Word: alec
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...great gossip. Don't pay any attention to what I'm saying." Alec Guinness, relaxing over lunch in Manhattan, is engaging in his favorite hobby: teasing. In fact, he is a great gossip, and it is impossible not to pay attention to what he says. During the past half-century or so, he has played dozens of memorable roles: a Prime Minister (Disraeli), a Pope (Innocent III), a King (Charles I), a prince (Arabia's Faisal), a fanatical colonel (Nicholson, in The Bridge on the River Kwai), a mad dictator (Hitler), a Jedi knight (Obi-wan Kenobi) and a spymaster...
Blessings in Disguise is Sir Alec's title, but the blessings in this all- too-short autobiography (Knopf; $17.95) wear no masks. Along with an engaging picture of Guinness himself, there are candid and almost always hilarious portraits of some of those he has met along the way to his threescore and eleven: George Bernard Shaw, Tyrone Guthrie, Edith Evans, Martita Hunt, Noel Coward and even Ernie Kovacs, who, he says, was "just about the funniest man I have ever...
...afternoon during the filming of Our Man in Havana, in which Kovacs played a corrupt police chief, Sir Alec passed the comedian's hotel room. The door was open, and Kovacs was sitting at a desk and typing furiously, surrounded by half a dozen naked girls reading magazines. "Shall I shut your door?" Guinness politely suggested. "No! For heaven's sakes!" replied Kovacs. "What would people say? They'd say Kovacs is in that room with a | bunch of naked broads. And they'd think the worst. With the door open they can see for themselves it's all perfectly...
...later years Richardson always had a silver tankard of champagne waiting for those who visited him backstage. Once, when Guinness came by, he rose and made a military-style toast: "To Jesus Christ. What a splendid chap!" Another time, when they were both starring in Doctor Zhivago, Sir Alec walked into Richardson's hotel suite in Madrid. "Who can one hit," said Richardson, "if not one's friends?" -- and punched him in the jaw. By the time Guinness raised himself from the floor to ask what was going on, Richardson was sound asleep in an armchair...
...home to British Prime Ministers since 1735. On the occasion of No. 10's 250th anniversary, the present occupant, Margaret Thatcher, 60, was hostess to her Queen, whom she welcomed with a deep curtsy, and to her five living predecessors: Lord Stockton, formerly Harold Macmillan, 91; Lord Home, ne Alec Douglas-Home, 82; Lord Wilson, once just Harold, 69; Edward Heath, 69; and James Callaghan, 73. After dinner, Queen Elizabeth, 59, joked that it was only the third time in 34 years she had been invited to No. 10. Said Her Majesty: "I was beginning to wonder what...