Monday, Feb. 07, 1972

Tall, white and handsome, the Most Rev. Michael Ramsey, hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion, made ecclesiastical history by preaching in Manhattan's Roman Catholic St. Patrick's Cathedral at a service attended by Terence Cardinal Cooke and Archbishop lakovos of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America. He also caught a performance of the controversial rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar and observed: "In spite of everything, a bit of Christianity did come over." Other Ramseyisms: "There is a bit of a wish for women priests in England, but I should be anxious not to go too fast for fear of upsetting the cause of Christian unity. I can foresee the day when all Christians might accept the Pope as Presiding Bishop. Perspectives change, and we must give the bag a good shake and see what happens."

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Film Star Michael Caine's new movie Pulp, now being shot in Malta, is surfing the current wave of nostalgia with a re-creation of old Holly wood times. Pint-sized Mickey Rooney and gravel-larynxed Lionel Stander are playing a couple of gangsters, and four Maltese cats are masquerading as Mae West, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich. But what really catches the Zeitgeist of those crazy days is the bit where Rooney gets shot and Stander does a backward somersault into the pool to surface in the middle of a floating bar.

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Transplanting human hearts is a family business in Cape Town, South Africa. Dr. Christiaan Barnard, 49, is famous for performing the world's first one in 1967 as well as seven others since then. Barnard's chief assistant in all of them was his kid brother--quiet, unassuming Dr. Marius Barnard, 44. Now Marius has completed his own first heart transplant, and Patient John Montgomery is progressing "exceptionally well." Off on a South American cruise with his young wife and baby, Brother Chris cabled congratulations: "I couldn't be more proud if I had done the operation myself."

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What does one do to get a hug from Elvis Presley? Richard Nixon knows. During a visit with the President, according to Washington Columnist Jack Anderson, Elvis asked Nixon if he could be issued a Federal Narcotics Bureau badge to add to his collection of police badges. "See that he gets it," said the President to an aide--then looked somewhat disconcerted as Elvis, tearful with happy gratitude, enfolded him in a bear hug.

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The year 1975 is going to be a Holy Year, said Pope Paul VI, so let's clean up the Holy City. His Holiness was not referring to litter. "A certain pornographic license and debased morals" have crept into Roman life, he said. Nude magazines have proliferated, and striptease has become a common art form in nightclubs. The pilgrims who visit Rome during a Holy Year are granted plenary indulgences for their sins, but it would hardly do for them to encounter too many temptations in the very city that the Pope called "custodian of memories which are among the most sacred."

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Canada's Premier, the proud parent of month-old Justin Trudeau, was given a copy of Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care. "Very interesting," said Pierre Trudeau. "I knew he was an antiwar leader, but I never realized he knew anything about babies."

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Times must be hard for the enemies of capitalist decadence; Russia's Literaturnaya Gazeta has laid down a heavy ideological barrage against Film Director Alfred Hitchcock, accusing him of "antihumanistic attitude toward art" and "psychological sadism." But as so often happens, a Communist putdown is a bourgeois blurb. "Millions of his spectators," says the Gazeta, "take Hitchcock's sinister feelings seriously and sigh with relief when the dark in the movie house is dispelled and the lights come on again."

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"I wasn't eager for the part," says Actress Lee Grant. No wonder. The part was that of Sophie Portnoy--the smothering mother who gives motherhood a bad name--in the movie version of Philip Roth's bestselling novel Portnoy's Complaint. "During the filming, I would look at myself in the mirror and feel that I had disappeared," Miss Grant recalls, "and here would be this awful person that I couldn't shake until the movie was over." Actor Dick Benjamin, who plays Portnoy, seems to have felt the same way. "We worked beautifully together," says Lee, "but between scenes he still saw me as Sophie--and very hard to take."

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