People and Events

Playboy magazine Publisher Hugh Hefner apparently did not take kindly to the recent $35-million palimony suit by his former mansion mate, who accused him of breaking his promises to support her, buy her a house in Malibu and store his sperm to impregnate her in case he became too old to do so.

On Wednesday, the 61-year-old Hefner filed a cross-complaint against Carrie Leigh, 24, claiming she deceived him with her own phony promise to be faithful. Leigh, according to Hefner, moved in with him “for the principal purpose of material gain--be it in the form of cash, furs, jewelry, medical expenses, living expenses or luxurious accommodations. . . .”

He said in his Los Angeles Superior Court complaint that the former Canadian model “engaged in a pattern of sexual infidelities” despite her vow to remain “sexually faithful to him. . . .”

Hefner said he spent more than $1 million on her and he wants it back.

Two decades have changed almost everybody, including some of the Chicano radicals who were prominent here during the late 1960s. More than 250 people attended a City Hall reception Tuesday night for Sal Castro, the former Lincoln High School teacher who led the 1968 student walkouts on the Eastside.

Among the attendees were several former members of the militant Brown Berets, wearing their old, slightly faded headgear and greeting each other with hearty abrazos as well as shouts of “Chicano power!”

But the self-styled “prime minister” of the Berets, David Sanchez, who said he has been writing a book on communication, showed up in a neat, tailored blue suit. “I couldn’t find my beret,” he said.

A Roman silver coin struck by Brutus in 43 or 42 BC to celebrate the assassination of Julius Caesar as a patriotic act changed hands here Wednesday--for a whole lot more than it was worth originally. A Zurich bank acting on behalf of an anonymous Swiss museum paid $75,000 for the thing--about twice the value estimated before the bidding.

The silver denarius was said by Numismatic Fine Arts Inc., the dealership headed by new Los Angeles Kings owner Bruce McNall, to be one of only 30 still in existence. It has Brutus himself on one side and two assassins’ daggers on the other.

It was one of the bigger deals on the first day of a two-day auction conducted at the Le Bel Age Hotel in West Hollywood. Another bit of small change, an AD 118 Roman gold coin bearing the likenesses of Plotina and Matidia, wife and niece of Emperor Trajan, went to a collector for $80,000.

That buyer, too, asked to remain anonymous.

Los Angeles’ West Valley animal shelter was coping as well as might be expected Wednesday with a sudden influx of 283 fighting cocks, seized in a raid on a Pacoima home Tuesday. Adding them to the 300 other combative roosters confiscated during the last six months created something of a housing problem for the Chatsworth facility.

Animal Regulation Department Lt. Tim Goffa said the shelter never had that many cocks before, but all were being fed and watered “just like any other animals.”

All the crowing didn’t seem to bother the neighbors. “We don’t notice anything,” said a receptionist at the DCL Corp. office next door.

Some of the birds seized in the Tuesday raid had been confiscated Feb. 20 in another San Fernando Valley raid--only to be stolen nine days later by someone who cut through a chain-link fence at the East Valley shelter.

Herman the Mouse is still at large in the Hollywood police station homicide section, a fact that does not altogether please secretary Martha Chacon. She once threatened to quit unless the detectives got rid of the mouse.

Somebody actually caught Herman the other day and put him in a shoe box. Somebody else let him go.

“I saw little Herman running around here this morning,” Detective Russ Kuster said amiably on Tuesday. As for Chacon: “I think she’s starting to ignore it.”