People

By Guy D. Garcia

"It wasn't my intention for him to do it as a film," recalls Nora Ephron, 44. "I just wanted him to read it." But Director Mike Nichols, 53, thought Heartburn, Ephron's best-selling novel that resembles the breakup of her marriage to Watergate Journalist Carl Bernstein, 41, would make a good movie, and the rest, as they say, is history, or maybe her-story. Now filming in New York City, Heartburn stars Meryl Streep, 35, as the jilted cookbook writer, and Jack Nicholson, 48, as the man who gives her marital indigestion. Nicholson is replacing Mandy Patinkin, 32, who departed suddenly after "artistic differences" with the director. So what is the movie based on the book based on the breakup about? Says Nichols: "It's about how tough and funny it is to live in a big city and try to love somebody." Not to mention make a movie.

Even rain could not dampen the good cheer last week as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother celebrated her 85th birthday. Accompanied by her daughters Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, the birthday girl started her various celebrations at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, where the organist ended the service by striking up a rousing Happy Birthday. The next day, the traditional 62-gun birthday salute was fired at Hyde Park and the Tower of London. But the best present came when the Queen Mum got her long-standing wish to fly aboard the Concorde. During her nearly two-hour specially chartered flight over Britain, she dined on Scottish lobster and Angus beef and sipped her favorite champagne. Then she was strapped into a seat behind the pilot as he accelerated beyond the sound barrier to 1,340 m.p.h. Mum's word: "Incredible."

The idea clicked last December in Rio de Janeiro, where Supermodel Jerry Hall was posing for Photographer Annie Leibovitz for the March '85 cover of Vanity Fair. The session went so well that the pair decided to do a 1986 pinup calendar. There was no problem finding exposure: Workman Publishing took the calendar, Playboy a set of the photographs. Hall's seasonal poses run from a vision in lace (January) to Aunt Sam (July) to a Christmas gift (December). Observes Leibovitz of Mick Jagger's lady: "Jerry loves the camera." And vice versa.

He looks wise, or at least wised-up, beyond his years, and why not? If anyone should be used to life in the passing lane, it is Bret Easton Ellis, 21. Since his first novel, Less Than Zero, was published in May, it has sold 50,000 copies and made several best-seller lists. Ellis, meanwhile, has become a cult celebrity, showing up on Today, Firing Line and MTV. Not bad for someone who just completed his junior year at Bennington College in Vermont. Ellis' book, set in the affluent Los Angeles suburbs where he grew up, chronicles a few days in the lives of a group of teenagers burned out on sex and drugs. "It can be taken, I guess, as a piece of sociology," he concedes. "A lot of teenagers hunger to be in that kind of group." As for the grownup pressures of his new success, he says straitlacedly, "You just have to keep writing. If you let stuff like that get in your head, you'll never write another word." --By Guy D.Garcia