Victory can be sweet even when it is easy. Chopping effortlessly through a moderate southerly breeze out in Rhode Island Sound, Courageous won her fourth straight race against Australia's Southern Cross by an almost embarrassingly wide margin of 7 min. 19 sec. That ended the best-of-seven America's Cup series and ensured that the old mug would remain bolted to its table in the New York Yacht Club, which has held it for 123 years. All that Courageous Skipper Ted Hood and his eleven-man crew got for their troubles was a few postrace swallows of champagne and a dunking in the soupy waters of Newport harbor. Undaunted, Alan Bond, the Australian real estate operator who had sunk $9 million into the disappointing Southern Cross challenge, promised to return to Newport some day, but with another boat.

For all of her worries about her father's health (see THE NATION), Julie Nixon Eisenhower managed to turn in a cool, poised performance as a TV hostess last week. Filling in for Barbara Walters on Not for Women Only, a daytime talk show, Julie taped five programs back to back, remaining mostly unflappable through five clothing changes and 4% hours under hot lights. But then she had plenty of support. The nine guests she interviewed on the subject of "Public People, Private Lives" included such old friends as Mrs. Norman Vincent Peale, Dollie Cole and California Congressman Barry Goldwater Jr. The audience had its own all-in-the-family touch. Among those who came to cheer Julie on were Josephine Abplanalp, whose aerosol millionaire husband Robert is one of Richard Nixon's most loyal backers, and Mrs. Howard Ellis Cox, Sister Tricia's mother-in-law.

Sunbathing, dancing and otherwise whiling away the last days of summer, perennial Sex Kitten Brigitte Bardot has holed up in her ten-room house, La Madrague, in St.-Tropez for the past four months. She has company--her 60-year-old mother Anne-Marie and current Boy Friend Laurent Vergez, 29 --and some more old (and young) chums will doubtless drop by when she celebrates her 40th birthday this week. As photographers who have caught her cooling off in the Mediterranean recently can attest, BB is still reasonably buoyant for a woman entering her fifth decade.

Willing to risk anything at his age (71), Comedian Bob Hope went to Manhattan's Central Park to tape a special show marking his 25th year on TV. Waving an arm at the thousands of New Yorkers who came to watch the free entertainment, he cracked: "This is the first audience that I've ever played to on grass--that I knew about." In one sketch, Hope and Jackie Gleason dressed up as two Central Park vice-squad members in bosomy drag. Carol Channing, one of the guest stars, asked Hope what would become of his talent if he decided to retire. Said Hope: "I won't let it all go to waste. I'll give acting lessons to John Lindsay."

Dressed only in baggy pants, a Nazi cap and leather gloves, British Actress Charlotte Rampling looks as if she cannot decide whether to espouse the SS or sm. She flirts energetically with both in The Night Porter, an Italian-made sexual shocker that will open in the U.S. after setting box office records in Europe. Rampling portrays a World War II concentration camp inmate who is seduced by a sadomasochistic SS officer (played by Co-Star Dirk Bogarde) and resumes the affair twelve years after the war when he is a hotel clerk in Vienna. The lurid movie was banned in Rome for a while last spring. In the U.S., it has met with a curious reaction from, of all people, its American distributor,

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