By E. Graydon Carter

No, Richard Allen, 46, is not acting out a parting suggestion from former Boss Ronald Reagan, 71. The ex-National Security Adviser, who resigned in January after the controversy over his handling of gifts from a Japanese magazine, was simply trying his own hand after judging a local kite-flying contest on Sanibel Island, Fla. "Kites can relax you, can adjust you," says Allen, who is now a political consultant and think-tank associate. He thought his own kite looked like the Pentagon, "but with one more angle." Said he: "It represents the Administration's six-sided strategic defense modernization program. You could call it the Caspar Weinberger Special."

Even by made-for-TV movie standards, the plot for Paper Dolls looks anemic: two young beauties pitted against the vagaries of haute couture; one hustled into the business by an aggressive stage mom (sound familiar?), the other by the head of a modeling agency.

How the film's costars, Alexandra Paul, 18, and Daryl Hannah, 20, landed their roles is an equally drafty tale, one that could have been cooked up by the counterman at Schwab's drugstore. Alexandra, a graduate of preppie Groton, turned up at a New York audition for Dolls and was whisked off to the coast. Daryl was a Hollywood ingenue-in-waiting. Soon they may become household manes. Both are "discoveries" of Charlie's Angels Producer Leonard Goldberg, 48, who is already talking about stretching Paper Dolls out into a series. On TV, your plots can never be too thin to make you rich.

The adventure's patron, Prince Charles, 33, describes it as "refreshingly mad." Indeed, it has been.

Britain's Transglobe Expedition is the first effort to circumnavigate the earth going over the poles, using only ground and sea transportation. Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 38 (call him Ran Fiennes, his friends do), along with Compatriot Charles Burton, 40, and other team members, set out from Greenwich, England, in September 1979. On Easter Sunday, some 50,000 miles later, the adventurers raced the spring thaw to their penultimate destination, the top of the world. Though a hazardous voyage back to Greenwich over quickly melting ice still lies ahead, Fiennes was exuberant. He rammed a slightly frozen Union Jack into the icecap, then scrambled to unpack their celebratory feast: a chocolate Easter egg and a magnum of champagne, which at that latitude was, of course, "nicely chilled."

He is the self-proclaimed king of jelly bean art, a title no one is likely to contest. In past political times, the "jelly bean impressionism" of Peter Rocha, 43, might well have received the critical reception accorded oils of bullfighters on black velvet or children with big watery eyes. But with a prime consumer of jelly beans in the White House, Rocha hopes that his art will catch the public's fancy. Rocha attests to using Jelly Bellys, the President's favorite, because "they are the only brand with a full color spectrum." And he has at last found an answer to the most ancient of jelly bean mysteries: What to do with the black ones? They make great eyes.

--By E. Graydon Carter

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