By E. Graydon Carter

In 17 outings at the Indianapolis 500, Gordon Johncock, 45, had been stymied by broken crankshafts, flat tires, dry gas tanks and fuel-pump failures. His one earlier Indy win, in 1973, had come in a race that was stopped by rain after 332.5 miles. "It seems throughout my career," he says, "that it hasn't been meant for me to run 500 miles." This year Johncock managed to hold on for a full-length victory, though the jaws of defeat were snapping close behind. With 13 laps left, Johncock's STP Wildcat-Cosworth was 12 sec. ahead of the second-place car, a Penske-Ford driven by Rick Wears, 30. Then Mears began closing in, gaining almost a second a lap. Johncock kept thinking desperately, "Is it going to stay together? Is it going to stay together?" It did, and he did, but only narrowly. He won by a mere .16 sec. in the closest finish in the Brickyard's history. But for Johncock, there was little cause to savor the $290,609 victory. After the race, he flew to Hastings, Mich., and the hospital bedside of his comatose mother Frances, 77. Hours later, she died, never having learned of her son's triumph.

Somewhere along the way, Anita Morris has surely completed Broadway's decathlon. She scaled a 50-ft. wall in the original production of Jesus Christ Superstar, performed an acrobatic dance routine in Seesaw, and was sawed in half by The Magic Show's Doug Henning, then stuffed into a cage with a 200-lb. cougar. In the current Broadway hit Nine, Morris gives new meaning to the phrase physical-fitness buff. In one number, A Call from the Vatican, she does a feline, erotic exercise for which she is so barely dressed in such sheer black that she has worn through three costumes in six weeks. Her performance was to have been part of Sunday night's Tony Awards on CBS, but when network censors took in A Call from the Vatican, they said sorry, wrong number. The replacement song, Be Italian, puts Anita into attire more in keeping with Sunday-night fare: a nun's habit.

Boy, dear diary, you land a good job in Washington and all of a sudden everyone wants to talk to you. It's sort of embarrassing, but when David Letterman called--you know, the host of Late Night on NBC--what could I say? I mean, David, he's so ahhhh. I'm 14 now, so it was O.K. for me to go to New York with my brother Jeff's wife Annette and my two Secret Service escorts, who follow me everywhere. I wore this new black dress that I had just bought, and everyone thought I looked pretty grownup. I was a little shy at first, but David was nice, and he asked me if I ever did anything bad in the White House, and I told him about the time I carved my initials in my windowsill. So then he calls Mom right on the show!!! Gross, right? I was so embarrassed!!! He tells her about my dress (which she hasn't seen yet), and she tells him that she likes my white one back home. In front of everybody!!! Then he tells her about my initials on the windowsill. I could have croaked. I'll tell you more about my summer job as a Senate page later, since nothing has really happened here yet, except that one Senator asked me to pick him up some peanuts. Ha. Ha. I think they are a little funnier in New York.

--Amy

The answer is a) dress-up night on the Blue Lagoon, b) an air-conditioning breakdown at Studio 54, or c) a modeling session for Harper's Bazaar. The question, of course, is what prompted Brooke Shields to slip into a Geoffrey Beene tuxedo bathing suit? Come to think of it, who cares why she did it? Having turned 17 last week, Brooke, the lovely duckling, has clearly grown into a long, lean swan. Later this year she embarks on Sahara, another splendor-in-the-sand epic in which she will play, for the first time, a woman. In the film, Brooke winds up racing a 1928 Packard in a trans-Sahara race. Will she bring her black-tie bathing suit? That was just for show. Personally, she prefers the informality of a well-worn Speedo.

--By E. Graydon Carter

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