Actor George Segal plays a mean banjo, as he demonstrated last week at a party for his new film, The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox. Trouble is, he doesn't gamble, shoot or ride horses, skills he needed for his part as a shady-dealing frontier cardsharp in the movie. So last year, while George was on location with the film in Colorado, the studio recruited a professional cardsharp from Las Vegas to teach him how to cut the deck, and some genuine cowboys to school him in horseplay. He seemed a natural for the saddle; after all, recalled Segal, "as a child I won first prize in an Andy Devine sing-along contest and second prize in a Tom Mix dance contest." And how does he ride after all those lessons? "Like Andy Devine sings and Tom Mix dances."

From the sound of it, A Star Is Born might just be the death of Singer-Actor Kris Kristofferson. "I'll be a better actor as a result of this, but I'm not sure that I'll even give a damn," says the weary performer, considering the rigors of working with Barbra Streisand. The film features Barbra in the part played by Janet Gaynor back in 1937 and Judy Garland 17 years later. Streisand is not just the leading lady, but the executive producer as well, and the shooting schedule has been dawn-to-dark frantic. Reports Kris: "I'm scared to death of her. The best one-word description of Barbra would be 'formidable.' "

"I had the feeling I was dreaming up a boy's novel," recalled Art Scholar Henri Defoer, head custodian of the Archiepiscopal Museum in Utrecht. Two years ago, while visiting an elderly spinster in eastern Holland to examine a holy statue, he spotted something of greater interest--a painting that hinted of the early Rembrandt. Defoer spent the next two years in research trying to verify his discovery. This week he jubilantly announced his museum's acquisition of Rembrandt's Doop van de Kamerling (The Baptism of the Moor), the artist's second oldest known work. Painted in 1626 when Rembrandt was only 19, the 25-in. by 19-in. discovery depicts the baptism of an Ethiopian courtier by Deacon Philip, as recounted in Acts 8. Defoer, 39, declined to name the painting's last owner or the purchase price. But he made no secret of his own pleasure at the acquisition. Burbled the scholar: "A work of this magnitude one finds only once in five lifetimes."

Africa's answer to Ann Landers, Uganda's President-Dictator Idi Amin, has volunteered his interpretation of the marital split between Britain's Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. Big Daddy expressed "sincere sympathy" over troubles in the royal couple's 16-year marriage, and declared that the breakup should "be a lesson to all of us men to be careful not to marry ladies in very high positions, as husbands in such marriages can summarily be dismissed by their wives." Amin cabled his regrets to Snowdon in Australia, where the photographer kept busy last week with an exhibit of his photos in Sydney. Meg, meanwhile, dutifully returned to her official functions and took Son Viscount Linley to visit the destroyer H.M.S. Hampshire in London. The ship, which she and Snowdon launched in 1961, is about to be scrapped.

"In the old days, ptomaine poisoning was a cover-all," recalled Veteran Actress Ruth Gordon, 79. "If you missed a show and you were young, it meant you were having an abortion. If you were old, it meant you were having a facelift." Gordon, however, was simply having salted codfish balls and mashed potatoes when she sat down to lunch in a Manhattan restaurant with her husband of 33 years, Writer Garson Kanin. The result? A case of ptomaine and three days away from Broadway's Mrs. Warren's Profession, where she is currently starring as a middle-aged madam. "It's a wicked thing," allowed Gordon of her illness. "At least my understudy had a chance to do the part."

Police were mildly surprised to find a fully clothed gentleman posing for pictures in a Washington, D.C., fountain one morning last week. They were astonished to see the same person half an hour later, this time splashing in the Reflecting Pool on the Capitol Mall. "One of the cops asked my photographer something like 'Whatareyadoin?' " recalled Humor Columnist Art Buchwald, who explained that he was merely creating a cover for his new book, Washington Is Leaking. "But that was it. Tourists just walked by--like everybody stands up to their hips in Reflecting Pool water." Well, not exactly. Police intervened when Buchwald tried to change into dry pants behind a parked truck, and the author-model was forced to drive home in a soggy suit.

While Actor Richard Burton continues his sellout run in the Broadway play Equus, Daughter Kate Burton, 18, has staged her own theatrical debut. Kate, a Brown University freshman whose mother is Richard's first wife, Sybil Christopher, speaks six lines in her college's production of Look Homeward, Angel."I don't know if I'll continue acting," she says. "I'm just doing it for fun right now." Papa Burton, 50, seems less tentative about his daughter's future. "She's not interested in going into the theater," he asserts. "She's smart to realize that most actors are perpetually unemployed."

Sequins, satin, but too little soul--that was the way some London critics saw former Supreme Diana Ross last week. Ross, who is now appearing on the screen as the star of Mahogany, appeared on the stage of the New Victoria Theater with a 30-piece orchestra, three dancers and a back-up singing group. "She looked lovely, moved beautifully, but sang with only a two-dimensional plastic perfection," carped the Guardian. Said the critic from the Daily Mirror: "The lady has no depth." Maybe not, but audiences bought up every ticket for the singer's three-day London engagement, and six more concerts have been added at the completion of her 19-city European tour. Even in the plastic version, soul sells.

"Nothing in the letter gave any indication that this was more than an ordinary Joe," explains District Court Judge Kenneth R. McHugh of Hooksett, N.H. The letter in question, concerning a Feb. 23 speeding ticket, had come from Michael Kennedy, 18, son of Ethel Kennedy and her late husband Robert. "I admit my guilt," wrote Michael, an unpaid Senate intern under his Uncle Teddy, "but I ask for personal reasons that this incident be kept as quiet as possible." McHugh fined the culprit $35, then entered the action on the court's public record. "The name didn't mean anything to me," he observed later. "There are a lot of Kennedys around."

In the 1850s, Harriet Tubman guided scores of her fellow slaves to liberty up North. Now she has people moving once again. Among them: Actress Cicely Tyson, who has been negotiating movie rights to a biography of the legendary freedom finder. Tyson has been beaten to the dressing room, however, by Singer-Actress Melba Moore, 30, winner of a 1970 Tony Award for the Broadway musical Purlie. Moore will portray Tubman in a short segment of The American Woman: Portraits of Courage, an ABC-TV show scheduled for May 20. "She's someone black people know about from when they were children in school," says Melba of her subject. "She belongs to us."

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