People

By Guy D. Gacia

His incandescent canvases were as much a part of the psychedelic '60s as Beatles music. Then, at the peak of his popularity in 1970, Artist Peter Max vanished from the international art scene and devoted the next 16 years to painterly experimentation and travel. But now Max is back. At Manhattan's Jack gallery last week, the Berlin-born artist opened a show of 30 gaily colored paintings and graphics under the rubric "Peter Max Celebrates America." Cheap the artist is not: his works on various patriotic themes are selling for anywhere from $12,000 to $50,000. So has Max joined the Establishment? "My art was patriotic in the '60s," he insists. "I was close to both Presidents and hippies."

While filming The Color of Money and Top Gun, he proved a quick study in the pool hall and the cockpit. Now Tom Cruise, 24, has shifted gears again to test his learning curve on the auto racetrack. Cruise took the wheel of a Nissan 300 ZX turbo sports car last week while making his pro circuit racing debut at the Road Atlanta race course in Braselton, Ga. His wife of two months, Actress Mimi Rogers, cheered from the pit. So did his new pal and Money co-star, Paul Newman, 62, a veteran race-car driver who later took the wheel of his own 300 ZX in another division. Cruise, who described his leg of the race as being "smooth as silk," drove for the first half of the three- hour marathon before handing off to a teammate who finished 14th in a field of 42 cars. As for Newman, he came in seventh in a field of 44 contenders. Looks like the kid still has a few things to learn from Fast Eddie.

"There's a word that brings us all together here tonight," Humorist Art Buchwald informed the black-tie crowd at Washington's Departmental Auditorium last week, "and that word is fear." Perhaps, but for most of the capital's movers and shakers, the scariest thing about Katharine Graham's 70th-birthday ; bash was not the long reach of her Washington Post Co. publishing empire but the possibility of not being invited. Among the 600 or more well-wishers at the fete organized by Graham's daughter Lally Weymouth: Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, Senator Edward Kennedy, Publisher Malcolm Forbes, ABC Newswoman Barbara Walters and retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Lewis Powell. "Here's looking at you, kid," said the President as he toasted the liberal Graham in Casablanca style. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger noted the "mark the Washington Post has left on this town, on our nation . . . and perhaps on some of us." As for Graham, asked how she felt about turning 70, she answered, "Ambivalent. Nobody likes to be that age."

Plenty of eleven-year-olds love airplanes, but John Kevin Hill is the first kid on his block to make history in one. As the flawless finale to a weeklong Los Angeles-to-Washington journey that was slowed down by thunderstorms over Ohio, Hill made a smooth landing at National airport last week and thereby became -- as far as anyone knows -- the youngest pilot ever to fly across the continental U.S. Climbing out of a single-engine Cessna 210, Hill, who had been accompanied throughout by his flying instructor, calmly discussed his future flight plans. "I want to fly around the world," said the pint-size pilot. "And I wanta go to the moon, bounce around and ride a lunar rover." Then Hill picked a wooden airplane off a huge celebratory cake and gleefully simulated a crash landing in the icing.

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York