"I felt like a sumo wrestler," grumbled Actor Peter Ustinov, reflecting on his scanty costume in The Life of Jesus. "But I'd rather wear diapers than nothing. I'm not very decorative anyway." Cast as a hefty King Herod by Director Franco Zeffirelli, Ustinov makes his biggest splash when he drops by the Roman baths for a dip with his fellow dignitaries. "Romans talk more freely in the bath," quipped the actor, adding that his watery scene was "not long enough for me to catch a cold." The movie, which features Olivia Hussey as the Virgin Mary, Robert Powell as Christ, and James Mason as Joseph of Arimathea, is due on television next spring. Ustinov, who played the emperor Nero in the 1951 film Quo Vadis, insists he is happy in the role of a heavy. "In religious films," he notes, "the best parts go to members of the opposition."

French President Charles de Gaulle acted "in the manner of a supreme commander asking for information from a sector commander" when he first met West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt in 1959. Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, on the other hand, led the way to a well-stocked party when he welcomed Willy, then Chancellor of West Germany, to the Crimea years later. Brandt's account of both meetings is part of his upcoming memoirs, Encounters and Insights, the first installment of which appeared last week in the West German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. Lyndon Johnson, writes Brandt, was basically a bother. Johnson came to Berlin as John Kennedy's Vice President in 1961, and where Kennedy proclaimed, "Ich bin ein Berliner, "Johnson was more the ugly American. "On a Saturday evening, we had to get shoes from a store which had long been closed because he liked mine so much," recalls Brandt. "Since his feet were different sizes, he needed two pairs. On Sunday, we had to get a collection of electric shavers as presents for friends." Later that same evening, the director of a manufacturing company "came to the Berlin Hilton to take an order for a considerable number of small ashtrays ... Johnson's disarming explanation: 'They look like a dollar and cost me only 25-c-.' "

After three previous tries at love and marriage, crotchety Crooner Frank Sinatra is announcing his willingness to fall into the tender trap once more. Frank, 60, who enjoyed matrimony successively with Childhood Sweetheart Nancy Barbato and Actresses Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow, has promised he will soon be getting to the church on time with Barbara Marx, in her forties, a former Las Vegas showgirl, model and ex-wife of the Marx Brothers' Zeppo. "Yes, it's true, but it's nobody's goddam business," grumped Frank last week, suggesting that he had had high hopes of keeping his proposal a secret. But after dating Barbara for four years, he should have expected that his intentions would be suspect.

"Even though I got my start in soft-porn films, I think they liked me for more than the undressed parts," reflects Dutch-born Actress Sylvia Kristel, 23, who first bared her talents in Emmanuelle. Now about to appear in Director Roger Vadim's La Femme Fidele, Kristel plays the role of a faithful wife who must contend with advances from another man. The role is "en costume," notes Sylvia primly, and "the audience will have to wait a full 40 minutes before I give in." Viewers of future Kristel movies may be kept waiting too, but the titles suggest that it won't be a fruitless vigil. After finishing Femme, she will film The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, a murder mystery featuring Peter Fonda, Michael York and Orson Welles. Later she will star in Madame Bovary, which will be directed by Hugo Claus, 47, the father of her son Arthur, 15 months. "It's another costume picture," says Sylvia, beginning to sound like a period piece herself. "I now love costume pictures."

Her late-night calls to reporters once made her phone line the livest wire in Washington. But now Martha Mitchell, suffering from multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer, and harried, is letting her attorney do the talking. "She is desperately ill, without friends or funds," asserted Lawyer William C. Herman in New York State Supreme Court last week, where he is attempting to collect nine months of back alimony from Martha's estranged husband, former Attorney General John Mitchell. While appealing his conviction for Watergate crimes, Mitchell has not only maintained a private chauffeur, said Herman, but recently received $50,000 of an expected $150,000 advance for a book on Watergate. Despite Mitchell's own claims that he was "living on borrowed funds," Justice Manuel A. Gomez cited the "absence of any denial" to Martha's charges and ordered the former Attorney General to pay up the $36,000 he owes Martha.

There are Russian spies, a kidnaped British scientist, a Pakistani Robin Hood, a Soho gay bar and some madness in a Bavarian castle. All of which is typical movie fare for fans of intrepid Inspector Clouseau, the bumbling gumshoe played by Peter Sellers. After a trio of previous successes (The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark, The Return of the Pink Panther), Sellers and Director Blake Edwards have teamed up for another round of Clouseau capers with The Pink Panther Strikes Again. This time Sellers' co-star is Actress Lesley-Anne Down, formerly Georgina in the Upstairs, Downstairs TV family and now a Russian agent sent to eliminate the good detective. Is Sellers wearying of the Pink Panther movies? "No, but I don't plan to make another one for some time," he says. "I think they have to be spaced out--if you know what I mean."

His next movie, due out this fall, is Marathon Man, a title appropriate for Britain's ever active master of the stage, Laurence Olivier, 69. But last week Lord Olivier confessed he has been slowed a little. "I've had quite a bad time of it for two years or so," he said, breaking a long silence about nagging health problems. His ailment? "It is called dermatomyositis, a wasting inflammation of the muscles. It's a rare disease, dammit, and no doctor can say whether you are going to get better." The illness, which sent Olivier to a London hospital last year, will not keep him from trouping before the cameras. Noting "the spiritual uplift that comes with work," he announced plans to appear opposite Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood in a TV production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Violinist Yehudi Menuhin first performed there as a prodigy of eleven; Composer-Conductor Leonard Bernstein once played piano in its dance studios for $1 an hour. Last week both were back at Carnegie Hall, along with the New York Philharmonic and a contingent of famous colleagues, for a fund-raising gala to celebrate the hall's 85th anniversary. Among the performers: Violinist Isaac Stern, Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who had come to play at his first nighttime concert in 35 years. The program, which cost up to $ 1,000 per ticket and inspired $1.2 million in contributions to the impoverished performance center, included compositions by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Tchaikovsky--the latter having conducted at Carnegie Hall's opening night in 1891. "May the Lord have mercy and forgive us for what we are about to do," said Stern, smiling, before joining his friends in the final number, a spirited but flawed vocal rendition of Handel's Messiah.

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