By Claudia Wallis

Model Housewife Pat Kramer has this itty-bitty problem. She is shrinking. Perhaps because of prolonged exposure to hundreds of household chemicals, Pat is growing smaller day by day--even as she continues to shop for the family groceries, scour bathtub rings and battle waxy buildup. "She's the kind of person who is going to make the best of it," explains Comedian Lily Tomlin, who plays Kramer in The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a film due for release in January. The sets, says Tomlin, include "a life-size kitchen, one for when I am 3-ft. tall, a huge countertop for when I am 6 in. and, finally, an enormous sink." The last is the scene of an apparent tragedy. There, next to the deadly garbage disposal, Pat's husband (Charles Grodin) learns, a tiny tennis shoe has been found--all that is left of his little woman. Has Kramer's life come to a grinding halt? To avoid giving away the ending, let it be said only that Pat has gone on to bigger things.

She rarely earned a callback during her first seven years in Hollywood, but Patti Davis, 28, is now just about the hottest name in town. The actress, who will be appearing on the Nov. 26 episode of TV's Vega$, has been receiving a hundred offers a day, says her manager Jay Bernstein. "She is as hot as any client I've ever had." And that from the man who handled the sizzling careers of Suzanne Somers and Farrah Fawcett. Davis, nee Reagan, assumed her mother Nancy's maiden name in 1974, she explains, "to have a better chance of having my work judged on its own merit." Is that how it is now being judged? Well, concedes the future First Daughter, "the extra exposure helps."

Oh. In Japanese it means king. In Japanese baseball it means the King: Sadaharu Oh, highest-paid athlete in Asia, with an estimated career income of $7.5 million. Honored bearer of uniform No. 1 for Tokyo's Yomiuri Giants, he led the team to 13 Central League pennant titles and twelve Japan Series victories in 21 years. Sadaharu is a lefthanded power hitter with a .301 career average and 868 home runs to his credit, more than Babe Ruth's 714, more than Hank Aaron's 755. Oh, what a commotion when Oh-san, now 40, retired! Five sports dailies issued red-ink editions hailing the king's modest announcement that "I have reached the technical and physical limits of my abilities." Mammoth sayonaras headlined the country's leading newspapers and led radio and television reports. The Giants reverently retired his number. That same day, across the Pacific, citizens of the country where baseball was invented elected a new President. But that was second-string news in the land where Oh will always be No. 1.

Since her death in 1971 , six attempts to make a film about Coco Chanel, the fabled French couturiere, have come unraveled. For the seventh, Producer Larry Spangler "looked at every conceivable actress," he says. "But the minute I met Marie-France Pisier, I knew I had met Coco. She is tough, charming, aggressive, ambitious, revolutionary, bright." Especially bright. Pisier has a master's degree from the Paris Law School and virtually a Ph.D. in Chanelology. Says the actress, who starred in Cousin Cousine (1975) and The Other Side of Midnight (1977): "I have read every possible book on her." In Chanel Solitaire, Pisier portrays the designer from age 18 to 35, exploring her numerous love affairs with men and, as Pisier puts it, "her friendly but carnal relations with women." The film, she adds, "emphasizes the shadows in her life, and the more shadows there are, the more one is able to slip into the character." Along the way, Pisier, the cast and more than 600 extras also slip into 1,500 costumes, all recreated from Chanel's own sketches.

--By Claudia Wallis

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