Margot Fonteyn danced the pas de deux from Swan Lake while Isaac Stern played the violin. Van Cliburn knocked off a Hungarian rhapsody. Shirley Verrett brought down the house with Donizetti. Sol Hurok was celebrating his 60th year as an entrepreneur with a salute from his stars. The audience that packed the Metropolitan Opera House at up to $100 a ticket in tribute to the 85-year-old Russian immigrant was stellar too. In the crowd: Vanderbilts, Astors, Roosevelts, Whitneys, Cristina Ford, Jackie and Aristotle Onassis, and the Prince and Princess Alfonso de Borbon of Spain. A visitor to Hurok's office before the gala remarked that it was too bad that all the profits were going to the arts research library in Lincoln Center instead of to Sol himself. "But you can't take it with you," the caller observed. "I'm not planning to go anyplace," replied Hurok without pause.

A Tory sportswriter? David Eisenhower, stepping up to bat with his first weekly column for the Philadelphia Bulletin, sounded a bit like one. "The rhetoric of change tingles the modern American," he noted, but baseball should look to its traditions. "Fans want a pleasant afternoon in a pleasant spot in the city, time to reminisce and," added David awkwardly but enthusiastically, "a rooting part in exhorting their players on to the legendary heights that came before." Hired by the Bulletin at an undisclosed salary, David, 25, will track the Phillies on tour and report other sports as well. This will give him a chance to warm up his typewriter. Said the President's son-in-law: "I intend to write about more serious subjects."

"I fell in love with this man, and I am pleased to say he fell in love with me," Liza Minnelli, 27, the Oscar-winning singer-actress, announced, batting her spiky eyelashes. The man: British Actor Peter Sellers, 47, whom Liza had been visiting for a week or so on the set of his new film Soft Beds and Hard Battles. "I suppose we shall live in London now," Liza added, declining to say whether they would get married. One hitch, of course, is that Sellers is currently wed. Meanwhile, there was Liza's previous engagement to Desi Arnaz Jr., 21, to dispose of. According to Liza, it just melted. Actress Britt Ekland, the second of Sellers' three wives, was not impressed. "He must have used one of his disguises on her," she told a London gossip.

If Actor Burt Reynolds could do it, why shouldn't Comedienne Phyllis Diller? Last year Burt, wearing nothing more than a broad grin, turned up as the two-page pinup in a woman's magazine.

Now Phyllis, choked in rhinestones and shod in gold boots and waders, has been chosen as Field and Stream's first centerfold to celebrate the magazine's 78th anniversary. Her measurements? "Approximately those of a striped bass."

After a bleak winter following her husband's defeat, Eleanor McGovern is writing a book based largely on her "introspections" in the bulging black notebooks that she kept during the long campaign. She is also hitting the lecture circuit with commencement speeches at colleges and high schools. Eleanor addresses herself to the Watergate scandal as a caution to graduates. "If I could give one gift to each of you," she says, "it would be the ability to draw a simple line--that line you will not cross."

Columnist Art Buchwald has a fascinating new theory about Last Tango in Paris: "It is really a simple, heartwarming film about two people trying to rent the same apartment in Paris."

All that naughtiness, why that's only to keep Maria Schneider from getting the lease. "You see Brando's mind working.

He figures if he rapes the girl, she'll go away." Anyone who has searched for a flat in Paris would understand, Buchwald wrote. "I don't know if Last Tango in Paris is a great movie or not," Buchwald sums up his critique, "but I believe that Director Bertolucci has made an important social statement about one of the real outrages of our time, which happens to be the housing shortage in France."

Even though it was held in the Convention Center at Reno's Harrah's Hotel, it was a small party by show-biz standards. But as bar mitzvahs go, it was everything a 13-year-old boy could ask for--tables laden with Jewish delicacies; $10,000 in savings bonds, as well as expensive doodads from 400 admiring guests. It was all for Mark Sidney Davis, the adopted son of Actress May Britt and black Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., who was converted to Judaism in 1954. Sammy toasted May and his present wife, Altovise, a singer, then presented Mark with a set of the Encyclopaedia Judaica.

J. Paul Getty, 80, has sent the best of his art collection on to California where he plans to move. But home for the oil billionaire, one of the world's two richest men,* is still Sutton Place, the Tudor mansion 27 miles southwest of London where Henry VIII wooed Anne Boleyn.

Usually kept at bay by eight Alsatian dogs and forbidding signs, the public was invited to tramp through house and grounds for the benefit of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. While Getty stayed closeted in his private quarters, the visitors saw few clues to his notoriously private life except for photos of his grandchildren, his books (including Richard Nixon's Six Crises) and his lions, Teresa and Nero, with whom Getty likes to spend an hour or two a day.

* Howard Hughes may or may not be richer. Only their accountants know for sure, but estimates for both fortunes run as high as $1.5 billion.

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