PEOPLE

Hamming it up with a piece of beef is World Champion Skier Jean-Claude Killy {below). "I am certainly not a cook," Killy says modestly, "but I enjoy fiddling around in the kitchen. Naturally I can make regional Savoyard dishes, like a fondue, and fried eggs, like any man, but my father is a really good cook and after I stop competition skiing I think I'll learn to cook seriously." The other thing Killy has said he plans to do seriously when he quits skiing is to drive racing cars. Well, any man who drove the Targa Florio as coolly as he did last year will doubtless prove to have nerves of steel when the culinary chips are down and he has to face a curdled hollandaise.

"I don't like beards. There isn't room for beards in the Queen's stables." The man who recently conjured up this rather cramped vision of Queen Elizabeth's stables at Newmarket was the trainer of her horses, 80-year-old Sir Cecil Boyd-Rochfort. Sir Cecil had invited 32-year-old Patrick Acray to come to work as an exercise boy, but when he saw that Acray was possessed of a one-inch beard he was shocked. "The fellow arrived at my front door at 7 p.m. and I didn't like the look of him at all. I could see right away that he was not suitable for my stables. I told my son-in-law—who is my assistant—that I was not going to have men with beards working there. I don't like them. They are unnecessary. There is too much of this long hair and beards these days.... I am certainly not going to have my string of horses going out each morning ridden by men with beards. It's certainly not on—not while I'm here anyway." It is lucky for Sir Cecil that he never trained horses for George V. He would have been placed in the tiresome position of having to tell Elizabeth's grandfather that he was not a suitable person for his own stables.

Last winter, while skiing on an intermediate slope at Sun Valley, young Joe Kennedy broke his left leg. This winter, while skiing on an intermediate slope at Sun Valley, young Joe Kennedy broke his right leg. The New York Senator's 15-year-old boy does run true to form, but it doesn't seem to be very good form.

"The shoot was carried out in an entirely responsible manner. Everybody dipped their boots in disinfectant." So said England's Duke of Rutland, under fire from a Lincolnshire County Council and the Lincolnshire branch of the National Farmers' Union for having held a shooting party on his own grounds. Shooting parties have been, by and large, voluntarily dispensed with during England's epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease, but a small group went out recently for pheasant on the Duke's 18,000 acres. A spokesman for the council said, "Perhaps there was little risk of spreading the epidemic. That's not the point. I think it was a poor example by people who should have known better." The Duke replied, "I would not have dreamed of shooting if there had been any danger at all of spreading foot-and-mouth. My home was not in an infected area." Nor were the homes of his guests—they came from London—and he went on to observe, "The pheasants are a problem. I believe that this foot-and-mouth epidemic is carried by the birds and the wind. On my brother's estate in Derbyshire, where there is foot-and-mouth around, there can be no shooting. The result is that there are 4,000 pheasants walking about all over the place!"

In Los Angeles the day before Christmas, Actress Ann-Margret's motorcycle collided with a car and she was carried off to the hospital in an ambulance. In Texas, Cowboy Quarterback Craig Morton was driving home from the Browns' game when he heard on the radio that a thief had been caught stealing his motorcycle from his garage. Ann-Margret's injuries were minor and neighbors not only prevented Morton's thief from making a getaway, they almost succeeded in stuffing him into a handy garbage can, but the only celebrity who seems to have had any real fun with a cycle over the holidays was Georgia's governor, Lester Maddox (above). He received an old-fashioned, bright red, pedal-it-yourself bicycle and was reported to have ridden it through the doors of the Governor's Mansion, across the veranda and down a flight of steps, then up three steps. After that he was photographed riding the thing sitting backwards on the handlebars—a picture that might be of some value to his political adversaries. Maddox says of bicycle riding, "It exercises everything in your body—your arms and legs, your heart, everything!" The way he rides, it certainly does.

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