By Guy D. Garcia

Lyndon Johnson once said about his job, "I wish my mother had lived to see me President." But Jack Klugman, 61, who is preparing for a one-man show on L.B.J., can top that. The veteran actor, best known as TV's crime-busting medical examiner Quincy, quipped: "I wish my mother had lived to see me first a doctor, then President of the U.S." James Prideaux's Lyndon, which opens in Wilmington, Del., next week and moves to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the following week, tells L.B.J.'s life from his halcyon days in Texas to the years after his turbulent presidency. Klugman admits he developed an "intense interest" in the politician by reading twelve L.B.J. biographies, but stops short of endorsing his political style: "He was no saint. I don't believe the end justifies the means."

The guest of honor at the lavish state dinner was Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang. But when Burt Reynolds, 47, arrived at the White House arm in arm with his old flame Dinah Shore, 66, the Washington press corps quickly turned its attention from international to personal politics. "I wouldn't tell you if it was true," stonewalled Reynolds, as he tried to fend off a barrage of questions about his relationships with Shore and Actress Sally Field, 37, who also happened to be in town. Reynolds was eventually pulled to safety by Nancy Reagan, 62, who teasingly told him, "I think they've got you cornered."

In its tireless quest for realism, Hollywood has already used the war-torn Middle East as a backdrop for such films as Hanna K. starring Jill Clayburgh, and the recently completed The Ambassador, starring Robert Mitchum and Rock Hudson. Now comes The Little Drummer Girl, which was shot on the barren hills of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Based on John le Carre's best-selling novel, the movie stars Diane Keaton, 38, as Charlie, an impressionable English actress who is recruited by Israeli intelligence for a double-agent mission against Palestinian terrorists. Keaton trained with a bazooka and a Soviet-made assault rifle for one of her most dramatic scenes. Says Keaton: "I never did anything like that before. But I loved it." How about a sequel called Annie Hall Goes to War?

She began writing her warm, human novel about life in a small Ohio town as a response to Sinclair Lewis' acerbic Main Street. That was in the late 1920s. But for Helen Hooven Santmyer, 88, the 1982 publication by Ohio State University Press of her 1,344-page opus, . . . And the Ladies of the Club, was only the first chapter in a success story. Last week G.P. Putnam's Sons announced plans to reprint 50,000 hardback copies of her novel by August, and the Book-of-the-Month Club has chosen it as a main selection. Meanwhile Santmyer, who has spent the past few years in and out of a nursing home in her native Xenia, Ohio, is happy to rest a little on her laurels. Says she: "I think age excuses me from making any more effort."

The Christian Dior advertisement showed a wedding scene, and the coyly phrased caption read, "Just a legendary private affair." The picture, part of a $2.5 million advertising campaign, showed real-life celebrities Gene Shalit, 51, Ruth Gordon, 87, and Shari Belafonte, 29, along with Model Barbara Reynolds, who looks an awful lot like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Unamused, Onassis filed court papers charging that the advertisement had violated her privacy and exploited her image commercially. New York Justice Edward Greenfield last week agreed and barred Reynolds from appearing in any advertisements masquerading as Jackie O. Quoting no less an authority than Shakespeare, Greenfield wrote: "Who steals my purse steals trash ... But he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed." But as the Bard also wrote, "The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief."

--By Guy D. Garcia