By Ralph Davidson

There's no business like covering show business, especially when it reaches the global proportions of Paramount's ambitious production The Great Gatsby. In England, Cultural Correspondent Lawrence Malkin talked with Director Jack Clayton in London and drove deep into the Surrey countryside to interview Mia Farrow.

In New York, where this week's cover story was written by Judy Fayard with the help of Reporter-Researcher Patricia Gordon and edited by Martha Duffy, Correspondent Mary Cronin spent several hours with Gatsby Scriptwriter Francis Ford Coppola. In the meantime, Los Angeles Correspondent Leo Janos talked to some of the Gatsby constellation: Robert Redford, Bruce Dern and Karen Black. Exploring their hopes and fears about the movie, he learned that none of them had yet seen the final version of their film.

Janos and Correspondent Patricia Delaney then teamed up to interview Paramount President Frank Yablans and Production Head Robert Evans. A former speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson, Janos is no stranger to hyperbole. But even he was amazed by Paramount's dazzling promotional acrobatics. "We're in the business of making magic," Yablans told him. Our case study of Hollywood goes behind the cameras this week to examine the mechanics--and the hazards--of that claim.

During the last years of his life, former Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev dictated his memoirs, filling almost 180 hours of tape with reminiscences of a career that took shape in the days of Stalin and ultimately exerted a lasting influence on the history of this century. The existence of these tapes was revealed last week when Time Inc. presented them to the Oral History Collection of Columbia University, along with authentication and transcripts.

After Time Inc. obtained the tapes, they were translated and edited into two separate volumes of memoirs by TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott, a student of Russian literature and former Rhodes Scholar. The first volume, Khrushchev Remembers, was published in 1970. The second, based on tapes that were dictated for the most part between the time the first volume appeared and Khrushchev's death in 1971, will be called Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Excerpts from it will appear in TIME before its publication in June by Little, Brown & Co. TIME Diplomatic Editor Jerrold L. Schechter, our Moscow bureau chief from 1968 to 1970, wrote the book's introduction. "The tapes," Schechter says, "are a unique contribution to our political and historical legacy. They contain not only an insight into Khrushchev's mind and the minds of the men around him but also a large part of the story behind the headlines of the past ten years. History and journalism are never very far apart."

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