By E. Graydon Carter

At Christie's in New York City last week, the house applauded enthusiastically as the gavel went down on Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning's Two Women. Reason: a price of $1.2 million, the most money paid for a work by a living artist. (The previous record for a De Kooning was a scant $242,000.) "The art market looks alive and well and living in New York," said Art Dealer Allan Stone, who bid on the work for an anonymous collector. The artist, who is alive and well and living on Long Island, got no share of the spoils. He sold the painting 25 years ago for well under $100,000.

When the inevitable casting calls for Grease 2 went out, the two lovebirds from the original, John Travolta, 28, and Olivia Newton-John, 34, were wisely out buying groceries or getting body work done on their Mercedes. But they had to pick up their phones some time, and the result is a film now being shot in New York City that borrows heavily from the 1978 thriller The Silent Partner. In this movie, which doesn't even have a title yet--how about Greed 2?--Newton-John plays a bank teller, and Travolta is a two-bit robber who uses blond tresses as a disguise. "You have to work yourself into it," says Travolta, "but I like myself as a blond."

No parolee ever looked better. Nearly a year after serving 17 days for tax evasion, Sophia Loren, 48, is back doing what she does best: pursuing the business of being a movie star. She is working now on a film biography of Maria Callas. At the Cannes Film Festival last week, fans and film hustlers were tripping over their Guccis to get a look at the postprison Loren. She was there to get an honorary trophy for representing "the long and great tradition of love that unites the festival at Cannes and the Italian cinema." A nice sentiment and, since the award carries no cash value, no tax problems either.

He was the dark side of the American Dream; a Godfearing, hardworking, lower-middle-class Protestant who wallowed in a simpler past and dreamed of better times ahead. The king of his own humble castle at 704 Houser Street in Queens, N.Y., Archie Bunker, played unfalteringly by Carroll O'Connor, entered into the American consciousness on a chilly Tuesday night in January 1971, when a nervous CBS first aired All in the Family. Archie, Wife Edith, Daughter Gloria and Son-in-Law Mike were a nuclear family born out of fission as they grappled with such TV taboos as racism, impotence, abortion, rape, homosexuality and alcoholism. When the three other principals (played by Jean Stapleton, 58, Sally Struthers, 34, and Rob Reiner, 38) left, O'Connor, 57, bought a neighborhood bar and turned it and the show into Archie Bunker's Place. But times had changed, and with few social bubbles left to burst, the program drifted into a tame sitcom limbo that disappointed old fans and failed to win new ones. It seemed to be kept alive through dint of sheer stubborn will by O'Connor, who, as star, producer and sometime writer and director, reportedly received as much as $5 million a season. Last week CBS canceled Archie Bunker. The show will be missed nowhere near as much as the character it was built around. Archie was a tortured prisoner of his xenophobic goblins, but he helped us see the enemy and, sure enough, he was us.

--By E. Graydon Carter This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.