On the Record

This little pig didn't go to market--yet. It lives down on the farm near the antebellum Atlanta mansion that Betty Talmadge once shared with her ex-husband Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. During her 35-year marriage, which ended last February, Betty helped run a family ham-curing business and was known in Southern circles for her ability to whip up a mean dish of black-eyed peas with ham hocks or baked cheese grits. Now she has jotted down her family secrets in a book called How to Cook a Pig and Other Back-to-the-Farm Recipes (Simon & Schuster; $9.95), with a foreword by Rosalynn Carter. It was hard to supervise the killing of a pig, Betty said, but she added: "I just closed my eyes and pretended it was a male chauvinist pig."

They were an odd couple. The occasion was the presentation of the 37th annual Hollywood Women's Press Club awards, and winner of the golden apple as female star of the year was Jane Fonda, who got it for her performance in Julia and because she no longer "offends the public" with her radical political views. Arch-conservative John Wayne gave Jane her apple. "I have known her father for 40 years," he said, "and therefore I had a special reason to watch her grow from childhood. Evidently I didn't make too much of an impression on her. I'm certainly surprised to find her standing to the right of me."

"If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do," Peter Sellers once remarked. "I do not know who or what I am." His confusion is understandable, for in his latest film he appears in no fewer than seven disguises while playing the befuddled Inspector Clouseau for the fifth time. In one scene, he goes sleuthing near the Seine dressed as a Swedish herring fisherman with a parrot on his shoulder. The bird is plastic, and the phony fisherman must keep it puffed up by pumping his arm. After an overstrenuous wave, the bird pops off entirely, leaving only its claws in Clouseau. Title of the bird-brained flick: Revenge of the Pink Panther.

Billing herself modestly as "Capitol Hill's Hostess with the Mostest," Korean-born Suzi Park Thomson is putting some old skills to work: setting up a catering service. "I have to make a living somehow," says Suzi, 46, onetime personal assistant to retired House Speaker Carl Albert. As such, she entertained handsomely on a salary of $14,750. For the past year, Suzi has been spending most of her time denying allegations that she is an agent for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Now she has found a mysterious, unnamed backer to help her cater gourmet luaus, banquets and office parties. Although she has done a few dry runs for friends at no charge and even turned out a Korean-flavored bar mitzvah meal, so far Suzi has had no paying customers.

On the Record

John Kemeny, Dartmouth College president and one of the architects of the Abomb, on the $15 calculator: "It took 20 of us working 20 hours a day, six days a week for an entire year, to accomplish what one Dartmouth student now can do in one afternoon."

Walter Mondale, conceding that Carter has overloaded Congress: "There is a concept in missilery, where you fire too many missiles too close together and they kill each other off --fratricide. I think it can be fratricide, too many issues landing at the same time."

Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on his appointment as New York City commissioner of cultural affairs: "The job is like that of commissioner of wheat in Kansas and spices in India, in that culture is our best crop."

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