By Richard Stengel

"Marriage may be compared to a cage," wrote Montaigne. "The birds outside despair to get in and those within despair to get out." In this case, the birds managed to get out, but they squabbled over their gilded Hollywood cage. Farrah Fawcett, 35, the buttery femme fatale of television's Charlie's Angels, and her estranged husband, Actor Lee Majors (The Six Million Dollar Man, The Fall Guy), 41, were granted a divorce in Los Angeles owing to irreconcilable differences. There was, however, one nagging question: Who should get custody of their $2.5 million Hollywood Hills house? Majors demanded it, and Farrah's attorneys countered that she wanted it. Solomon might have split the home in two, but Superior Court Judge Harry T. Shafer couldn't decide and planned a visit to the home. Once outside the courtroom, the uncoupled couple chose to talk it over at a local cafe. Two hours and one dinner later, Majors determined that he would give the house to Farrah, declaring, "She deserves it. She's a nice lady, and I still love her very much."

The First Lady of Song came swinging and singing back to Harvard in style. Riding high in a white limousine, she returned to Cambridge to accept a "Woman of the Year" award from the University's Hasty Pudding Theatricals. Over 40 years ago, Ella Fitzgerald, 63, had played at Harvard proms. In addition to Hasty Pudding's ritual gifts of a pudding pot and a dozen roses, Fitzgerald got a green-and-yellow basket to commemorate her 1938 hit recording of A-Tisket, A-Tasket. Said a cheery Ella: "Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there's love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong."

In George du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894), set in the bohemian Latin Quarter of Paris, the sinister Svengali hypnotizes a tone-deaf gamine named Trilby and transforms her into an exquisite diva who becomes the toast of all Europe. When Svengali dies, so does Trilby's voice. In a two-hour, made-for-television movie titled Svengali, Jodie Foster (Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone), 19, plays a rock 'n' roll Trilby smoothed into a Streisand by Peter OToole's latter-day Svengali. Foster is on leave this semester from Yale, where she is a sophomore majoring in literature. Has she been doing her homework? Not much, it seems. "I have a copy of Trilby" Foster says, "but I haven't even read it yet."

The Queen was not amused.

Her press spokesman, the normally sedate Michael Shea, called the peeping Tom photographs "the worst sort of taste." It seems the prying paparazzi of the British press offended the royal family by capturing the straw-hatted Diana, Princess of Wales, vacationing on a Bahamian beach. The telephoto-lens pictures, taken by enterprising photographers from a nearby beach, were plastered all over the Sun, Britain's largest selling daily, and the Daily Star. It was a picture of a standing Diana in a strapless bikini, revealing her gently rounded royal tummy, that offended regal sensibilities most. The next day, the Sun editors offered an obsequious apology and, to show how sorry they were, reprinted the picture seven inches deep on the front page.

After serving for more than a decade as a detective in the Los Angeles police department, Joseph Wambaugh (The New Centurions, The Choirboys, The Glitter Dome), 45, permanently traded in his pistol for a pen. When the city of Houston began a search for a new police chief, Wambaugh's name turned up on the list of eleven candidates put together by the mayor's office. According to an aide of Mayor Kathy Whitmire, not everyone on the list is a serious contender for the $81,000-a-year job, but no one will be immediately ruled out. Wambaugh's reaction: "I've learned that in Houston one either gets murdered or gets rich. I've been so bored lately that I'm ready for either. Therefore, I enthusiastically accept. Have gun, will travel." --By Richard Stengel

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