By Guy D. Garcia

"As a kid I was fascinated by knights and pageantry," says Actor Matthew Broderick, 21, now in Italy filming Ladyhawke, a medieval love story. Turning myth into filmed reality, however, has been anything but child's play. "The first day of shooting I was asked to ride a horse up a steep hill to a castle; at the same time I was told to hold on to a live hawk with a glinting brown eye," says Broderick, who was last seen on-screen playing WarGames with a renegade Defense Department computer. This time he is a young thief who dashes to the aid of a beautiful princess and her cavalier, under a spell that turns her into a hawk by day and the cavalier into a wolf by night. Actors have had scenes with predators before, but most of them were agents. Broderick confesses that he was "scared stiff' to play opposite this beady, beaky old pro. Still, when your co-star is the thing with feathers, all you can do is wing it.

Daddy may be a political superstar, but Actress Patti Davis, 30, has lately been less concerned with Ronald Reagan's career than with carving out her own constituency. Her recent activities range from a stint in summer stock, where she starred in a Traverse City, Mich., production of Vanities, to a more glamorous gig posing for British Photographer Patrick Lichfield in nearly $1 million worth of diamond, emerald and platinum jewels. The idea for the photos came from Olga Rostropovich, the daughter of Conductor-Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who persuaded a gaggle of international beauties to sparkle for Lichfield. Among them: Princess Caroline of Monaco, Morgan Fairchild and Lindsay Wagner. The ice was provided by Harry Winston, whose army of security guards was as vigilant as Patti's Secret Service men. At first, while posing for the pictures in Los Angeles, she appeared to be put down by all that glitter. "Look at my nose," she reportedly complained. "It is too long, and it wrinkles when I laugh." But she was content with the photographed results. "I'm not so bad," Davis was said to have remarked to Lichfield. "You had taste."

"I loved Mr. T, but I hate the makeup," says Gary Coleman, 15, who spent more than two hours dressing up as his oversized hero for the season premiere of the NBC series Diff'rent Strokes. The A-Team spends a week filming in the Drummond apartment, and little Arnold has an identity crisis when he learns that his new girlfriend is only using him to meet Mr. T. Arnold's effort to win back her attentions by imitating television's baddest dresser will never get him into the pages of Gentlemen's Quarterly, but it does get lower-case t a lecture from upper-case T, who explains, "You gotta be your own original." When you're 15 years old, 4 ft. 2 in. and the star of a sitcom in its sixth season, that kind of advice is about as useful as a Mandinka toupee.

"There will be no political or aggressive message directed toward the East," declared Vienna's Franz Cardinal Koenig on the eve of Pope John Paul ll's four-day visit to Austria. But the Pontiffs carefully worded pronouncements could not entirely escape political hemidemisemiquavers during last week's trip. John Paul's most explicit address came the day of his arrival. During vespers on the Heldenplatz, in the heart of "imperial" Vienna, he praised a crowd of about 100,000 Austrians for their nation's "willingness to open its boundaries to people from other countries deprived of the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech and respect for human dignity." That evening at the Vienna soccer stadium, the Pope warned his youthful audience (in fluent German) against "drugs and casual sexual encounters," and dismissed the notion of a "different, novel sort of church." On the third day of his visit, he led a group of Polish emigres in religious and national songs and, at another point, was seen reading a pamphlet titled Solidarity in Work. Asked at the end of the journey whether such visits might be a source of encouragement to Catholics in neighboring Czechoslovakia and other East bloc countries, John Paul replied, "Yes, I am very convinced of this."

--By Guy D. Garcia

On the Record

Daniel Boorstin, 68, historian: "Reading is like sex. It is often undertaken in bed, and people are not inclined to underestimate either the extent or the effectiveness of their activity."

James Baldwin, 59, novelist: "Everybody wants an artist on the wall or on the shelf, but nobody wants him in the house."

Erica Jong, 41, author, on women's liberation: "We won the right to be eternally exhausted. I can just see my daughter's generation saying I'm not going to give it away. I'm going to wait until I'm taken care of." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.