PEOPLE

By Belinda Luscombe

THE GREATEST AND ODDEST

THE ARTIST Formerly Known as Prince doesn't allow his interviews to be recorded. The Fighter Still Known as the Greatest has difficulty speaking. So when it came to publicizing a concert the two are organizing for the MUHAMMAD ALI World Healing Project, it was hard to decide who should do the talking. Eventually the Artist consented to answer questions posed on the phone to someone else and then relayed to him. Ali's cause appealed to him, he explained, because of the champ's "truth and compassion," and because it's dedicated to fighting bigotry. "When I was in the fifth grade, I was bused to an all-white school," said the singer. "They made fun of my name and picked fights. I always fought, and I always won." Maybe that's why he changed his name to something no one could pronounce.

GOING, GOING, GOWNS

The walls of Christie's salesrooms in New York City are like a faux castle, lined with plastic stone and fake vines, but there were real royal relics up for grabs there last week. More than 1,000 potential buyers, a phalanx of reporters and dozens of young Christie's employees in little black dresses watched Christie's chairman LORD HINDLIP auction off 79 of DIANA's castoffs--some lovely, some dated, some plain hideous. The "Up Yours" dress, right, so called because Diana wore it to stunning effect the night Charles admitted his infidelity on TV, was an early favorite at $74,000. But it was eclipsed by the $222,500 blue velvet "JOHN TRAVOLTA dress," far right, which she wore at a White House dinner in 1985, and the $151,000 "Elvis dress," below, as Diana has called it. Most of the gowns sold for $20,000 to $40,000, shockingly low to some bidders. "I bid on anything less than 20," said Ellen Louise Petho, who dropped $108,100 on four dresses that she intends to auction back home in Port Huron, Mich., for "other causes Di supports." The event made $5.7 million for charity, $1.8 million of it just from catalog sales.

NOW, CORRECT CARTOONS

You can't teach an old soldier new tricks, but you may be able to rid him of his nastier habits. GENERAL HALFTRACK, who was doddering when Beetle Bailey first joined the Army in 1951 and must by now be a very old dog indeed, is being sent for sensitivity training. "The real-life sexual-harassment problems the Army was having kind of spilled over onto us," says Beetle creator Mort Walker, 73, who has faced the wrath of feminists in the past. "Some editors felt that although we weren't condoning it, we were on the edge." So, no more chasing MISS BUXLEY around a desk or falling off his chair to get a better view when she walks past. (The general ceased ordering her to retrieve files from the bottom drawer about 10 years ago.) He even apologizes to her and PRIVATE BLIPS. He's a reformed general--almost. "He's still a bad golfer and a bureaucratic bungler with bad marital habits," says Walker. "He embodies all our failures. We're not going to be deprived of things to make fun of."