Just ten minutes before the show was to go on downstairs in the Waldorf-Astoria Empire Room, diminutive Joel Grey, 41, was still puttering around naked in his room. The photographer was getting nervous. He had been promised a picture of the 5-ft. 2-in. star wearing his black Ultrasuede tuxedo alongside a life-size poster advertising the entertainer's two-week Manhattan engagement. But Joel's wife Jo was unfazed. "Why don't you take the picture now?" she suggested. So the camera clicked and Sharp Dresser Joel was caught for posterity wearing only a bath towel.

One person who will not be reading Merle Miller's current bestseller Plain Speaking is Margaret Truman Daniel. Annoyed by Miller's publication of his conversations with her father, the late President Harry Truman, taped in 1961-62, Margaret has ignored the complimentary copy sent her by the publishers. Talking to Knight Newspapers Columnist Vera Glaser last week, Margaret said: "I don't like people riding my coattails," a reference to her own bestseller Harry S. Truman, which appeared in 1972. Her main objection: "Dad wrote Plain Speaking, not Miller. This man has just taken tapes and strung them together, and we all know what you can do with tapes."

It was the first good news this year for Schuyler Chapin, general manager of New York's Metropolitan Opera. After recently accepting the resignation of Music Director Rafael Kubelik and trimming the length of future seasons, Chapin got some assistance last week on his worst problem: a multimillion-dollar operating deficit. The National Endowment for the Arts came through with a lifesaving transfusion of $1 million for general support, which must be matched by private contributions. This is the first time that the Met, the premier American grand opera house, has received a sizable federal grant, though public subsidies are routine in Europe. After announcing the windfall between acts of The Barber of Seville on the Texaco-sponsored weekly Met broadcast, Chapin asked his nationwide audience of opera lovers to chip in, even if it was only $1. Privately he said: "This does not solve the problem. Our current gross deficit is $7 million."

Tenor Franco Corelli is a former Italian rowing champion, while Tenor Placido Domingo tried out as a bullfighter in Mexico. Now Middle Linebacker Paul Glanton, 20, of the University of Minnesota Gophers seems likely to become yet another singing sportsman. Each afternoon these days Bass-Baritone Glanton works out in rehearsals at the university's opera workshop. Cast as Don Alfonso in Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, Paul finds football and opera similar. "If you eliminate the contact," he said, "the performance and the rehearsals in opera are just as strenuous as football." There is another difference too. Paul does not expect someone from the Met to show up with a contract, although he hopes that someone from the NFL will. "They don't draft in the opera," he noted.

After a month on location in the Caribbean, Actors Studio Artistic Director Lee Strasberg, 72, considered his first acting part in over 35 years. "It's easier to do than to tell," he declared of his role as Mobster Hyman Roth, a new and important role in Francis Ford Coppola's forthcoming installment of the Corleone family saga, The Godfather, Part II. Perhaps tired of seeing pupils like Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino and Jane Fonda get all the credits, Strasberg finally succumbed to one of many offers over the years to make his screen debut. Speaking of how it felt to practice "the Method" rather than teach it, Strasberg said: "I had the tools, but I hadn't used them continuously, so some things didn't work--which confirmed everything I say to my students." He added that he might even consider continuing as an actor. That is, "if I get another offer I can't refuse."

The 1,000 Mud Men are New Guinea's natural aristocracy. To keep enemies and even friends in line, they don grotesque masks of gray-green clay to frighten the daylights out of the intruder, then advance in a slow, loping gait, uttering grunts and squeaks. Last week, however, the Mud Men masked themselves for purely social purposes. They mustered at Goroka with almost 80,000 other tribesmen who had walked for weeks through the New Guinea jungle to see "No. 1 Bilong All," pidgin for "chief of everyone," when she stopped off in Papua-New Guinea on her tour of Australia and New Zealand. As for the royal party, their formal mien broke down completely. Whipping out Rollei-flexes. Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Princess Anne and Mark Phillips snapped away at their formidable hosts. Despite a loyal display of spear raising, the Mud Men seemed a little disappointed that the crownless "Missis Kwin" was not wearing ceremonial regalia to match their own.

"I've had it with France," said a homesick James Jones, 52. The expatriate novelist, who has lived on the lie St. Louis in Paris for the past 16 years, and whose novels have been based further and further from the American scene, was in Miami last week signing a lease on a Key Biscayne house. As of September, Jones, who is working on a novel, The Whistle, will be writer in residence at Florida International, a state university started less than two years ago. Attracted to the school in part because of the sizable Spanish-speaking and South American enrollment among its 10,000 students, Illinois-born Jones feels that he is re-entering the mainstream: "My interests are American. This is where the cultural revolution is really going on."

If New Journalist Tom Wolfe could coordinate his talents, he would be able to illustrate as well as write his pop-sociology articles. But deadlines have a way of catching up with him, so Tom's words and pictures do not always appear together. Last week at a Manhattan art gallery some 30 of Wolfe's drawings went on show even as he is finishing his book on the astronauts. Displaying a Ronald Searle waspishness, Wolfe's caricatures range from a bloated President Ted Kennedy running for re-election in 1980 to a study of libidinous Texas teen-agers doing the Coon Ass Waltz. Prices range from $600 to $1,500. Said Wolfe at his vernissage: "I think illustration is the highest form of art. Look at Gustave Dore. His illustrations of Paradise Lost. Don Quixote and the Bible really took hold of the imagination."

Veteran Madcap and TV Tycoon Lucille Ball, 62, was in Manhattan last week drumming up business for her new movie, the $10 million Mame. Launching a nationwide promotion tour for the movie, Lucy gave 52 interviews in four days, accepted a couple of awards, appeared on three television shows, and dropped a bombshell. Her 23-year-old half-hour comedy series would end this season. But her 50 million fans, who can now tune in Lucy repeats up to two and a half hours a day, will not lose sight of her. Lucy will appear in several TV specials next season, and later perhaps start another series. Meanwhile, she is hard at work plugging Mame as a wholesome movie "because a lot of people who would like it have stopped going to the movies."

In the hit TV show Sanford and Son, it is Junior who keeps trying to split from Junkdealer Con Artist Pop. In Hollywood, the script is reversed. Redd Foxx, who plays Sanford pere, has split from the show for the past three weeks, leaving scriptwriters feverishly writing around him. Earlier, the temperamental star had insisted on moving rehearsals from a windowless room to an airy hotel suite, and now comes the news that Foxx will not tape the remaining five shows of the season. He is hospitalized in Hollywood to undergo "tests for nervous exhaustion."

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