After Warner Bros, excised half an hour from George Cukor's 1954 remake of A Star Is Born, the director vowed never to see the film again. Last week at New York City's Radio City Music Hall, after a painstaking reassembly, the original version that Cukor loved--all three hours of it--was shown publicly for the first time since its release 29 years ago. James Mason, 74, who played Norman Maine to Judy Garland's Esther Blodgett took a bow at intermission, but Film Historian Ronald Haver was the true star of the show. Combing musty film vaults in Brooklyn and Hollywood, Haver first found a copy of the original sound track, which he used as a guide when he began splicing in the bits and pieces of missing film that he found. The tale has many of the ingredients of a great detective story, but its penultimate scene is the stuff of pure Hollywood legend. On the night before he would have attended the first private screening of the restored movie earlier this year, Cukor died in his sleep.

In the end, all the backstage banter about a romantic reconciliation and all the coy onstage asides were but means of bloating the box office of their ponderous Broadway revival of Noel Coward's comedy Private Lives. Mercifully, it seems that Richard Burton, 57, and Elizabeth Taylor, 51, may never replay their headline-grabbing love affair again. For last week, at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas (what could be more romantic?), Burton wed his companion of the past 18 months, Sally Hay, 35. It was Burton's fifth reading of the wedding vows. (Past partners: Sybil Williams, Taylor, Taylor again, and Susan Hunt.) After learning of the marriage, Taylor, whose current consort is Mexican Lawyer Victor Luna, pursed her lips into a smile and said, "I've known all along they would be married and happy together."

It was everything James Watt could have hoped for in a July 4th, and more. While the Interior Secretary watched from the roof of his offices a few hundred yards away, his celebrated choice for the capital's Independence Day concert, Wayne Newton, 41, hauled his sequined Las Vegas act out onto the Washington Mall. (One local radio station suggested that a two-drink minimum be imposed to make the entertainer feel more at home.) Doffing a headdress that had been presented to him earlier--Newton is part Indian--the singer milked the day's patriotic sentiment, kicking off with his own version of Neil Diamond's America, which ended with a shameless appeal to Martin Luther King's memory as Newton intoned a snatch of King's "I have a dream" speech. Mawkishness went on to new depths, even for a July 4th, with Newton's lead-in to Tie a Yellow Ribbon. "May there never be another American held hostage on foreign soil," he solemnly descanted. "And if you feel like singing along with us, do it." Where did you say the Beach Boys were playing?

While the scuffed grass of the All England Club's Centre Court began its annual post-championship airing out, this year's Wimbledon winners, John McEnroe, 24, and Martina Navratilova, 26, were being toasted during the post-tournament dinner at London's Savoy Hotel. McEnroe, who crunched New Zealand's Chris Lewis in the straight set men's finals, had even worked on his backhanded temperament, going so far as to shake hands with the umpire and referee after one match. "I think I've made a conscious effort to get along," said he. "But don't take this too seriously."

--By E. Graydon Carter

On the Record

Isaac Bashevis Singer, 78, author and 1978 Nobel laureate: "When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer."

Beverly Sills, 54, director of the New York City Opera and retired diva, on the fact that she does not sing at all now, not even in the shower: "My voice had a long, nonstop career. It deserves to be put to bed with quiet and dignity, not yanked out every once in a while to see if it can still do what it used to do. It can't." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.