A famous actor turns 80 today. Read his reaction and guess who it is: “Ah…… well…… uh …It seems rather high.” Jimmy Stewart still goes to work every day in Beverly Hills. His birthday will be no different. The star of such classics as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and You Can’t Take It With You says, with characteristic amazement, that he gets more mail today than he did in the 1960s.
Stewart keeps an active schedule of appearances, primarily for charities, and he will be a guest on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson on May 27.
HAILING MIKHAIL
It’s not enough that Mikhail Gorbachev is leader of that other superpower, or that he rivals our own leader in popularity. Now the man who inflamed ‘Gorby fever’ during his visit to this country has won a literary prize.
A Swiss foundation recognized Gorbachev for his latest best-seller, Perestroika: New Thinking For Our Country and the World. And if Gorbachev’s radical ideas, such as press freedom, don’t catch on in the Soviet bloc, he at least has a second career to fall back on.
TEDDY BEARING IT
Singer Teddy Pendergrass has limited use of his hands and is confined to an automatic wheelchair after a car accident six years ago, but he’s a more productive musician thanks to a nifty little computer.
Pendergrass says the MIDI, or musical instrument digital interface, lets him play “every instrument that would be included in a 100-piece orchestra” and he can complete a record in one-third the studio time it used to take.
UN-URNED INTEREST
Circumstances apparently have not allowed actor Peter Lawford to rest in peace. When he was cremated after dying of heart failure in December 1984, his four children by Patricia Kennedy Lawford were supposed to pay the funeral bill. So says his widow, Patricia Seaton Lawford, who was forced to take back the ashes. Patricia Lawford, 30, scattered the star’s remains from a boat a mile off Marina Del Rey in California.
The Westwood Village Cemetery spokesman would not comment, but a statement from the children said they were not aware of the dispute until recently.
