She is just sweet 13 but already Brooke Shields has played a prepubescent prostitute in Louis Malle's movie Pretty Baby. For her next role in Wanda Nevada, precocious Brooke is cast as an aspiring singer named Wanda who escapes from a Nevada orphanage and roams the West with a two-bit gambler named Baudray D'Emerillo (Peter Fonda). "I'm still playing the part of a girl who wants to be older, but this time there's none of that sex business involved," says Brooke. Even nicer, she has established a rapport with Co-Star Fonda, who also happens to be the director. "This is the first time I've worked with a director who is a good friend," says Brooke, adding with childlike logic: "Maybe it's because he's got children himself."

Was it a Greek myth? Absolutely, said acquaintances of the prospective bride. Not at all, insisted the bridegroom's mother. At issue: persistent rumors that Shipping Heiress Christina Onassis, 27, the twice-divorced daughter of the late Aristotle Onassis, will wed Sergei Kauzov, 37, a divorced former official of the Soviet ship-chartering agency Sovfracht, on Aug. 1, and settle down in Moscow. The couple are supposed to have met either in Moscow, where Christina negotiated the charter of her ships to carry American grain to the U.S.S.R., or in Paris, where Kauzov was sent on business. When the Soviet government got wind of the romance, it is said, Kauzov was called home and fired. Later, Kauzov, who has a glass eye from a childhood accident, began supporting himself as an English tutor. When TIME's Moscow correspondent called Christina at the Intourist Hotel, she said firmly: "I have never talked to reporters, and I am not going to now."

After steering his newspaper into the ranks of the nation's best, Los Angeles Times Publisher Otis Chandler revved up for a different kind of contest: the Six Hours of Endurance race at Watkins Glen, N.Y. Making his professional track debut, Chandler, 50, drove his own Porsche Turbo 935. "I had done some amateur racing, but I had never gone toe to toe with the world's greatest drivers," says Chandler. "It was much more than I had bargained for." Even so, the press lord is now feeling like a king of the pit: "I guess I kind of scored one for the amateurs and for the old folks," he boasts. Chandler's finishing position: a respectable No. 6 out of 52.

It is a tough act to follow, but Singer Georgia Holt is ready to face the music. Holt, nee Jackie Jean Crouch 51 years ago in Kensett, Ark., happens to be the mother of another warbler: Cher. When Mom took the mike at a West Hollywood nightspot, Studio One, last week, Cher and her sister, Actress Georganne LaPiere, were in the audience cheering wildly. For Holt, the stint was actually a refrain. As a youngster, she used to hit the notes on the radio and in saloons across the West. This time around, Holt has hopes of cutting an album and making it big. Says she: "I sound better on tape than in person."

On the Record

Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, giving an off-the-cuff modest appraisal of Jimmy Carter: "I think we are much better off with him as President than we would have been with the Republican opponent."

Patty Hearst, newspaper heiress convicted of bank robbery, joking about what she will do when she gets out of prison: "I'd really like to travel again--anywhere but Italy. There's too much kidnaping there."

General David Jones, the new

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "When I go to the Army-Navy game now, I've got to hope for a tie."

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