By Richard Stengel

"If you come out, John, I'll let you serve," coaxed a coy Billie Jean King. "You can even pick your own linesman." This last promise was one her quarry couldn't resist, and out from backstage came a head-banded, curly-haired, racquet-wielding Snoopy masquerading as a mild-mannered John McEnroe. The arena was the Grand Ballroom at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria, as the Second Annual Women's Sports Foundation dinner served a sizable helping of awards and raised some $80,000 to encourage women's participation in sports. "I adore John," Billie Jean commented, "but his bark is worse than his serve." Fault!

The math is simple: ten plus ten equals 20. But the relationship between perfectly proportioned Bo Derek and her similarly endowed sister Kelly Collins seems rather more complex. Kelly, 20, who has worked as a sultry stand-in for her elder sister, is preparing to star in a new film called K.A.O.S., a campus whodunit. Kelly, green at the acting game, confesses she is "scared to death," but is not daunted by her sister's histrionic talents: "Frankly, I haven't seen anything in which Bo showed she could act." Although they may not be in the Olivia de Havilland-Joan Fontaine class of sibling rivalry, their lapse of sisterly feeling proves that tens are easily divisible.

Having learned the first rule of married life (it doubles the bills), Prince Charles, 32, has proclaimed a regal solution: a 50% raise. Charles--unlike the rest of his family--receives no allowance from the British government. As the Duke of Cornwall, Charles splits the duchy's revenues fifty-fifty with the Treasury; last year he collected -L-275,000 tax free (more than $500,000). As the result of a new Treasury agreement, Charles, with an 18th century home in Gloucestershire and a suite in Kensington Palace to keep up, will now pocket 75% of the revenues.

As an actor on stage and screen, Michael Moriarty, 40, knows the sting of critics' barbs. But Moriarty, unlike most performers, can retaliate in kind. Last week he starred in a tart, off-Broadway monologue called Dexter Creed, written by himself. Moriarty portrays an acerbic, dyspeptic critic loosely modeled on John Simon, 56, the acerbic, dyspeptic drama critic for New York magazine. Simon considers himself an arbiter of high artistic standards. And clearly Dexter Creed doesn't come up to them. In his review of the play this week, Simon growls: "Cruel and unusual punishment." For whom? The playgoer or Critic Simon?

"Forgive me for saying this, but you're causing the President grave concern," said the scolding letter. President Ronald Reagan, it continued, "personally asked me to find out why you're holding back." The letter, sent out in September by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, over the signature of its chairman, Senator Robert Packwood of Oregon, was intended to raise funds for G.O.P. senatorial candidates. But the hectoring, heavyhanded hard sell was too much for White House Political Director Lyn Nofziger, who axed the appeal and labeled it "the limit of fund-raising hyperbole." Packwood, who had not written the letter, left town without comment, but one committee spokesman confessed: "We'll be more cautious in using the President's name in the future."

&$151;By Richard Stengel

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