The name was familiar, but his American hosts had trouble with the pace. In three weeks, erudite, easygoing Ze'ev Binyamin Begin, 37, son of Israel's Premier, managed flying visits to 20 U.S. campuses on a private, expenses-only trip to bring "the message of Israel" to students and, it was hoped, offset what his countrymen see as rising anti-Israel sentiment among American youth. "People don't have to agree with the Israeli government," conceded Begin, "but I think we have a valid position." Binyamin is a geologist (with a Ph.D. from Colorado State University), "a profession," he joked, "as non-Jewish as rain making." The Premier's son made the supreme sacrifice for an Israeli: instead of wearing his customary open-necked shirt, he donned coat and tie. So strange was the four-in-hand, he insisted, that he had to have it tied by his mother-in-law before he left Jerusalem. In the U.S., afraid to undo it, he carefully slid the fully knotted assemblage on and off each day.

A warrior priest is something new in the line of 102 Archbishops of Canterbury stretching back to Augustine in A.D. 597. The 102nd not only won a Military Cross (as a preclerical Scots Guards officer in World War II for pulling a comrade out of a burning tank) but he happens to be a passable tennis player as well. With magnificent pageantry last week in a cathedral bright with spring daffodils, lilies and notables, Robert Alexander Kennedy Runcie, 58, was installed as

Primate of the Church of England and spiritual leader of 65 million Anglicans around the world. Runcie is likely to be a lively prelate if his background and early actions are any test. In a remarkable ecumenical break with tradition, he invited Basil Cardinal Hume, 57, the country's Roman Catholic shepherd, to read the Epistle at the installation. The two are good friends--although Hume's game is squash.

Only a movie star who is self-confidently not past her prime would take on the role of a movie star past her prime. Page Lauren Bacall, who at 55 is

very nearly as primal as she was at 20, when she made her film debut in To Have and Have Not. This time, in a thriller called The Fan, being shot in New York City's theater district, Bacall is an aging actress embarking on her first musical, bothered by a psychotic admirer, Michael Biehn, 23, who begins with fan letters, moves on to erotic notes and finally threatens the lady's life. "It's a wonderful part," says Bacall. "One of the best offered to me in a long time." Is there any connection to her own first musical, Applause, ten years ago, in which she played an aging star maneuvered out of her role by a scheming ingenue? "This is not a story about an aging star," says Bacall, who has been keeping lucratively young between acting parts with a series of TV commercials.

How lovely to be in Britain where the beer and bangers are. That must have been Graham Greene's wistful thought as he worked away in sunny Antibes. Returning home from the South of France to supervise production of two of his plays--one a farcical dig at Ernest Hemingway called For Whom the Bell Chimes, the other a 20-minute curtain raiser titled Yes and No--the 75-year-old British author seemed to have food on his mind. "What I miss most in Antibes is British beer," he told one interviewer. "I miss English sausages," he confided to another. He feasted on plenty of both during his stay and, holding a family reunion, served sandwiches of good English beef and smoked salmon.

If it's art, Jimmy Carter knows what he likes. Asked during a meeting with magazine editors who his favorite painter was, the President replied: "El Greco." He liked the painter's mysticism and modernism, Carter said, and the way he interrelated landscapes and people to make points about human character. That gave ARTnews Editor and

Publisher Milton Esterow, who had raised the question, an idea. He commissioned Caricaturist David Levine to do Carter in the style of El Greco. The result: a mystical, modernist study of a man who looked like he had just lost a primary.

Oh, what a dutiful evening.

Oh, what a dubious play. That's what Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Zhang Wenjin, never having seen a Broadway musical, might have reflected on as he paused during a U.S. visit to judge whether Oklahoma! was exportable to Chinese audiences. After the final curtain, however, Zhang rave-reviewed. He sent flowers to the cast, went backstage to flash his topcoat in a happy encounter with the show's dancers and blossomed in the course of that ultimate Broadway event: a party in his honor at Sardi's. "If these pictures hit the Peking papers," he joked through an interpreter, "I'll be in trouble." Zhang decided Peking should see Oklahoma! too, but the Chinese don't want to pay expenses. So O-o-o-o-o-oklahoma itself will pick up the tab --partly through a dollar-an-Okie fund drive aimed at proud Oklahomans, partly through corporate contributions.

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