Once there was Beau Geste featuring Gary Cooper, Susan Hayward and la gloire. Now there will be a Chinese priest from Ireland named Father Shapiro, a black White Russian called Booker T. Dostoevsky and a rampaging Arab called Abdul the Disgusting. The ridiculous new version, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, stars Michael York in the title role, Marty Feldman as his twin brother Digby and Ann-Margret as the pair's libidinous stepmother. For the skew-eyed Feldman, who co-wrote the script, The Last Remake offers his first chance to play director as well. How is the actor-writer-director holding up? "I wear three hats," says Feldman, "but I have only two heads."

Grandpa Winston used to hobnob with the high and mighty at No. 10 Downing Street, but Granddaughter Arabella Churchill seems to prefer less lofty companionship. After a two-year stint of fund raising for leper colonies and another two years breeding sheep in Wales, she has now moved into an abandoned slum building in West London and opened a low-priced restaurant for some 200 fellow squatters and other neighborhood residents. "I've always wanted to do something like this," says Arabella, 27. "We don't want to make a profit. We just want to give good meals at cheap prices." The Greater London Council, which owns the building, promises to evict Arabella and her pals as quickly as possible.

Apart from the bride and groom, the happiest person at next week's Beverly Hills wedding may well be the fellow who controls the car-parking concession. Some 800 guests have been summoned to the lavish black-tie garden party to watch sometime Actress Marisa Berenson (Barry Lyndon), 29, hook up with Rivet Manufacturer James Randall, 32. The bride will don a gown by Valentino for the occasion, and she says that her attendants "will wear whatever they wish to wear." They will not, says Marisa, dress in shocking pink in memory of her late grandmother, Designer Elsa Schiaparelli.

Other couples, meanwhile, have made some connubial plans of their own. Chevy Chase, 33, who recently quit his job as Saturday Night funnyman to create TV specials for NBC, will marry in December. His bride-to-be: Actress-Model Jacqueline Carlin, 27, whom he met two years ago. Swedish Tennis Star Bjorn Borg, 20, has exchanged engagement rings with Mariana Simionescu, 19, Rumania's second-ranked woman tennis player until her defection to the U.S. this month. Tennis groupies, take heart. Mariana reports that she and this year's Wimbledon singles champ have not yet set a date for the wedding. Her guess? "Perhaps in two or three years."

When Ramses II flew from Cairo to Paris seven weeks ago, the trip was supposed to be therapeutic for the 3,000-year-old mummy: emergency treatment for fungi and bacteria in the royal cadaver. Last week, however, irate Egyptian and American scientists called that story a cover-up designed to shroud the real reason for the visit: closer diplomatic ties between Egypt and France. Ramses is "not deteriorating from bacteria or fungi or anything else," complained Dr. James Harris, a University of Michigan researcher who has been X-raying mummy teeth for a decade. The fungi ploy is "scientifically dishonest," said Harris, hinting that the two nations just wanted to evade the venerable policy of keeping faded pharaohs at home. Responded Professor Lionel Balout, Ramses' chief restorer in Paris: "Harris has published a series of stupidities. He's only a dentist."

"She passed by my house; maybe she threw out some fairy dust," chirped Ultra-Model Margaux Hemingway, 21, considering her near brush with Marilyn Monroe in 1956. Margaux was a mere tot then, and Marilyn was busy filming Bus Stop near the Hemingway homestead in Ketchum, Idaho. Last week in New York Margaux finally came face to face with Monroe--with two of her in fact--and instead of fairy dust, she was carrying diamonds. The occasion: a jewelry show by Designer Jacques Bellini featuring Monroe look-alikes as models. Now that this small Hemingway ambition has been fulfilled, Margaux can contemplate a more complicated goal. "I'd like," she has told a friend, "to be reincarnated as a giraffe."

Publisher and former Ambassador Walter Annenberg, that durable chum of Richard Nixon, has made a few more friends: he announced a $20 million gift to New York's Metropolitan Museum for construction of a fine arts communication center. The donation will help pay for a new wing to house a 500-seat auditorium, faculty and seminar rooms, and space for the production of art-related films, tapes and TV shows. For Museum Director Thomas Moving, 45, who had just revealed plans to leave his post at the end of 1977, the hefty donation means a new job as head of the center. Said he happily: "This will complete our physical structure and bring us fully into the 20th century."

After packing his sequins and spangles through three tours of Australia, cuddly Piano Player Wladziu Valentino Liberace, 57, thought he should do something nice for the folks Down Under. So he agreed to film a free commercial in behalf of the Australian Council of Churches' annual Christmas Bowl Appeal. "My job is spreading happiness," said Liberace in his 17-sec. plea for donations. "But as we all know, there are millions of people in the world who haven't got much to be happy about." Now there is one more--Liberace himself. After seeing a preview screening, a council committee rejected the commercial because of the showman's "extravagant" style. His image, said the council staff, was "a gross example of all things bad about our society."

Her ballets combine classical jetes, old-fashioned waltz steps and even an occasional buck and wing. Now avant-garde Choreographer Twyla Tharp has put some of her newest ideas on ice--by means of the 1976 Olympic figure-skating gold medalist John Curry. Tharp, who has laced on blades only five times in her life, unveiled a seven-minute routine she created for Curry to perform at an Olympics fund-raising benefit at Madison Square Garden. She thought her lack of expertise had proved an advantage: "I was pleased to know nothing about skating; I was pleased to have no bias."

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