Off camera, Isabelle Adjani is a tough, no-nonsense Frenchwoman who regards acting as an art of deception, "fake all the time." But on camera, she is developing a persona as a romantic heroine. As Victor Hugo's tragic, love-struck daughter in The Story of Adele H., she won an Oscar nomination. In her latest role, Adjani, 23, plays Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering Heights. After resting up in the languorous countryside of Provence, she plans to tackle yet another demanding role: Marguerite, a jilted lover, in a movie based on La Dame aux Camelias by Alexandre Dumas fils. For a star drawn to literary roles, Adjani is surprisingly reticent about her career. "Life is worth being lived," she shrugs, "but not worth being discussed all the time."

This President of the U.S. did not wait until he left the White House to write a blockbuster about his Administration. In fact he started work on his memoirs the day he took office, finishing them within a year. Moreover, his aide insisted, "every word was his own."

Exactly which President is this? Why, he is a character in a forthcoming novel, Good as Gold (Simon & Schuster; $12.95), in which Joseph Heller does for Washington, D.C., what he did for the military in Catch-22. This time Heller's hero is Bruce Gold, a Jewish writer from Manhattan's Upper West Side, who hopes to get away from his Portnoy-esque family to be a "high Government official," even though to do so he may have to get a "better" wife. "Belle would be O.K. for Labor or Agriculture," someone advises Gold, "but not for Secretary of State or Defense." And Gold's aspiration is to follow in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger, even though Gold considers him "an odious shlump" and a "shallow, socialite warmonger." Says Heller innocently: "I don't think Kissinger should mind my portrayal. Everyone knows how grateful he is for criticism."

"It's nice to be a beginner in one's 70s," says Isidor Feinstein Stone. Izzy closed down his investigative newsletter,

I.F. Stone's Biweekly, in 1971 after a 19-year run, and has turned to a new career: translating ancient Greek. Although his formal training was only a single semester of Greek more than 50 years ago at the University of Pennsylvania, he has translated a number of poems, five of which appear in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. He also reads Greek history in the original. "It's trying to dig out the truth from ancient documents the way I used to dig them out of the Pentagon," says Stone. So excited is he about his new endeavor that he has lectured about it on the college circuit. At Berkeley, he called himself "a recycled freshman in ancient Greece."

He was an alcoholic author, a chronicler of middle-class American life in books like Main Street and Babbitt. She was a foreign correspondent. They married in 1928, Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson, and soon found that their temperaments didn't mix. Now the story of their stormy relationship will be told in Strangers, opening March 4 on Broadway. "Thompson was a great, great force in American life and, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, the most successful woman in the U.S.," says Lois Nettleton, who will play the challenging role.

Lewis too was a "monumental person," says Actor Bruce Dern, who is returning to Broadway after nearly two decades on TV and in films (Coming Home). "Lewis accepted the Nobel Prize at age 45, spent the rest of his life trying to live up to that prize, and it finally broke him."

Need a hired hand in Florida? Dial the Capitol in Tallahassee. Newly inaugurated Governor Robert Graham just took in $24 for an eight-hour day laying sod. "It's good for you psychologically. It cleans out the cobwebs of the day-today crises you normally deal with," says Graham, 42, who literally worked his way into office by spending 100 days of his campaign at odd jobs. Among them: scrubbing bedpans, covering a police beat, hefting fertilizer and tuning Toyotas. The idea was to "get in touch with the people" (and perhaps make voters forget his roots as a millionaire South Florida cattle baron). Now that he is in the Governor's mansion, Graham still plans to spend one day a month moonlighting. On his job list: court bailiff, political reporter and phone staffer with the state's consumer complaint bureau.

On the Record

Betsy Cronkite, wife of CBS-TV Anchorman Walter: "Sometimes, if we have an evening home, we're likely to sit here with a tray and watch straight through, like Mr. Average Man, all the dumb shows."

Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, after taking a nasty spill on the ski slopes: "We British ski on."

Eugene McCarthy, former Senator and now author: "The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."

Nellie Connally, John's wife, on her husband's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination: "I don't mind sharing John with the state or the country, but I don't wanna give him away."

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