By E. Graydon Carter

A shade past the ingenue stage, but not quite right yet for classic leading-lady roles, Margaux Hemingway, 27, apparently has to take what comes in between. And that means teaming up with Elliott Gould, 44, in something called Over the Brooklyn Bridge. (In a singular stroke of good judgment, the producers changed the film's title from My Darling Shiksa.) If her screen work seems a little pale, the Hemingway magic returns the moment she lapses into her first vocation as model. Even when she dons men's clothes in Paris for a fashion spread, Margaux seems to be aging as well as the wine she was named after.

Doing double duty as speaker and proud parent or uncle at no fewer than three commencements last week, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, 51, could not have been more in evidence if he were running for President--or head of the P.T.A. He returned to his alma mater, the Fessenden School in West Newton, Mass., where his youngest son, Patrick, 15, was graduating from the ninth grade. Next came Brown University for the graduation of Nephew John F. Kennedy Jr., 22. But it was last week's graduation of Daughter Kara, 23, from Tufts University that created an unusual family portrait. Kennedy and his wife Joan, 46, who filed for divorce last December, got together with all their children for the occasion. Although Kennedy once again delivered the commencement address, he said he was "honored most of all to come here as a parent to celebrate this day with my daughter and her classmates."

A tough-on-the-outside, mushy-on-the-inside blend of up-from-the-ghetto chivalry seems to have won Mr. T the hearts of inner-city youth and Nielsen families alike. His A-Team television series is the only sure hit of the early 1983 ratings season, and when Mr. T goes to Washington, as he has done for the filming of D.C. Cab, the wholesomeness gets nearly out of control. Mr. T, 31, plays one of the drivers of a bankrupt cab company in the capital, who go about solving kidnapings and helping out old ladies. But in between takes, even Mr. T needs a little sprucing up to get that exterior to look sufficiently menacing. His haircut was inspired by his research ten years ago into the Mandinka tribe of West Africa. But only his hairdresser dares to tease the result.

It has lain among the wealth of original manuscripts in the cavernous New York Public Library for the past 30 years. Now Father Abraham, a short story by William Faulkner, is about to be published for the first time. Written in 1926, after his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, the story plots the origins of the Snopes family, who were to form the center of his Yoknapatawpha County trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion). Father Abraham, which was the start of a never finished novel, has been known to Faulknerian scholars for years. But curiously, no one had ever transcribed his intricate handwriting until the Red Ozier Press decided to bring out a limited edition of the work. The delay in publication was not caused by the manuscript's quality. According to University of South Carolina Professor James B. Meriwether, who edited the story, "The young Faulkner did nothing more ambitious or more successful."

--By E. Graydon Carter

On the Record

Howard Baker, 57, three-term Republican Senator from Tennessee and Senate majority leader, on whether he regrets his decision not to seek re-election next year: "No. Not only am I not sorry but I'm now actively engaged in negotiations to try to gain time off for good behavior."

Jan Scruggs, 33, president of Washington's Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Fund, on why his organization agreed to regulations that would keep demonstrators at a distance from the half-year-old monument: "We didn't want Jane Fonda one day and Jerry Falwell the next." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.