Director John Guillermin got off to a very bad start with his leading lady. He reportedly began by asking her to strip so that he could see if she was qualified for the part. Swedish Actress Ewa Aulin, who had stripped willingly enough in Candy, objected strenuously. So did her husband. The way Ewa remembers it, Guillermin made matters worse by saying he could not understand her modesty and telling her, "You're no better than a whore." Bystanders kept her husband from Guillermin's throat, and Ewa dropped out of the cast of El Condor in a fury. "If the producer wants a show girl, he should contact one," she said. "It would be much cheaper for him all around." Ewa had previously objected to two "superfluous" skin bits in the Spanish western, one a bed scene with Jim Brown and the other a nude-at-the-window scene in front of a large crowd. "I don't object to nudity," she explained. "I object to crudity."

"I know Mia and Andre are going to give this baby the right kind of love and devotion. That's the whole point, isn't it?" said the prospective grandmother, Actress Maureen O'Sullivan. It had better be--because the prospective father, Composer-Conductor Andre Previn, will not even discuss the possibility of marrying Mia Farrow, who is expecting his baby in the spring. Andre, in fact, is still married to his second wife Dory. But the Previns have separated, and he has bought a little farmhouse in Surrey, England, where he and Mia hope to settle down after the Broadway opening of Coco, for which he wrote the music. "It's not a farm. Just a farmhouse. I couldn't manage a farm."

The conductor began by dropping the baton. He followed that gaffe by indicating one tempo with his hands while calling for another. Still, the musicians did not seem to mind, as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra staggered through Brahms' Third Symphony. "I have never in all my years on the concert stage conducted an orchestra," Artur Rubinstein had confided to the concertmaster. "I have dreamed of it since I was a little boy. You will think me a fool, but would the orchestra permit me to conduct a rehearsal?" The orchestra was only too happy, and the great pianist, 80, was delighted. "I learned a tremendous lesson today," he said when he had finished. "I now realize how much is involved."

He has yet to put in his bid for the moon, but Houston's multimillionaire promoter, Judge Roy Hofheinz, is getting closer all the time. He has the Astrodome and baseball's Houston Astros, has developed an "Astroworld" to rival Disneyland. And now he has Paul Haney, 41, formerly NASA's Voice of Apollo. "The voice of the astronauts will become the voice of the Astros," said the judge, as he announced that Haney would become the ball club's vice president for public affairs. Said Haney: "I understand there are three strikes and four balls. I'll learn the rest as I go. I was a part of the greatest show off the earth, and now I'm working for the greatest show on earth."

One of the few casualties of the peaceful and orderly Moratorium Day activities was Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California. As he addressed an Indiana University audience on the eve of M-day, counseling nonviolence, someone turned off the lights in the lecture hall. A figure in a gaudy Halloween costume and mask dashed in from a side door and hurled a custard pie into Kerr's face. He scored a direct hit, then raced away. (Collared and later unmasked by police, the masquerader, a onetime student radical, was arrested.) Dr. Kerr calmly removed his glasses and wiped them clean with his handkerchief. "I'd like to ask for equal time," he said quietly. The students gave him a standing ovation.

Russ Gibb, disk jockey for Detroit radio station WKNR, had a startling announcement. Paul McCartney of the Beatles, he said, has been dead for several years, and is being impersonated by a double. Gibb figured it all out from two Beatles album covers. The new Abbey Road cover, he explained, shows Ringo Starr dressed as an undertaker, George Harrison as a gravedigger, and John Lennon as a religious personage. Paul is dressed hi a normal suit and is barefoot--the mark of a corpse laid out for burial in Italy. The license plate on a parked Volkswagen reads "281F," meaning that Paul would have been 28 if he had lived. On the second album cover, Magical Mystery Tour (1967), Gibb found an equally arcane message; Paul is dressed in black, the others in white; an inside picture shows Paul as a soldier above a sign reading "I Was You"; the back cover shows him wearing a black flower--the other three have red ones--alongside a funeral wreath. For a final tipoff, Gibb recalled a McCartney look-alike contest held two years ago. The winner was never announced, said the disk jockey, because he filled Paul's slot. Nonsense, answered a Beatle flack: "I haven't seen him for a few weeks, but I know he's there."

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