legal evasive action and telling people that of course Hope is Jewish--the passage in his book was "only a few playful words."

While writing a doctoral thesis on "Psychological and Social Analysis of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Childhood," Nona Ferdon found something no one else seems to have noticed in a diary that Roosevelt kept during 1902 and 1903, when he was at Harvard. In four entries, there appears a string of numbers and odd symbols. Eventually, a newspaper story produced enough hints from amateur code breakers to show that the numbers stood for vowels (1A, 2-E, etc.), and the symbols were simply unfinished letters. The surprisingly tame translation: "Spent the evening on the lawn and Alice confided in me." Next day: "Worried over Alice all night." Seven months later: "The Commonwealth sails for Europe." Nine months later: "After lunch, have a never-to-be-forgotten walk to the river with my darling. Have to go to New York next Sunday." But who was Alice and who was "my darling"? And above all, why the code?

Actor Robert Mitchum phoned his old friend Rita Hayworth in Beverly Hills. "Hey," he said, "how'd you like to come down here to Mexico and play my mother?" After she finished laughing, she came--not to mother Mitchum but the young man he is out to kill in the film called The Wrath of God. Mitchum has, roughly speaking, the title role: he plays a priest who carries a submachine gun in his Gladstone bag.

Many aficionados of the old Loretta Young Show (1953-61) thought that Loretta's introductions were generally better than the shows themselves. Perhaps NBC thought so too. In any case, the network included her 239 entrances and exits when it sold the series for European release. It turned out to be a bad move; a jury of seven women and five men awarded Loretta Young $559,000 in her breach-of-contract suit on the ground that those old-fashioned dresses and hairdos did her $5,000 worth of damage per show. Loretta, wearing a Jean Louis dress and turban, thanked each juror personally. NBC, wearing a Corporate Image, announced that it would appeal.

It had been a night to forget for former West German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss. First, there was all that embarrassing publicity when two prostitutes snatched his wallet outside Manhattan's Plaza Hotel. And now, ten months later, the district attorney's office wanted him to come back and testify against the culprits. "Pressing political business" would make that impossible, said Strauss. But the ordeal was not over yet. New York State Supreme Court Justice Myles Lane, in dropping the charges against the two, administered a tongue-lashing to the no-show witness. "If everyone were to follow his example," said Justice Lane, "it would be tantamount to giving a carte blanche license to commit crime."

Love can be bad for the ecology in more ways than one. The widely watched TV wedding of Songbird Tiny Tim on the night of Dec. 17, 1969, "drastically undermined" the electricity conservation program of the Consolidated Edison Co., Board Chairman Charles Luce told a Sierra Club conference in Vermont. "Our load went up 200,000 watts," said Luce.

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