Italian Actor Marcello Mastroianni happily gorged himself in La Grande Bouffe, Italian Director Marco Ferreri's savage comedy about four men who eat themselves to death. A glutton for punishment, Mastroianni has been lured back for another Ferreri satire. Called Bye Bye Monkey!, it is about an aging, asthmatic gardener who wanders down to a dump in a nameless large city and finds the remains of a movie monster named Macho Kong (no kin to King Kong). Hearing a whimpering sound within the monster's body, Marcello the gardener pulls out a baby chimpanzee, whom he treats like a child. "It's a fantasy film. You know, surreal," says Mastroianni, 53. "But after all," he asks with a Latin shrug, "isn't life like that?"

At the bronze lions in Peking's Forbidden City, who else but the world's most lionized soccer player? The mighty Pele and the New York Cosmos also walked on the Great Wall, toured the Imperial Palace and visited Mao's tomb. The official reason for their trip: a match with the Chinese national soccer squad. Alas for the Cosmos, the Chinese tied the first game and won the second 2-1. "We did not expect to find soccer of this caliber in China," conceded Cosmos Captain Werner Roth. But at a welcoming banquet, the mood was jovial, and the Chinese players eagerly pumped their visitors about AstroTurf and the height of buildings in Manhattan. The curious Chinese will soon find out for themselves. They arrive for a five-game U.S. tour next week and are scheduled to play the Cosmos Oct. 8 on the AstroTurf at Giants Stadium.

After turning out several fat but never fatuous biographies of famous Britons (Mary Queen of Scots, Oliver Cromwell) Woman-About-England Lady Antonia Fraser has focused on the topic dearest to her heart: love. The former wife of Conservative M.P. Hugh Fraser--and the current companion of Playwright Harold Pinter--says she loves nothing more than to give and receive billets-doux. To kindle ardor in the souls of her readers, Antonia, 44, has compiled Love Letters (Knopf; $8.95), a tender anthology of 135 amorous notes dashed off through the centuries by lovers of distinction. Sample sweet nothings: "You are a wretch, truly perverse, truly stupid, a real Cinderella. You never write to me at all," a peevish Napoleon scrawled to Josephine from Verona. "Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry," wrote Oscar Wilde to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Complained Benjamin Franklin to his platonic French friend Mme. Brillon: "You find innumerable faults in me, whereas I see only one fault in you (but perhaps it is the fault of my glasses)."

The farmer's wife tossed a little do in her Middleburg, Va., backyard--and charged $35 a couple admission. And why not? Hostess Elizabeth Taylor Warner was sponsoring a political fund raiser for Republican Gubernatorial Candidate John Dalton. Because of a painful flare-up of bursitis, Liz, clad in blue jeans and red silk slippers, hobbled about on a cane. Before giving a brief welcoming speech, she impulsively went for a helicopter ride with Husband John Warner and the Daltons, sweeping low over her 160-year-old farmhouse and 2,000 acres of pasture land. "Being in a helicopter to me is like being on a rollercoaster. It's a feeling of being free," said Liz. Then she returned to the 3,000 or so guests trampling her flowers and munching chicken and corn on the cob on the manicured lawns. There may be more such events: Warner is considering running for the U.S. Senate next year.

Cinderella's coach turned into a pumpkin--and Jonathan Winters' head has now suffered the same fate. With a little help from his makeup man, Comic Winters ripens into a big jack-o'-lantern on the set of Walt Disney's special, The Halloween Hall o' Fame. The show, scheduled to air Oct. 30 on NBC, stars Winters as a bumbling night watchman who swaps heads with a talking pumpkin. The tricks and treats are vintage Disney, and Winters loved it all--especially his costume. "I was secure with my head," he says. "I knew I was a pumpkin mentally. There's a lot of seeds up there--some gone."

In the ongoing Story of Oh, slugger met slugger. Baseball Great Hank Aaron journeyed to Japan to congratulate the Yomiuri Giants' first baseman Sadaharu Oh, 37, for hitting his 756th home run (TIME, Sept. 12)--and topping the U.S. major league record set by Aaron himself in 1976. After a few words to the 45,000 Japanese fans in Tokyo's Korakuen Stadium, Hank, clad in mufti, slammed a ball into the leftfield bleachers while the crowd chanted: "Aaron, Aaron, Aaron!" Hammerin' Hank even toted along a special present for Oh, who has a peculiar habit of raising his right leg in the air before the pitch. Aaron's gift: a stuffed flamingo.

Living well is the best revenge. But when you are the most famous widow in the world, it takes a lot of money. Not having fared particularly well by the estate of her first husband, Jacqueline Kennedy negotiated a $3 million reverse dowry when she married Aristotle Onassis in 1968. In exchange, Jackie, then 39, relinquished all future claims to the fabulous estate of the husband 23 years older than she. A troublesome stepdaughter changed all that. Christina Onassis had opposed the marriage in the first place, friends say, and called Jackie "an opportunist." By the time her father died, her feelings were such that she stopped the funeral motorcade and changed cars to avoid riding with Jackie. When the estate was settled, Christina wound up with a big chunk of it and Jackie received $250,000 a year (including $50,000 for her two children by J.F.K.). But Christina later decided to contest the terms of the will to get more, and so Jackie, feeling liberated from the constraints of her premarital agreement, asked in too. An angry Christina at first offered her $8 million. After enough negotiations to keep an army of lawyers busy for a year, Christina finally bought out her stepmother to avoid any future entanglements. The price: a cool $20 million for Jackie, plus $6 million to help her pay the taxes on the payoff. Anyone for Tiffany?

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