People

By Richard Lacayo

Music, they say, hath charms. Larry Adler, 71, is a maestro of the harmonica whose U.S. concert career foundered in the 1950s when he was blacklisted for declining to identify friends as Communists. Edward L. Rowny, 68, is President Reagan's adviser on arms control and a man who lists to the right politically. But Rowny is also an avid harmonica player who used to deflate after-hours tensions at the 1982 Geneva arms talks by performing a Russian folk song or two. As teenagers, both men played together in a Baltimore harmonica band, and after one of Adler's concerts last year, Rowny popped backstage to renew the acquaintance. That led the pair to join a benefit concert in Baltimore last week, where they played an onstage duet of the sort they could never play in politics. Says Adler: "You could fly a plane between where we stand on the political spectrum. But music can transcend ideology." Maybe they should send Springsteen to the next summit.

Backed by an endowment of $2.3 billion, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif., has no need to count the pennies, or even the millions. It proved that again last week at a London auction, where the museum bought Andrea Mantegna's Adoration of the Magi for $ 10.45 million, the highest sum ever paid for a painting at auction, surpassing the $10 million paid for J.M.W. Turner's Seascape: Folkestone last year. Mantegna worked on the deeply spiritual canvas between 1495 and 1505, when he was court painter for the worldly Gonzagas of Mantua. They would have appreciated the jealousies the sale has triggered. Britain may still seek to keep the painting in the country by refusing to grant an export license. And Daniel Wildenstein, an unsuccessful bidder, howled, "I am furious not to have the picture." The Marquess of Northampton, however, was said to be delighted by the price. But then, of course, he was the owner.

In a nation with countless soccer fields, West Germans have just one public golf course. But they also have Bernhard Langer, 27, who last week became the first German ever to win the Masters Tournament. With brilliant iron shots and steadier putting than has been usual for him, Langer in the last nine holes came from four shots back to win by two. His final total: 282, six under par for the Augusta National course. The lone West German pro on the P.G.A. tour, Langer is the first of his countrymen to win even the German Open. His Masters victory, he hopes, "will inspire some other young boy from Germany to take up the game." For now, though, when asked who the greatest German player in history was, he smiles brightly: "It is I."

These days Paulina Porizkova in a swimsuit is everybody's favorite model. Also without a swimsuit. The May issue of GQ magazine features her both ways. In Key West, Fla., Porizkova, 20, was shooting a men's beachwear picture spread with Model Jeff Aquilon to accompany a story on topless beaches. The plan was for her to be featured in the background. Somehow she moved to the fore. "Her personality came through," is how Photographer Patrick Demarchelier explains it. Porizkova thinks that the fuss she's already heard about the pictures is much ado about nothing. In Sweden where the Czech-born beauty grew up, "there's not a woman on the beach under 80 who wears a top." Perhaps. But few of them have as much personality. --By Richard Lacayo