PEOPLE

Colette Flesch has become the first woman to be elected mayor of Luxembourg City, the capital of the Grand Duchy. She was born there but graduated from Wellesley, studied at Harvard and received her M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Eight times the national fencing champion of Luxembourg, Miss Flesch competed in the Rome, Tokyo and Mexico Olympics and is remembered at Wellesley as a golfer, skier and tennis player. "It's only in fencing that I was a champion," she observes, "because I loved that sport very much. But I am going to concentrate only on playing golf, because it adapts better to my working hours." In addition to the mayoralty itself Miss Flesch will also hold the positions of deputy in the National Chamber [Parliament], Luxembourg's representative to the European Parliament, secretary general of the Luxembourg Olympic Committee and secretary general of the Luxembourg Fencing Federation. With the working hours those jobs promise, Miss Flesch can use all the adaptability she can get.

Ken Harrelson announced in Boston that he had been offered a choice of roles in a film called Moolah. "They convinced me I had the style to be an actor, but I don't know," he said, with unwonted modesty. "The only time I ever acted in my life was when I was 6 years old. I played a Kentucky colonel in a school play." As for the roles he is up for now, he says, "I don't know which I'll take yet. One is a hard-nosed cop, the way it's described to me. Anything I'm involved in," he observed, "has something to do with a nose."

Ted Heath, leader of Britain's opposition Tory party, skippered his 33.7-foot sloop, Morning Cloud, to victory on corrected time in the 640-mile Sydney to Hobart race—a real triumph for the 53-year-old politician, whose experience until last year was limited almost entirely to 16-foot dinghies. "Exhilarating!" was Heath's word for it all, and The Guardian noted that his P.R. man might be pretty exhilarated, too. "Success in the leather-necked world of Australian ocean-racing," the paper pointed out, "provides his public relations advisor with excellent material to leaven the somewhat heavy weight of organ-playing and choir-conducting his political image has previously contained."

Pam Eldred, Miss America, is a Detroit Red Wing fan who attended every home game last season. This season she got to feeling pretty terrible about Alex Delvecchio, who had played his first 30 games without scoring a goal, so Pam decided to lend him the tiny crown-shaped pin she had worn when she scored in Atlantic City. Delvecchio pinned it to his suspenders and returned it with thanks after finally getting two goals against Boston. Unfortunately he will never know whether it was Miss America's pin that did the job or the Tabasco sauce an usher had sprayed on his stick before the game.

"The coats keep you warm," a miffed Gina Lollobrigida was quoted as saying of her seven new furs, but if Gina is warm the World Wildlife Fund is hot. Five of the actress' coats are maxis, two of them made from the pelts of animals on the list of endangered species—tigers and lynx—and a spokesman for the fund declared that its leaders were "horrified.... We estimate that she has the skins of 250 animals. It must have taken 10 tigers to make that tiger maxi [alone]." "What can I do?" wailed Miss Lollobrigida. "The tigers in my coat were already dead.... If I don't buy the coats somebody else will. Might as well stop killing chickens for meat. It's the same thing."

Saul Silberman, president of Tropical Park, flew to Nassau on a recent Saturday for the opening of his new track, Hobby Horse Hall, flew back to Miami for the last race at Tropical and then went home to watch a little television. He was tired enough by 10 p.m. to go to bed, but it turned out that his day wasn't quite over. At 11:30 he was awakened by a masked intruder who told him cheerfully, "We don't want to hurt you, except financially." Then he and a companion bound Silberman and his wife and made off with about $5,000 in cash and valuables. This didn't hurt Silberman financially to the point of making him give up his annual ritual of handing out $2,100 to steady Tropical customers, but it was $7,000 gone in three days. Then he put down $300 on Slicky Jim in the third. The horse paid $54.50, and Silberman picked up $7,860. Easy go, easy come.

John Masefield, the late British poet laureate, is best remembered for the poem that begins, "I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,/ And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by," etc. etc. Now the truth is out. The New York Times has reprinted a letter from Masefield to a friend in which he confesses to seasickness: "3 hours in a sea-sick steamer, & after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak 3 times, & then be sick coming home," he wrote. Perhaps the answer has been there all along. When Masefield entitled his poem Sea-Fever he meant it literally.

TWO PHOTOS