By Claudia Wallis

"I said that I would return when the swords flowered," declaimed Salvador Dali, 76, quoting from a Catalan poet "and ja soc aqui [I am here]. I shall be so brief that I have already finished." Thus began a slightly surreal press conference in the artist's home town of Figueras, Spain, that ended his mysterious six months of seclusion. To bring poetry to life, Dali carried an elaborate, eagle-headed sword and distributed tuberoses to reporters. His costume was no less vivid: a leopardskin coat and red barrenita cap. Answering questions in French, Spanish and Catalan, the painter declared, "I am monarchist, Catholic and Roman," but without a political creed "because nobody knows whether the Venus de Milo was a fascist or a Communist." When pressed about a Catalan government investigation into his affairs, he insisted, "I like to pay taxes." Dali then reiterated a previously announced intention to begin a still vague 22-mile-long project in Rumania and revealed another plan: to remarry his willful wife Gala, 87, as an "endorsement" of his love for her. "She is everything to me," insisted the great surrealist. "The only way to make love is as a sacrament."

It was cold and damp on the courts, there were no locker rooms or showers, the hotel food was only marginally edible, and the 6,000-seat stadium stood virtually empty. "This," declared Eliot Teltscher, the world's tenth-ranked tennis pro, "is no way to run a tournament--in China or anywhere else." Other players at the Marlboro Grand Prix Tennis Classic in Canton, the first professional athletic competition in the People's Republic, were in a similar funk. "I didn't eat for the first two days," insisted Tennessean Terry Moor. But the most celebrated participant took it all in stride. In fact, Jimmy Connors hardly seemed to notice he was in China at all. He spent the five days of his visit playing and practicing, sleeping and eating, dining on the all-American peanut butter he had brought from home. Only grudgingly did he attend a banquet in the players' honor. There was, however, at least one exotic object Connors took in: the 7-ft.-long $8,750 check he received for winning the singles finals against Teltscher, 6-2,6-3.

Tout Paris wore its hautest couture to the elegant Nuit S de Cartier, a party to launch the jeweler's new line of evening accessories. Well, almost tout. Catherine Deneuve's date, Actor-Singer-Director Serge Gainsbourg, came to the ball uncombed, sans tie and wearing a scruffy 9 o'clock shadow. But then, the ex-love of Actress Jane Birkin is known for being defiantly neglige, despite the company he keeps. Cartier Heiress and Chairman Nathalie Hocq, 29, personally arranged the intimate dinner for 879 and subsequent party for 1,500, chartering eight Mystere-Falcon 20 jets to transport jet-setters to Paris from seven foreign cities. "This party represents the antithesis of disco," proclaimed the proud hostess. "It symbolizes a return to the lifestyle of the past, to classicism and to beauty," she added, perhaps before catching a glimpse of Mile. Deneuve's date.

Diana Rigg is not likely to forget a certain critic's 1971 review of her nude scene in Abelard and Heloise: "He said I was built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses." While not every actor has been brickbatted quite so brutally, all get swatted in the course of a career, says Rigg: "There is bound to be a bad choice of play or a misconceived performance." On the theory that "every time you quote your own bad notice you exorcise a little of the pain," Rigg has asked her fellow victims to send her their most painful and embarrassing reviews for an anthology. The book is to be titled No Turn Unstoned -- after George Bernard Shaw's definition of what a critic leaves behind him. So far, Rigg has received 300 offerings, which she plans to supplement with the worst reviews of late great actors (those who, as she puts it, "have gone on eternal tour"). The book, she insists, "is not just an actor's way of getting back at a critic." In fact, Rigg sympathizes with the reviewer's plight. "After you've spent a night of bore dom," she allows, "the temptation to pan must be very great."

-- By Claudia Wallis

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