Can he sing? "I've been singing all my life," was the answer. Will he dance? "No dancing," retorted Muhammad Ali, otherwise known as Cassius Marcellus Clay. Next month the deposed heavyweight champion will make his Broadway debut, starring in the musical version of the Black Power play. Big Time Buck White. What's more, he has some pretty strong notions about what kind of show it will and will not be. As befits a Muslim minister, he insisted on a contract guaranteeing that there will be no unseemly language in the script. And there will be no nudity. There will, in fact, be no women at all in the show. What Muhammad will do is sing four protest songs and probably engage in a freewheeling question-and-answer session with each audience. Was he awed by his rise to stardom? asked a reporter. "Course not," said the star. "This is no big thing. It's smaller than I am."

. . .

It began with a chance meeting at a dinner party. Then came evenings at the theater and weekends in the country and a holiday trip to Italy. Now there is a wedding in store for American Socialite Pamela Colin, 33, and Britain's fifth Lord Harlech, David Ormsby Gore, 51, former ambassador to the U.S. and once a sometime-companion of Jacqueline Onassis. They met in London, where she is an editor of Vogue. Before that, she designed sweaters and scooted through Manhattan traffic on a motorbike, decked out in jaguar coat and matching fur helmet. According to her father, Ralph Colin, a prominent New York lawyer and patron of the arts, the wedding will be held in December.

. . .

"Dear Sir," begins the letter. "This sweater was a Christmas present. Would you please credit it to my account." A mundane note, perhaps. But not when the writer is returning a red cashmere pullover that was a present from her husband, John F. Kennedy. Scribbled across the letter are several notations by the unidentified store's credit department, questioning where the sweater was actually purchased and finally deciding to settle for an $18.50 credit. The latest tidbit of Jacqueline Kennedy memorabilia is soon to be put on the block along with three similar letters (expected price: several hundred dollars apiece) by Manhattan Autograph Dealer Charles Hamilton, who will not say where he got them--except that they were "salvaged" from someone's wastebasket. One of the other letters indicates certain gaps in Jackie's well-known attention to detail: "His shoe size is 10 C. So perhaps you will know what size socks to give him."

Word flashed out of Manila that Charles A. Lindbergh, flying a little Piper L5, was overdue and presumed down near Kawayan, 170 miles northeast of Manila. Instantly, rescue craft took off along his track, searching for wreckage. Happily, it was a false alarm. The 67-year-old Lindbergh, who now devotes his life to the cause of conservation, had simply set his single-engine plane down in a dry rice paddy to avoid a tropical squall. Then his battery went dead, cutting out the engine starter; finally he hitched a ride with a passing motorist to get his battery recharged, and after four hours he took off again on his inspection tour of wildlife and primitive tribes in the area. Said Lindy, when he finally arrived at his destination: "I can still fly a plane, and I don't take unnecessary risks."

. . .

The owner of a campground outside Marseille was surprised to see an emaciated woman, sunburned and unkempt, stagger toward him from a stand of fir trees. Joan Tunney Wilkinson, 30, daughter of former Heavyweight Champion Gene Tunney, identified herself and asked for a drink of water, thereby ending a massive two-month-long search that began after she left her husband and two small daughters in Norway. According to Paris' France-Soir, the couple had quarreled, then separated to cool off, after agreeing to meet in Hamburg 15 days later. Apparently suffering from amnesia, the attractive brunette never kept the date; instead, she wandered south through Europe--hitching rides, sleeping in fields, eating what she could find. She is now recuperating at Marseille's Sainte Marguerite Hospital.

. . .

Even though she has no taste for the stuff herself, as far as Margaret Mead is concerned, puffing on pot is not a dangerous pastime. In Washington to testify before a Senate subcommittee studying drug abuse, the aging (67) but very much tuned-in anthropologist asserted that marijuana is less toxic than tobacco and milder than booze. What is harmful, she said, is the law banning the drug. As she put it: "There is the adult with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other telling the child. 'You cannot.' " The answer, Dr. Mead told reporters after the hearing, is to legalize marijuana for anyone over 16.

All of which definitely turned off Florida's Governor Claude Kirk Jr. "Kids are taught patriotism and morality in the classroom," he told a civic club audience, "but when they get home they see a television set with this dirty old lady on it."

. . .

She rode a horse to get her man in Auntie Mame, and now the forever irrepressible Rosalind Russell is gallivanting around with a bunch of goats in her latest comedy. The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax. Roz plays the part of a gadabout middle-aged American tourist who leads a double life as a CIA courier carrying secret microfilm. Nabbed by Communist agents on one such mission, she escapes by hiding among a herd of goats. The animals, mostly pets of children in Wyoming where the scene was shot, proved to be unruly hams before the camera. Said the slightly battered actress afterward: "I've been butted around before in Hollywood and on Broadway --but never as accurately as by those goats."

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