Star Tracks

Chaffee & Puffy

That was none other than Suzy Chap-stick (née Chaffee) helping HEW Secretary Joseph Califano with his shoelaces. Califano had stripped to his shorts to chug with the ski ace on the Washington Mall to kick off the HEW-sponsored Health Works 79 Fair. “He’s only been running a year, but he was terrific,” cheered Chaffee, who nonetheless left him in the shade over the near-mile distance. The nonsmoking Secretary wasn’t really winded, Suzy reported, but still was too pooped to pop in on the fair’s nutritional tent-show act featuring high schoolers dressed up as singing vegetables.

Mrs. Stewart expects

Do you think she’s preggy? Asked shortly after their April marriage if his new bride, Alana Hamilton, was expecting, rocker Rod Stewart replied, perhaps ingenuously: “If she is, she hasn’t told me.” Now she has. Their first (Alana has a son, Ashley, 4, by ex-hubby George Hamilton) is due the end of August. On a stopover in Britain, Rod pursued his other love, soccer, and stashed Alana with her new mother-in-law. Because of disorderly crowds, Rod didn’t take Alana to the big England-Scotland match, but she was with him (and his soccer memento) when he fondly checked for life signs and winged back to the U.S. rock circuit. “I’m a faithful husband,” declares Stewart, “and these stories about other girls when I’m on tour are all untrue.”

Bunker mentality

Veteran public servant Ellsworth Bunker, 85, retired as U.S. ambassador-at-large last year after helping to negotiate the Panama Canal Treaties—but he looked ready for more diplomatic combat as he attended a Pan American Society dinner honoring him in New York. The helmet was, in fact, a relic of his World War II Civil Defense warden days, which the tenant of his old Manhattan apartment had unearthed for Bunker to take back to his Vermont farm.

Lloyd’s score is love

Marriage has not put Chris Evert much off her game (though she lost on clay to Tracy Austin in Italy), but it hasn’t exactly helped her new life’s partner, John Lloyd. He’s been on a desperate seven-month losing streak which both blame on their relationship. “He is a very unselfish, giving person,” says Chris, who admits he has spent too much time accompanying her on the women’s tour. Agrees John: “Tennis players have to be selfish, but when you marry everything has to be 50-50. I have not been concentrating enough.”

Old Greaser Network

To boost the Hollywood career of singer-comedienne Ellen March, an old buddy from the 1973 touring company of Grease, John Travolta, bearded between roles, and Marilu Henner of Taxi invited some 200 heavies to hear her at L.A.’s Studio One. Later John and Marilu (left) hobnobbed with Ellen and another Greaser who made it, director Tom Moore. P.S.: protégée March got inked (as they say in showbiz) for a TV spot on Dinah!

Latka’s commandment

“I’m God,” proclaimed the soapbox orator in London’s Hyde Park. Then Manhattan-born comic Andy Kaufman—known for impersonating Elvis Presley onstage and Latka Gravas on ABC’s Taxi—slipped into the twang of a Tennessee preacher and enjoined Londoners to use their umbrellas because “they are the unifying force of the world.” That got guffaws (it wasn’t raining) and so did the rest of his shtik. Which was a triumph, because Taxi hasn’t arrived on the London telly, and most of the crowd thought Kaufman, in town to shoot a flick, was just a bonkers umbrella salesman.

The question is: Who’s on the second baseman?

The home team L.A. Dodgers had thumped Cincinnati pitchers for 17 hits by the bottom of the eighth—and then the real hitting began. Reds reliever Dave Tomlin threw four balls that Dodger second baseman Davey Lopes indicated gloweringly were too close to his conk. Lopes walked to first coolly, but teammate Derrel Thomas dashed to the Reds’ dugout and took a poke at Cincy’s Rick Auerbach, and the fight was on. Both managers moved into the melee as peacemakers, though Dodger mentor Tommy Lasorda whispered to Red counterpart John McNamara: “We should get out of here—it’s a young man’s game.” Low man in the pile was Auerbach (bottom right) who, with Thomas, was bounced after all got untwined. The Dodgers took the game 17-6, but there was no decision on the punch-up, pending word from National League President Charles Feeney.