Lights dim, music swells, the curtain twinkles with silver lights. As it lifts, the orchestra strikes up There She Is, Miss America, and artificial fog envelops the stage. No wonder the audience leaps to its feet in wild applause: another smash by Mike Nichols, director or producer of such successes as Catch 22, Annie and The Odd Couple. This time, however, Mike is east of Hollywood and way off-off-off Broadway at a barn in Scottsdale, Ariz. His Miss America is a white Arab mare listed unromantically on the program as "Lot No. 1 -Fantazja." Other ingenues should be so lucky. After 17 minutes of brisk bidding, Fantazja sells for a record $450,000. By show's end 31 Nichols-bred Arabians have been knocked down for a total of $2,316,000. Horses are a beguiling pastime for Nichols, who has loved them since childhood and bred Arabians since he could afford to. "This isn't life or death," he explains. "It's based on pleasure."

It rather looked as though the Raj had returned to In'ja. Once more the Union Jack fluttered over Delhi's posh Roshanara Club, while pukka sahib types bowled on the cricket pitch. The bar of the Calcutta Light Horse, a regiment founded a century ago, was pink gin-deep in British officers. Some of them, though, looked film-familiar: Gregory Peck, David Niven, Roger Moore and Trevor Howard. The pseudo sahibs were shooting The Sea Wolves, about a daring 1943 attack on a German communications ship anchored off Goa. How did it feel to re-create the days of empire? Said Niven to his Indian hosts, in a line that would never have been heard at the old Roshanara: "I'm surprised you don't kick us out for what we did when we were here."

Speak of the devil. First Evangelist Billy Graham, in England for a 21-day revival on the Oxbridge campuses, slipped in his bathtub, bruising ribs and brewing a painful case of pleurisy. Then, as an overflow audience of 20,000 jammed Oxford's scruffy town hall to hear a Southern-drawled sermon on sin, a number of students decided to be sophomoric. Some heckled Graham as a fascist, others set off the hall's fire alarm and cut closed-circuit TV cables that were carrying his message to 5,000 listeners in five other auditoriums. The preacher, now 61, took his hazing with saintly calm. "I hope for that sort of thing," he said. "It adds to the excitement."

At 63, after 18 years as TV's avuncular anchor, Walter Cronkite was talking retirement--even though his current $600,000-a-year contract with CBS Evening News has another year to run and his commitment to the network as nonretirable talent is unchanged. Some telegossips said Walter wanted out; others suggested he was helping CBS retain Probable Successor Dan Rather, who was being heavily wooed by ABC. Either way Cronkite could certainly leave with honorable profit in other fields.

Last week, for instance, he was particularly persuasive as a celebrity auctioneer at a charity sale at Christie's galleries in Manhattan: "Give me a 50, a 50, a 50, let's see a 60, a 65. Don't scratch your nose because I'm very observant." His spiel swiftly sold five lots of porcelain objets d'art, raising $1,160 for the World Wildlife Fund. Cronkite said he learned his patter from the Lucky Strike tobacco auctioneers, who were last on radio when he was still a cub wire-service reporter. No matter. Impressed, Christie's Head Auctioneer Ray Perman told him: "If you ever want to work for us, you get very good prices."

On the Record

Gene Saks, director of the upcoming Broadway comedy Save Grand Central: "It's about young white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Isn't it time we had a play about them?"

Ella Grasso, Connecticut Governor, presenting her legislature with a sharply higher-tax, lower-spending budget to cover unexpected deficits: "This will be very brief--bare facts to cover bare bones."

John W. Mazzola, president of Manhattan's Lincoln Center: "Without the arts, New York would be Bayonne, N.J. And I grew up in Bayonne, N.J."

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