"The food wasn't too hot, the bar was poorly manned, and the lights were too high so everyone's wrinkles showed," complained Washington Post Reporter Sally Quinn, 34, describing last week's fund-raising gala at Washington's Kennedy Center. Held to salute the Center's Board Chairman Roger Stevens, 65, the black-tie dinner and show had featured Jacqueline Onassis as chairman and star attraction, Gerald and Betty Ford, Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, a clutch of Kennedys and other Washington celebrities. But Sally was unimpressed. "Most of the VIPs looked as if they'd really rather be home in bed," she snipped. As for Jackie: "Usually when you try to smile all the time that way, your teeth get dry, and your lips stick to your teeth. How does she do it?" The whole evening was "an enormous letdown," concluded Quinn. "Nobody really has a chance to talk or mingle with any of the celebrities. Only the hard-core climbers are going to hover around Jackie or the other biggies." Sic simper, Sally.

The pale fellow sporting the Indian loincloth is Irish Actor Richard Harris, 45, all painted up for his role in The Return of a Man Called Horse. In the movie, a sequel to A Man Called Horse (1970), the actor plays an 18th century colonist who leaves America and returns to England, dislikes what he sees, then comes back to the colonies to live among the natives. Apparently the trip is quite enough for Harris. "We wrote a scene at the end in which he's old and he dies," Harris says of his character. "One Horse is all right, but two is enough."

One expert in sex therapy called the book "technically instructive"; another doctor, however, warned that the author's "circus-trick" love-making techniques could prove fatal to the weak of heart. The object of their testimony: a raunchy paperback autobiography by Porn Queen Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat. After deliberating for nearly five hours at London's Old Bailey courthouse, a jury of nine men and three women found the British publisher of the book, titled Inside Linda Lovelace, innocent of obscenity charges. Linda declared herself "ecstatic," but others were less pleased. Groused Labor M.P. Neil Kinnock, when told that court costs would be paid out of public funds: "The taxpayer has just contributed -L-20,000 to the promotion of a soft-porn book because of our stupid obscenity laws."

For his first concert tour of the West Coast since 1948, Pianist Vladimir Horowitz almost began on a bad note. During a pre-concert shopping excursion through Seattle, Horowitz, 71, suddenly found himself wedged in a supermarket turnstile. "I pushed it one way, and it would not move," he recalled. "I pushed it the other way. It would not move. I never saw anything like it. I said, 'Goodbye, I'm gone forever. Finito.' " Supermarket employees finally managed to free the imprisoned virtuoso after a 15-minute struggle with the balky machinery, however, and Vladimir survived to play before a sellout crowd at the 3,100-seat Seattle Opera House.

he once campaigned for the vice presidency, but found real fame as a TV pitchman for American Express, joked Bill Miller, running mate with Barry Goldwater back in 1964. Miller, now 61, was speaking at the Washington Press Club's annual congressional dinner on the ironies of presidential politics. "I lost the vice presidency by 16 million votes. I wasn't invited anyplace for six years," he noted. "In 1972, Sarge Shriver lost the vice presidency by nearly 20 million votes--and [now] he's running for President." Still, there was one dividend from the oblivion that followed the 1964 campaign. "I got a TV commercial," said Miller, referring to his "nobody-knows-me" credit card ad. "But as a result of the commercial, I am now known by everyone--and so American Express canceled my contract."

With her second child expected later this month, Actress Tuesday Weld probably had maternity rather than method acting on her mind during the filming of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. The ABC-TV film, to be shown on March 7, stars Exorcist Actor Jason Miller as the Lost Generation novelist (The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night) and Weld as his exotic and eventually psychotic wife Zelda. Unlike Miller, who read a small shelf of Fitzgerald books and biographies before tackling the script, Weld insists that she did absolutely nothing to prepare for her role. "What appealed to me most was that it had to be done in three weeks," she confesses. "That was just about the amount of time I wanted to spend. After that I get tired."

The two-week-long will-she-or-won't-she drama was over. Citing what she described as "unjustifiable criticism" leveled at her husband, New York's Senator Jacob Javits, Marion Javits quit her $67,500-a-year job as a public relations consultant for Iran's national airline. Her decision obviously relieved the Senator, who is both a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a leading advocate of U.S. support for Israel. But some feminists, among them Ms. magazine's Gloria Steinem, thought that the conflict-of-interest problem in the Javits household might have been solved in another way. Said Steinem: "There was never any discussion of [Senator] Javits quitting."

For the first time in more than a year, rubbernecks gathered outside the compound that was once known as the Florida White House, hoping to catch a glimpse of the former First Lady. Accompanied by four Secret Service agents, Pat Nixon had come to Key Biscayne to take inventory of the family possessions at the ex-President's property there, which is for sale (a few nibbles, but no takers yet). After completing her list and taking a dip in the still cared-for pool, Pat jetted off to New York and less serious business: an evening at the Broadway musical A Chorus Line with Daughter Tricia Nixon Cox.

Dressed in long Johns, a wool cap and running shoes, Actor Bruce Dern looked suspicious to the gendarmes on the predawn shift in Paris, a city where jogging is not one of the more common early-morning sports. When the cops caught up with him in the Tuileries gardens, the actor had some trouble convincing them that he was only doing his daily twelve-mile run. Dern, 39, wanted to stay in shape while filming Claude Chabrol's new movie The Twist, in which he plays a writer who is married to Ann-Margret but dallying with Sydne Rome. All that exercise paid off cosmetically in the film, Dern insists. Co-star Rome "is 15 years younger," he says, "but my legs are in better condition."

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