JACQUELINE BISSET

Thoroughbred

At thirtyeight, Jacqueline Bisset has been a starlet for eighteen years, playing thoroughbred beauties in movies like Airport, Bullitt and The Deep with an aplomb that never varies. In Rich and Famous and the forthcoming Class, she portrays for a change the kind of wealthy older woman with a keen eye for younger men who is more pursuer than pursued. Recent photos suggest, however, that she is by no means convincingly over the hill.

FANFARE PORTFOLIO

BABES IN TOYLAND

Hollywood's Super Kids

A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had,” said the original Hollywood prodigy Orson Welles. Here are four of Welles’s offspring, young movie directors who share his fascination with technique, if not with Shakespearean drama. They take boyish delight in Sharks and monsters, guns and robots, helicopters and macho men—the stuff of comic book culture. Left to right: George Lucas (the Star Wars series), Steven Spielberg (Jaws, E.T.), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), and Martin

KEITH HARING Objet d’Artifice

Graffiti artist Keith Haring tells stories about high-speed urban life in frantic figures and patterns. The surfaces he chooses range from canvas to subway billboards to baby cribs to urns (see left). Though he is often grouped with those graffiti artists who have emerged from the South Bronx, Haring in fact comes from white, middle-class Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York. True to his background, Haring’s chalk, paint or marker drawings are respectably neat and tidy. They were prominent on the eighteen-foot-high wall at the recent Whitney Biennial and can still be seen on subway billboards, where two years ago his work first came to the attention of the New York cognoscenti (those, that is, who don’t take cabs). He straddles the fence, neither truly subversive nor wholeheartedly commercial.

VIRGIL THOMSON Encore

I’m a reasonably cheerful character... and absurdly self-confident,” Virgil Thomson once said. “I think I’ve been extremely fortunate to have a quite good brain, and a quite good ear, extremely good health, and a fair disposition.” Now eighty-six, this legendary American composer and critic has just enjoyed a highly praised revival of The Mother of Us All, the opera he wrote with Gertrude Stein in the ’40s, which opened in New York in March and will travel to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Wolf Trap this summer.

JOAN RIVERS Dishing It

Can we talk? This thin sliver of a vamp, all teeth and talons, is the hottest comedienne in show business today. Subbing for Johnny Carson, starring at Carnegie Hall, or headlining in Vegas, Joan Rivers rushes in where even the National Enquirer fears to tread. (What’s the label on Liz Taylor’s designer jeans? Orson Welles. You thought Bo Derek was smart? She studies for a Pap test.) Coming attractions: a lead on Broadway in a female version of The Odd Couple\ two films, both written by Rivers; and a book about her early days in comedy, when she was more bomb than bombshell.

VINCENT SPANO The Sheik

In The Black Stallion Returns, twenty-year-old Vincent Spano’s performance as a Berber prince had the stiff elegance of a young man new to caftans. But in Baby It's You, the Brooklyn-born actor played a more believable kind of sheik. His performance as a classy greaser had the regal ease of a young man born to wear sharkskin. In his new film, Rumble Fish, he will try to make us believe that he’s a clean-cut, blond, all-American paragon. Even blond, it’s likely he’ll smolder.