Ten years ago, Actor Sterling Hayden said that sailing around the South Seas with his four children would help make them "sensitive, self-reliant human beings." Last week, in a Los Angeles court, his eldest son, Christian, now bearded and 21, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years for draft evasion after an eloquent self-defense that included a quote he credited to John Bunyan: "I would rather spend the rest of my days in jail than make a butchery of my conscience." Christian's father, who won a Silver Star in World War II, is backing him.

There were rumors that Cleveland's Hall of Fame superpitcher, Bob Feller, might be nearly as fast with a ballpoint as he once was with a baseball. Then his creditors came up swinging $1,000 worth of rubber checks. But loyal Clevelanders, who regard the most unhappy Feller as a municipal monument, saved the day. The bad checks, along with about $50,000 in business debts, have been anonymously repaid.

No one else brings out the beast in celebrity hounds as does Brooklyn's Barbra Streisand, who nearly lost her poise and her manager while trying to get into the Broadway premiere of her film Hello, Dolly! Barbra barely avoided being knocked to the pavement when rampaging fans crashed through police barricades, overran the singer's flying wedge of personal escorts, and bloodied Manager Marty Erlichman. The girl did not find it funny. "I'll never go to another premiere," she vowed.

"Hard and sharp as flint, secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster" --Charles Dickens' vinegary characterization of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol sounded slightly odd in the mellifluous baritone of New York's Mayor John Lindsay. The mayor confessed that he was miscast as narrator of the Robert F. Kennedy Theater for Children production. Now that it's budget-squeezing time at City Hall, Lindsay intimated that he was better equipped for Scrooge.

The Guinness Book of World Records credits Composer Hoagy Carmichael with the longest song title ever perpetrated: I'm a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank on the Streets of Yokohama with my Honolulu Mama Doin' Those Beat-o, Beat-o, Flat-on-My-Seat-o, Hirohito Blues.

"I've never seen him paint a child," mused the great Raphael authority Dr. John Shearman, unconsciously speaking of the artist in the present tense. "It reveals a new side of him." On Shearman's authentication, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has purchased a hitherto unknown portrait by Italy's Renaissance master. Shearman dates the painting in 1505--when Raphael was 22--and believes it to be a betrothal portrait for twelve-year-old Eleonora Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua.

Christmas comes but twice a year for Admiral John S. McCain, U.S. naval commander in the Pacific. After spending the holiday with the troops in Viet Nam, the admiral plans to hop a jet --and cross the international dateline --in time to share a turkey with his wife in Honolulu.

Children of every race and nationality thronged a UNICEF Christmas party at the United Nations, but one kid asked Comedian Godfrey Cambridge: "Why are you a brown Santa?" "We come in all colors this year," breezed Santa, who had even stuffed the traditional pillow under his belt. Time was when he would not have needed it; Cambridge once weighed 370 lbs.

Willem Alberts owns the nightclub Pompidou near The Hague, and just before the Common Market summit conference in that city, he received a phone call from the French embassy. Out of respect for President Georges Pompidou, he was asked to rename his establishment. "Well, I could change the spelling from Pompidou to Pompidoe," said he. "It's the same pronunciation in Dutch. But you will have to pay the cost of changing my neon sign." Not a word since from the embassy, which apparently does not feel that one letter is worth the price ($20). Anyway, Pompidou loves nightclubs.

The Brookline, Mass., Fire Department cannot rely too often on a 75-year-old musician with a 31-year-old fire engine. Still, it has taken official cognizance of the Arthur Fiedler Hook and Ladder Company. The Boston Pops conductor, a lifelong fire buff who owns several hundred fire helmets, was all ready for his first alarm after his family presented him with the venerable pump truck for his 75th birthday.

Sweden's dull-but-dirty skin flick I Am Curious (Yellow) was banned in Boston and remains banned, by a 7-1 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned a federal court decision against a censorious local tribunal. The lone dissenter was much-married Justice William O. Douglas, who emphasized that he voted as he did because he is against censorship--"not because, as frequently charged, I relish obscenity."

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