A Birthday Bash for Miss Liberty

--President Reagan will unveil the newly restored Statue of Liberty on July 3 at her 100th birthday party, a “50-goose-bump” fete featuring fireworks, a parade of up to 141 ships and a concert with Frank Sinatra and Lionel Richie, officials said. “We intend to throw one hell of a party in her honor,” Chrysler Chairman Lee A. Iacocca, who also heads the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, said at a Manhattan news conference, where plans for the four-day fete in July called “Liberty Weekend ‘86” were announced. The 100th birthday will be televised on ABC-TV in the United States and will be beamed overseas by satellite. The July 6 four-hour finale in New Jersey’s Meadowlands will feature more fireworks and another concert of stars. On the Fourth of July, the President will oversee an International Naval Review in New York Harbor with navies from as many as 117 countries joining the U.S. Atlantic Fleet--only the fifth review in U.S. Navy history, officials said. Sailing ships from as many as 141 nations also will be on parade in “OpSail 1986,” they said.

--Bill Cosby, star of the top-rated NBC comedy, “The Cosby Show,” says the film industry is often racist and he is much happier working on television or on stage. “Black people certainly are primitive, aren’t they? If you want proof, just send in a white film maker,” Cosby said in an interview published in the December issue of Playboy magazine. Cosby, 48, who has starred in such films as “Uptown Saturday Night,” said “Year of the Dragon” and “The Gods Must Be Crazy” are examples of racist films. In the first, a white man decimates New York’s Chinatown, Cosby said, and the second “shows that if you just drop a Coke bottle out of an airplane, you can pretty much shake up an entire African culture.” Cosby said: “I never cared about being a movie star. . . . In reality, the TV series is exactly what I enjoy doing.”

--Actress Cicely Tyson, chairwoman of UNICEF’s trick-or-treat campaign, said in a talk at the University of Texas in Austin that feeding Africa’s starving millions is a monumental problem that “no one entity can solve.” The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund trick-or-treat program has raised $80 million in its 35 years.

--Former First Lady Betty Ford, who has already written one autobiography, plans a second book about whipping her alcohol and drug dependency, her literary agent says. Profits from the as-yet-untitled book will go to the Betty Ford Center and other addiction treatment centers designated by Mrs. Ford, her agent said.