By Guy D. Garcia

If you've got it, merchandise it. Christie Brinkley, 29, has and she does. Last year there was a striking swimsuit poster and calendar. The supermodel has also decided to take an active role in creating the clothes that she wears so well. Last week Brinkley was in Manhattan at the gala "label cutting" for her own Russ Togs line of swim and sport clothes due in department stores this fall. Wearing a man's pajama shirt and secondhand tuxedo jacket plus knit cotton pants she designed herself, Brinkley wants "to design clothes that are comfortable. These are not going to be skimpy bathing suits cut up to here. These are suits my mom can wear too." Considerate dads might want to go out and buy their wives a copy of Brinkley's workout book.

It is already a classic of Hollywood deal making gone sour. The upshot is that if Director Francis Coppola, 45, has any chance of getting The Cotton Club to the screen in December as planned, it rests with U.S. District Court Judge Irving Hill. In a ruling last week in Los Angeles, Hill likened a foot-high pile of allegations, suits and countersuits to the movie Rashomon, in which "every event is reported entirely differently by every person who saw it." The cast of the courtroom drama includes Coppola, Producer Robert Evans and Investors Fred and Edward Doumanl and Victor Sayyah, who have been waging a bitter back-lot struggle for control of the way-over-budget ($58 million in all, some say) Harlem jazz-era epic with Richard Gere, Diane Lane and Gregory Nines. Says Evans of Coppola, in one reported sample of the prevailing civility: "He has as much respect for money as I do for Gaddafi." Waving aside intimations of drug abuse and gangland connections, Judge Hill left Evans in charge but gave final authority over post-production decisions to Associate Producer Barrle Osborne, who is backed by Coppola and the Doumanis. Meanwhile, one Hollywood agent is said to have found the off-camera yarn so interesting that he offered $500,000 for screen rights to The Cotton Club courtroom papers.

Pulitzer Prizewinning Journalist Harrison Salisbury, 75, first approached the Chinese government with the idea of retracing Mao Tse-tung's Long March twelve years ago. "They just laughed," he recalls. But Salisbury persisted, and last fall he was finally given the go-ahead for a 70-day journey along the more than 6,000-mile route that Communist troops trekked on foot to escape Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army in 1934-35. With his wife Charlotte, an interpreter and General Qin Xing Han, deputy director of the military museum in Peking, Salisbury made some concessions to age, skipping a few miles here and there and using mostly Jeeps or minibuses. The author, now at home, expects to complete a book, The Long March: The Untold Story, in time for the 50th anniversary of the historic event in the fall of next year. Says Salisbury: "It was the most remarkable journey I've had in 50 years of reporting, but the green hills of Connecticut look awfully good to me now."

Once again those "little cable cars" were "climbing halfway to the stars." So one star came the other half of the way to meet them, celebrating the cars' reappearance after a two-year, $60 million restoration job. Tony Bennett, 57, his heart still in his throat, on his sleeve and in San Francisco simultaneously, helped Mayor Dianne Feinstein, 51, lead a city wide festival marking the official reopening of the system. "One of the great treats in life is to ride on a cable car," burbled Bennett. "The whole world has been waiting for this day." As church bells rang and thousands of balloons bobbed in the wind, Bennett obligingly belted out his trademark song over and over for swooning bystanders. Doesn't he get a little bit tired of repeating the same lyrics? Retorts the eternal romantic: "Do you ever get tired of making love?" --By Guy D. Garcia