Denmark's Bent Larsen, generally considered the second-best chess player in the West, flew into Reykjavik for a first-hand look at the war of nerves between Soviet World Champion Boris Spassky and U.S. Challenger Bobby Fischer. "Spassky has been thrown off balance," Larsen said. "He probably is boiling inside, and that is not good for him. But he is a strong player, and it is too early to count him out." Two days later, Fischer opened the tenth game of the 24-game tournament with his favorite gambit: arriving nine minutes late. Spassky's countergambit: arriving three minutes after Fischer. In the actual game, Fischer, who has not been beaten since opening day, won a smashing victory in 56 moves to lead by 61 points to 31 (more than halfway to the 121 he needs to become champion). Said Larsen: "This looks like the end."

Jane Austen may have been a great novelist, but her hair was a mess. That bit of historical minutia was revealed by Scientist J.A. Swift of Britain's Unilever Research after an exhaustive analysis of a lock of hair that had been bequeathed by Miss Austen to her niece and ended among the relics of the Jane Austen Society. His scanning electron microscope, Swift reported in the erudite scientific journal Nature, showed that changes brought about in individual hairs by brushing and combing were absent from the lock of the woman who wrote Pride and Prejudice. "It must be concluded," said Swift, "that within the last three years of her life, Jane Austen did little to tend her hair and that brushing, combing and handling were minimal."

Was that really Adolf Hitler taking a stroll in London's Hyde Park? "It's astonishing how many people don't even remember what he looked like," said Sir Alee Guinness, who is playing the Fuehrer in a movie called Hitler: The Last Ten Days. "When we photographed some tests in Hyde Park, with me all made up and in uniform, not a soul turned around. But the taxi drivers know. I had one who kept looking at me. When I got out, he went round the block and came back again. He stopped alongside me and asked, 'You are an actor, aren't you?' I reassured him and he went on his way."

What's 6 ft. 4 in. tall, throws a knockout punch, and has long furry ears? It's John Wayne, drawling veteran of over 200 he-man films, dressed up in a rabbit costume. With enthusiastic support from Laugh-ln's comedienne Sarah Kennedy, Wayne is impersonating the Easter bunny on next month's opening of Laugh-In. Acting the role of a rabbit did not come easily. When he arrived onstage, the Duke growled: "The first guy who snickers gets a broken face." After the ordeal was over, he remarked: "I felt pretty funny in that bunny suit, but it could have been worse. They could have dressed me up as a liberal."

After 8 1/2 months of pregnancy, Dancer Juliet Prowse, 35, decided that marriage might be a good idea. She flew off from Hollywood to Stateline, Nev., with Singer John McCook and ordered up a wedding at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel --only to find that she was too late. The baby was on its way, so she rushed to a hospital and was delivered of a boy, 7 Ibs. 15 oz. Said McCook: "This will postpone the marriage for a while."

"I seem to look better in 17th century costume than I do in 20th," mused Author John Updike, all gussied up in jerkin and billowing laced shirt, and ready to tootle his recorder in an outdoor performance of Bach and Pachelbel. To celebrate 17th Century Day in Ipswich, Mass., Updike wrote a pageant about local history in 1968, and the citizens are once again donning their costumes. "Our texts illustrate the nobler elements of the Puritan heritage," goes a line from the play, "a faith in the law, a passion for the things of the mind, a habit of independence."

Will superstardom spoil Jeeves, the world's best-loved superservant? Not at all, say the creators of Jesus Christ Superstar, who intend to build a new musical around Jeeves and the dryly dotty types populating the novels of P.O. Wodehouse. "Wodehouse has been our favorite writer for 15 years," says Lyricist Tim Rice. "He's the funniest man in the English language," adds Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. How will it all turn out? "It won't be an opera," says Webber. "It will be more like a musical --modern, but not out-and-out rock." Rice chimes in: "Basically it will be like J.C. Superstar--what we consider good middle-of-the-road theater." -

Life with once-celebrated Physical Culturist Bernarr ("Body Love") MacFadden had its ups and downs, according to Widow Jonnie Lee MacFadden. Up in an airplane, he parachuted into the Hudson River at the age of 83, tried the Seine at 84 but missed and ended up in an empty lot. Once, she recalled, "he wanted me to jump with him, and he wanted me to wear red tights with 'MacFadden' lettered across the buttocks. I wouldn't do it." Jonnie Lee, 66, who has published her own health tome, called Barefoot in Eden, said that her husband kept his virility right up to his death in 1955 at the age of 87. Her own prescription: vegetables, wheat germ and bicycle riding. But, she added, "I believe that the best exercise is sex, dear."

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