Can anyone with a Nobel Prize and a novel currently on the bestseller lists be financially "desperate"? That is Russian Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn's own word for his own situation. His books are banned in the U.S.S.R. and his royalties are piling up in Switzerland, where he cannot get at them. As word of his plight spread, some unusual Samaritans offered to help. First came Hollywood Writer Albert Maltz, once jailed and blacklisted for refusing to tell a congressional committee whether he was a Communist. Maltz said that the Soviets owe him some $34,000 in royalties on his writing (The Cross and the Arrow), and should pay it all to Solzhenitsyn, "an incredible human being, one of the moral giants." Then came two Pulitzer-prizewinning novelists, Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men) and Bernard Maiamud (The Fixer), who also announced that they wanted their Russian royalties paid to Solzhenitsyn. But the Soviets do not have any copyright treaties with the West, and they deny any obligation to pay royalties to Americans. Besides, said one top official, Solzhenitsyn doesn't need any help because he is "well off." Actually the Russians allow the novelist to get a trickle of money from Switzerland (taxed at 40%), but he has to live very modestly. As for the Soviets turning over money from other writers, Solzhenitsyn said, "I'm convinced they won't give me a single kopeck."

"So they sent it and I read it and I thought eccccchh." Barbra Streisand was recalling the script of Up the Sandbox, the just-released film in which she plays a daydreaming housewife who flirts with Fidel Castro and blows up the Statue of Liberty. Barbra soon changed her mind, accepted the part and went off to Kenya to film one of the daydreams. While there she had a blue flower painted on her cheek, put together her own Samburu tribal costume and sat for a chat with an African and his two wives. "How would you like Barbra as your third wife?" asked one onlooker. The African said nothing but looked apprehensive.

She wasn't suggesting for a minute that the law be changed, but Bess Myerson, onetime Miss America and now New York City Commissioner of Consumer Affairs, did sound a bit wistful as she told a Daily News columnist how the medieval French used to keep merchants honest. A royal edict of 1481 held that "anyone who sells butter that contains stones or other things to add to the weight will be put into our pillory; then said butter will be placed on his head until entirely melted by the sun. Dogs may lick him and people offend him with whatever defamatory epithets they please without offense to God or king." Alas, the commissioner concluded, "we are more gentle toward transgressors today."

"What fun it was--all the ridiculous simple things we did! The excitement was tremendous. One day in August we made $5 selling lemonade..." So trilled Lee Radziwill in a little memoir entitled Opening Chapters, the first (and so far only) installment of her prospective volume of reminiscences. Running a slender 1,500 words in the January Ladies' Home Journal, and accompanied by snapshots of Lee and Sister Jackie with their dog and some horses, the article so delighted the Journal's publishers that they threw a party. Truman Capote came to render homage: "Charming, well written, and she wrote it herself." The star guest was Jacqueline Onassis herself, whose most recent recollections probably involve the problems of being photographed while sunbathing. Liberal Sage J.K. Galbraith greeted her accordingly: "Why, Jackie! How good to see you with your clothes on!"

"They were careless people," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald of two leading characters in The Great Gatsby. "They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Paramount Pictures thought it knew just the actress to play the careless Daisy Buchanan in the David Merrick production of the 1925 novel: Ali MacGraw, wife of Paramount's executive vice president Robert Evans. Then Evans and the actress separated, and the studio went looking for a new leading lady. Among those it tested: Faye Dunaway, Candice Bergen and Katharine Ross. The final choice: Mia Farrow, who, despite a case of flu, donned a 1920s' costume, took a screen test, and then pronounced herself "thrilled and excited and looking very forward to making the film."

As faithful as Santa Claus, Bob Hope arrived in the Far East on his 22nd annual Christmas tour of military bases. From Korea to Viet Nam, Hope offered the familiar smorgasbord of pretty girls (like Miss World) and buffoonery (like dressing up as a samurai). Can this show go on forever? Hope is now 69, and he told a luncheon in Tokyo that the 1972 tour would probably be his last. But then he added: "If some kind of emergency arises, I may burst out."

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