"There's a little bit of the child in all of us; we all want to be in the circus," says Actress Betty White, who gets her wish in an upcoming Circus of Stars. White's ringmates in the December CBS-TV special will include Actors Peter Fonda and Richard Roundtree and Jack Ford. White is teamed up with a camel. "Working with animals is a lot easier than working with some actors," she said after the taping. Did she feel upstaged? "Heavens no. I'd much rather see an animal act up there than some tired old broad."

That blur in a business suit racing through New York City was Vice President Walter Mondale, stumping in behalf of local Democratic candidates. One of Mondale's more leisurely stops, however, was at a $100-a-plate dinner to honor Martin Luther King Sr., 77, and to raise funds for the Center for Social Change, headed by Coretta King. Among the 2,000 present: U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, New York City Mayor Abe Beame and New York Governor Hugh Carey. The program, which included a reading of Martin Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech by Actor Paul Winfield, ended with an all-embracing finale--the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome sung in French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and English.

"I feel I owe the American people an explanation of what happened," said the frail, blue-eyed woman. After a decade of obscurity in Texas, Marina Oswald Porter, 36, was in New York City to face a press conference and stir up publicity for Marina and Lee, an account of her life with Kennedy Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, written by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. "My regret through the years has been immense," said Marina, who now lives on a 17-acre farm outside Dallas with her three children (two by Oswald) and Kenneth Porter, a sewing-machine salesman. Marina, who will share in the book's royalties, insisted that Oswald had acted alone and that she still grieved for the President's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Then she added, almost unnecessarily: "Sometimes I do feel sorry for myself."

During his successful race for the West Virginia governorship last November, Jay Rockefeller kept a tight lip when it came to talk of his wealth. "I am too rich to steal," one less-than-tactful aide quoted him as saying during the campaign. How true. Last week, while Wife Sharon was in Washington testifying on her appointment to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Rockefeller finally released a financial report. His net worth: $19,716,479 in trust funds, property, furniture, art and other possessions.

Her role last year as a bitchy TV executive in Network brought Faye Dunaway an Academy Award. Now Faye hopes to click, behind smaller lenses, as a fashion photographer in Eyes. "She's beautiful and representative of the beauty and fashion world that this film is about," says Producer Jon Peters, the former hairdresser who earned his first moviemaker credits with Housemate Barbra Streisand's A Star Is Born. Eyes is now on location in New York, and the producer says he is having more fun than on his first trip to the Big Apple. He was 13 then, a California runaway who was working in a Manhattan hotel at night--tinting the hair of hookers and that of their French poodles. Says he: "It was in the days when they had color-coordinated dogs."

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