One rich supporter rewrote his will to cancel a $1 million bequest; a school official received a hate letter addressed "Dear Communist Pimp." The reason? A black-studies director at Claremont Colleges near Los Angeles had hired Communist Angela Davis as a part-time lecturer. Said Davis, back in a classroom for the first time since U.C.L.A. fired her in 1970: "All I was interested in was teaching a nice, small, quiet seminar. I really didn't want it to become a carnival-type situation." So as soon as she got through her first class, she set off for New York City to help another bashful fighter, Heavyweight Champ Muhammad All, promote his new autobiography.

He seldom smiled, never allowed his guests to smoke, and in 28 years as moderator of NBC's Meet the Press turned the Q. and A. into a branch of the martial arts. Even so, when Lawrence Spivak, 75, faced his final guest, President Ford, and went on to a party in his honor last week, some 250 politicians and former panelists came by to bid farewell. Among those on hand:

Senator Ted Kennedy, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and James Farley, 87, Franklin Roosevelt's Postmaster General and Spivak's first Meet the Press TV guest back in 1947. The bonhomie pleased Spivak but did not soften him up. "Somebody once told me," he recalled with satisfaction, " 'you've made a career out of saying things other people would get punched in the nose for suggesting.' "

"I'm always nervous when I hear my own plays," confessed Lillian Hellman, 70, who gritted her way through an evening of Hellman read by the likes of Christopher Plummer, Mildred Natwick, and Jane Fonda. The New York City tribute to the playwright benefited the Committee for Public Justice, a civil liberties organization she founded in 1970. Noting that friends she had not seen in 20 years had called up asking for tickets, the author of The Little Foxes and The Children's Hour greeted the occasion with typical hauteur. "I'm appalled," she laughed. "Appalled that anyone would think I'm handling the tickets."

Four months after his father disappeared, Son James Hoffa has put his own campaign for union office into gear. Appearing at Teamsters' Local 299 in Detroit, the younger Hoffa, 34, won a landslide election to a $400-per-week job as the local's director of organizers. Meanwhile, his father fired a few parting shots in the December issue of Playboy, which had interviewed him before he vanished on July 30. "The only guy who needs a bodyguard is a liar, a cheat, a guy who betrays friendship," Jimmy told Playboy's reporter. "Never was afraid in my life and don't intend to start tomorrow. Who's gonna bother me?"

"Nyet"was the answer to Andrei Sakharov, 54, after he applied for an exit visa to Norway to claim his 1975 Nobel

Peace Prize. The Soviet H-bomb pioneer was told he was barred from travel because of his knowledge of state secrets, but more probably it was because of his crusade for civil liberties in the U.S.S.R. Sakharov's distinguished predecessors, Authors Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), were denied visas when they won Nobel Prizes for Literature in 1958 and 1970.

Now in Morocco filming The Life of Jesus, Director Franco Zeffirelli has assembled a decidedly ecumenical cast. To portray Christ at various stages of his life, he has chosen a newborn Berber baby, a two-year-old Arab boy, a five-year-old Jewish lad and Actor Robert Powell, 29, an Anglican. For the Virgin Mary, the Roman Catholic director settled on Argentine-born Olivia Hussey, 23, who first starred in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet eight years ago. Her religious preferences? "This may sound a bit far out," she says, "but two years ago a medium told me that I had been the Virgin Mary in a previous life." Yes, a bit.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.