On the Record

Shooting from the lip, Los Angeles Police Chief Edward Davis brands advocates of gun control "quacks" and legislators who support liberal marijuana laws "irresponsible, no-good sons of bitches." Come January, Davis, 61, who likes to call himself the "toughest cop in America," will retire from the force and make a bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. "I have discovered that there is a vacancy in the Governor's mansion," says Davis, referring to the fact that Incumbent Jerry Brown lives in his bachelor flat. "So I set my sights on that. It certainly needs to be filled, in more ways than one."

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Meanwhile, California's no-frills Governor climbed aboard Freddie Laker's no-frills, $135 flight to London. "I'm paying for it myself," explained Jerry Brown. The reason for his trip: to attend a memorial service at Westminster Cathedral for his old friend E.F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful. The underground bestseller, which argues for a new kind of technology on a smaller, more human scale, greatly influenced Brown's "Less is more" theories of government. During his 48-hour stay, Mr. Austerity dined with Prince Charles and paid a courtesy call on Prime Minister James Callaghan.

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The whiz who made The Wiz is now turning Kismet into Timbuktu!--and bringing it to Broadway. Borrowing eleven songs and the plot from the 1953 hit musical, Director-Choreographer Geoffrey Holder has cast the colorful show with blacks and set it in the fabulously wealthy capital of 14th century Mali. Eartha Kitt plays the wife of the wicked Wazir who wrongs Melba Moore, a sweet young country girl. Moore, whose face is dotted with Holder's notion of tribal markings, says that she loves the chance to "kick up my heels a bit" and "to get the prince and live happily ever after--like in all the fairy tales and good soaps."

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With a satanic stroke of his pen, Syndicated Cartoonist Herbert L. Block has drawn and quartered Washington politicians for more than three decades. Says Block, whose frequent quarry was the jowly, bushy-browed Richard Nixon: "My cartoons are opinion pieces and are recognized as such. My opinion." To honor the Pulitzer-prizewinning cartoonist, the National Press Club gave him its Fourth Estate Award, which has gone in the past to such heavies as CBS's Walter Cronkite and the New York Times's James Reston. The 68-year-old "Herblock," as he signs his name, says he plans to keep at it for "20 or 30 more years." Now that he doesn't have Nixon around any more, he is concentrating on President Carter. Jimmy, he finds, "looks a little like both Jack Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt."

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She wanted to be a lightning rod for American arts and crafts, Joan Mondale said during the campaign. As the Veep's wife, she has been an electric presence on the museum, gallery and crafts-fair circuit, logging 40,000 miles on her cultural missions. Just as zealous on the home front, she decided to hang handmade ornaments from 60 U.S. craftsmen and -women--cornhusk dolls, beaded Indians, crocheted icicles, free-form tin stars and batik creche figures--on the 12-ft. Christmas tree in the vice-presidential mansion. "We will use them all. If we can't squeeze them on, we'll dangle them hither and thither," promised Joan delightedly. Her selection to top the tree: a blue-and-white, stuffed-velvet flying angel from western Kentucky.

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From Russia with love came ebullient Poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko. In Rome on a patriotic mission--to read some poems at a gala Italian program in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Russian Revolution--Yevtushenko also went to the theater with an Italian heiress, jogged in the Villa Borghese and told a reporter how deeply he had been affected by Federico Fellini's most recent movie, Casanova. "I am a woman chaser," said the poet, 44, "and Fellini made me understand how hateful it is to touch a woman you don't love. From the moment I saw that film, it was as though I had been sick. I couldn't sleep with a girl. I was really sick." Yevtushenko lowered his head, then raised four fingers and added with a sly grin: "For four days."

Charlie's fallen angel has replaced her former halo with a parasol--and is on Cloud Nine. "This is my first three-dimensional role," bubbles Farrah Fawcett-Majors. In the forthcoming movie Somebody Killed Her Husband, Farrah plays Jenny Moore, an unhappily married young mother who falls in love with an unsuccessful writer of children's books (Jeff Bridges). Between embraces, the pair chase around Manhattan trying to find out who knocked off Jenny's husband--and why. "I really understand the character of Jenny, and every day I think I learn something new about her," reflects Farrah, who, it seems, has suddenly had a revelation. Says she: "I can't get by just by being Farrah Fawcett-Majors."

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Some sent their regrets. Nobel-prizewinning Physicist Luis Alvarez, for example, explained forthrightly that he could not subscribe to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's exotic mixture of "religion, science, economics and politics." But four other Nobel prizewinners were among the 450 scientists, social scientists and theologians --many of a conservative stripe--who went to San Francisco for a three-day conference on "science and absolute values" sponsored by Moon's Unification Church. After an effusive introduction by Australian-born Neurophysiologist and Nobelman Sir John Eccles, Moon urged his guests, in barely understandable English, to express their beliefs fully. Housing, feeding and entertaining the academics plus their spouses for the brainy bash was costing about half a million dollars, but Moon was unperturbed. He viewed it as a way "to meet and examine the scientists and the professors to use in later days." He has big plans to found a university, it seems, and he figures, "If I pay professors a little more than they are paid in other schools, they will come." Judging from last week's turnout, he has a point.

On The Record

Charles Percy, Illinois Senator, ruminating on the ailments troubling the Grand Old Party: "We have to get the party out of the country clubs, out of a Caucasian atmosphere, away from the Anglo-Saxon approach. As long as the Republican Party takes a Neanderthal point of view, I don't see why it deserves to win."

Isabella Walton Cannon, newly elected mayor of Raleigh, N.C., explaining why, at age 73, she went into politics: "I'm an active person--I couldn't sit still. I retired at 65 from the business office of the North Carolina State University library, and I figured I'd live to be 90. That's a good chunk of time. I'm not the book-club type."

Desmond Morris, British zoologist and author of the new book Manwatching, a Field Guide to Human Behavior: "People will walk by an old man sitting on a park bench, but stare intently at a painter's portrait of an old man sitting on a park bench because it has the visual authority of a frame around it. To me, looking at people can be as fascinating as looking at a great work of art."

Isaac Stern, violinist, in praise of Livingston L. Biddle Jr., the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts: "My Russian friends tell me it's not the ministry of culture that you worry about. It's the culture of the minister."

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