"I thought I was due for a pleasant film experience,"says Candice Bergen, who was last seen slugging it out with Giancarlo Giannini in Italian Director Lina Wertmuller's feminist treatise The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain. This time the title is a cinch--Oliver's Story. A continuation of Love Story, it also stars Ryan O'Neal, who falls in love with Marcie Bonwit, an executive in her family's department store. Alas, Oliver and Marcie do not wind up together. "She's a woman who works, who wants a relationship, but not at the expense of her life," says Bergen, 32, adding sweetly, "like most of us."

Once he was a graceful Gold Glove outfielder and .300 hitter for the St. Louis Cardinals, earning $90,000 a year. But when the Cardinals tried to trade Curt Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1969, he filed a suit challenging baseball's reserve system. Said he: "I am a man, not a consignment of goods to be bought and sold." The Supreme Court upheld the reserve system, and an angry Flood quit baseball, drifting around the world, tending his own bar on the Spanish island of Majorca and painting portraits for $350 and up. Now that baseball players are free at last, Flood, 40, has returned to the game as a radio broadcaster for the Oakland A's. "I'm as nervous as a rookie," he said before his debut, where he made a hit with his delivery but struck out on analysis. "I've been kidded," he said modestly, "that my job is to catch foul balls headed for the booth."

Are you ready for two Travoltas? As Saturday Night Fever continues to turn on the fans, John's elder brother Joey, 27, has decided to cash in on the family name. "Things are hot for me now," says Joey, who once taught emotionally disturbed children in Englewood, N.J. With $5,000 from John, 24, Joey headed for Hollywood, where he turned down a part in a TV pilot because the role was too much like his brother's in Welcome Back, Kotter. But he managed to sign a movie contract. Joey has also cut his first single. The title: I Don't Want to Go. Where, Joey, where?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knows tough competition when he sees it: "If he goes into politics, I stay out," he announced, eying David Eisenhower. The two got together in Manhattan at the invitation of a new magazine, Your Place, which has published an interview with each of them. Both Robert, 24, and David, 30, admit that coming from prominent political families poses problems. Robert, a student at the London School of Economics, recalls the "white rage" he felt when he was a Harvard undergraduate and a lecturer described J.F.K. as "macho, a Harvard jocko type." But overall, he concedes that being a Kennedy means "the balance is in my favor." As for David, who is living with his wife Julie near her father's complex at San Clemente and writing a biography of his grandfather, he says that something of Ike must have rubbed off on him. "I don't feel pressured as intensely anywhere else as on a golf course," he told Your Place. "A 3-ft. putt is really a test of your moral and intellectual capacity."

On the Record

A. Bartlett Giamatti, the new president of Yale University: "In 15 years, Yale will be more expensive, there will be 1 million fewer 18-year-olds, the capacity to place Ph.D.s will be rarer, the young faculty is increasingly in despair. But we cannot retreat into a siege mentality."

John Ehrlichman, former presidential assistant who just got out of jail, on Richard Nixon: "I have done my time. I don't think he is ever going to stop doing his time."

Lord Kenneth Clark, narrator of TV's Civilisation: "I still go to Chartres cathedral each year and to the Parthenon every three years. Very good. Keeps your standards high."

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