"I've been singing and dancing since I was a kid, and I never had a chance to use it in any of my movies," complains Actress Raquel Welch, 35. That, she says, is why she has begun a ten-week nightclub tour through Mexico, the U.S. and Europe. In Mexico City, she notes happily, a sellout crowd of 1,200 paid $80 apiece to catch her song-and-dance act on New Year's Eve. At the Concord Hotel in upstate New York, 3,400 customers came for her show, setting a record for the hotel. Says Raquel:

"I think people sit down at 80 bucks a whack to have a look at somebody who is a movie star, who is a bigger-than-life image." Do they get their money's worth? "They want to see me out of curiosity. When I deliver a performance, I think that's the coup."

There is a set of chopsticks used by Richard Nixon in China, a souvenir can of caviar from Russia, a bronze bust of the former President and a full display of cufflinks, matchboxes, pens and playing cards from his years in the White House. All are part of a one-room minimuseum opened on Nixon's 63rd birthday last week at the San Clemente Inn, near his California home. "Not everyone approves, but every day people thank me for doing it," said the inn's owner, Paul Presley, adding that the former President had given his blessing to the project. Despite its decidedly small scale, the exhibit just might be the last, as well as the first, to be dedicated to Nixonalia. In Washington, a three-judge federal panel denied the ex-President possession of the 42 million documents and 880 White House tapes accumulated during his Administration. Nixon's claim that the material belonged solely to him was dismissed as "without merit" by the court.

Suffering from dry skin? Maybe a wrinkle or two? Consider the remedy used by Actress Doris Day, 51. "One night a week I make it a practice to cover my entire body, forehead to toes, with Vaseline," she reveals in a new biography, Doris Day, Her Own Story, by A.E. Hotchner. "I then put on a flannel nightgown and lightweight socks to cover my feet and go to sleep like that." The gooey cure poses some problems. She cautions: "If you're sleeping with a man, husband or otherwise, you are not a very appetizing number in this condition, and it's best to be in a separate bed on this occasion."

At 58, she is no longer the same young girl who shared a sleeping bag with Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls back in 1943. "I've reached an age where I am starting a new career as a character actress," says Ingrid Bergman, now at work on her 43rd film. The movie, which will be titled A Matter of Time in English-speaking countries and Nina elsewhere, stars Bergman as an aged contessa and Liza Minnelli as a young hotel chambermaid enthralled by the older woman's reminiscences. Bergman, who still needs nearly an hour-long makeup job to affect the wrinkled look, says the contessa "is just the opposite of my own character because she is destroying herself by dreams of her youth." She adds, "I don't dream about my past. I accept my age and make the best of it."

The playbills called it a "musical romantic comedy," but the critics decided that Home Sweet Homer was tragic.

Loosely based on Homer's Odyssey, with Yul Brynner playing the Greek wanderer, the show had endless problems during a yearlong eleven-city tour, including a demand by Writer Erich (Love Story) Segal that his name be removed from the credits. He must have known something.

"There is no intermission, evidently a precaution against losing the entire audience at half tune," wrote New York Post Critic Douglas Watt. Said Clive Barnes of the New York Times: "At times you could imagine yourself watching a parody called Kung Fu Comes to Athens." Enough, said the show's producers, and closed the doors after one performance.

According to a Ford Motor Co. insider, rumors of a separation between Henry Ford II and his Italian-born second wife Cristina, whom he married in 1965, "were getting to be so well known that even gas-station attendants in Grosse Pointe were talking about it."

Some of that gas-pump speculation had been fueled by Ford's arrest for tipsy driving in California last year while in the company of Kathleen DuRoss, 36, a sometime model. Last week an attorney for Ford confirmed that the Detroit industrialist, 58, and Cristina, 46, are indeed living apart. "No action of divorce has been commenced by either party," said the lawyer, declining to discuss any reasons for the split.

While Dad tends to this year's campaign, Steve Ford, 19, will be stalking horses, dark and otherwise, in California. The President's youngest son has abandoned Utah State University and headed further west to work for California Horse Breeder George Texeria in Mission Viejo. "He found that he had plenty of extra tune in Utah," explained a White House spokesman last week. "He just couldn't find the kind of job he wanted." Denying the suggestion that Steve's move is really an attempt to leave college, the White House pointed out that he has enrolled at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona and will attend classes there.

Great Britain's Princess Anne dresses like "a royal auto mechanic." Rockmaster Elton John "would be the campiest spectacle in the Rose Parade if he entered." Singer Bette Midler seems unaware that "pantaloons went out with hoop skirts." So says Hollywood Designer Richard Blackwell, 53, in his 16th annual "worst-dressed" list. Blackwell, who named Jacqueline Onassis among the worst-dressed women of 1971, gave the top award this year to Daughter Caroline Kennedy, 18. She looks like "a shaggy dog in pants," snipped Blackwell, adding, "Who says bad taste isn't inherited?"

His topless swimsuits have become ancient history, and the thong never really caught on. So Designer Rudi Gernreich has come up with a new entry in the field of frivolous fashion: boxer shorts for women. Says he: "You can jog in them, sleep in them, wear them around the house, around the pool or over a bare swimsuit" These modified B.V.D.s will appear in stores throughout the U.S. by March and will sell for $5 to $7. The men's garters, he quickly adds, are not included.

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