Second Acts

By BRUCE HANDY

JONESBORO "No One Will Ever Forget"

I don't think any of us will ever be the same," says Connie Tolbert, who has worked for 15 years as a secretary at Westside Schools in Jonesboro, Ark., site of one of the most disturbing crimes in recent memory. Last March Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, went to school armed with three rifles, seven handguns and nearly 500 rounds of ammunition. They were angry, it was said, because Mitchell had been spurned by a girl he had a crush on. After Andrew pulled a fire alarm, the pair methodically opened fire as their classmates exited the school. One teacher and four students were killed, and 10 more were wounded. To the nation, it was both a singularly horrific crime and one in a series of student shootings that plagued the 1997-98 school year, something to be simultaneously sickened and puzzled by. To the people of Jonesboro, it was also something one had to live with. "We talk about it all the time." says Tolbert. "We go on, but no one will ever forget." The school is filled with reminders, including a Christmas display of five blue-and-white angels and the presence of a police officer who routinely patrols the hallways.

Mitchell and Andrew are currently in state custody at a youth detention center, having been convicted of the killings in juvenile court. Under Arkansas law, children 13 years and younger cannot be tried as adults; the boys could be free by age 18. Mitchell Wright, the widower of the slain teacher, is pushing the state legislature to change the juvenile-justice code.

The boys stole their weapons from Andrew's grandfather, Doug Golden. "We feel we were victims too," he says of his family; he believes most people feel the same way. "Every day somebody comes up and says, 'I want to say something and I don't know how.' They don't blame us for what happened." Golden raised his grandson to be a hunter and has no regrets. "In teaching a kid of any age how to hunt," he says, "you are not preparing him to go out and kill people. You're teaching him how a gun is supposed to be used, not abused. It's not an instrument of violence." --Reported by Julie Grace

SEINFELD The Retirement Years

Probably no one since Richard Nixon has got as much attention for quitting as Jerry Seinfeld did when he announced late last year that he was self-canceling his long-running sitcom. After an avalanche of magazine covers (including TIME's) and relentless promotion by NBC, the series finally ended on May 14 with a 75-minute episode that saw Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer sent off to jail. Though critical reception was mixed, the show was the highest-rated entertainment program of the 1997-98 season (and 37th on the all-time list).

Did everyone overreact? NBC wouldn't say so. Though the network knew it would take a ratings hit after Seinfeld's departure, it didn't expect that the audience for Frasier, which took over Seinfeld's time slot, would be off by 25% compared with Jerry's numbers; that ratings for the entire Thursday-night schedule would be down 17% from the same period last year; and that NBC's overall prime-time ratings would be down 14%, the greatest slide in a season in which all the broadcast networks--except for the surging WB--have seen their audiences erode. It was TV's version of the domino theory. Hoping, perhaps, to co-opt its upstart cable competitors, NBC eased out programming chief Warren Littlefield and replaced him with Scott Sassa, 39, who earned his stripes as a top executive for the Turner Broadcasting System.

Seinfeld, meanwhile, has enjoyed an eventful "retirement." He appeared on Broadway performing his old stand-up act, which was broadcast on HBO, and he moved to New York City. There, he and his new girlfriend, Jessica Sklar, 26, a publicist, became gossip-column fixtures after it was reported that he had helped break up her months-long marriage to the son of a prominent family of Broadway-theater owners. Another overreaction? "I'm hardly interested in my own life," Seinfeld complained to a reporter from the New York Post. "I don't know how you could be interested." As for the rest of the Seinfeld cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus can be heard as the voice of the princess in A Bug's Life; Jason Alexander will be starring next year as Boris Badenov in a live-action Rocky and Bullwinkle movie; and Michael Richards is in Ireland filming David Copperfield for TNT. He plays Mr. Micawber. --Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

VIAGRA What Goes Up

In the contest over who or what inspired the most bad jokes this year, it's a neck-and-neck race between Monica Lewinsky and Viagra, with Pamela Anderson a distant third. Otherwise, the impotence pill that was introduced last April has been a bit of a letdown, if only because expectations were so inflated by the drug's initial hype. After racking up nearly $100 million in sales in its first month on the market--making Viagra the fastest-selling new drug ever, outpacing previous phenoms like Prozac--sales have steadily slumped to just over $40 million in October.

In part the downturn may have been a response to the news that upwards of 130 men have died while using Viagra, the majority from heart attacks. The drug hasn't been formally implicated in those fatalities--given its older-skewing patient base, one would expect a certain overlap between Viagra users and the dead--but the FDA issued new guidelines last month saying doctors should be wary of prescribing it to patients with heart conditions or high blood pressure. Because of its vision-disturbing side effects, the drug has also been suspected of contributing to at least one plane crash. Indeed, a Federal Aviation Administration pamphlet recommends a prudent "six hours from Viagra to throttle."

Still, the news about Viagra is mostly happy. It works for many men, and Pfizer, the manufacturer, estimates that 5 million prescriptions have been written. The company's stock has risen from 75 11/16 in January to 116 as of last Friday (slightly down from its peak of 121 3/4). Sales may get a boost when a new ad campaign begins next year featuring that charismatic pitchman Bob Dole.

LONG TERM CAPITAL Let Them Eat $3.6 Billion

It is a maxim in Hollywood that "no one knows anything." Of course, this couldn't be true in non-show business because if it were, what would be the point of listening to heavyweight economists and high-flying financial managers? Surely such people--and their very rich clients--know precisely what they're doing. Surely. But that faith didn't prevent penny-ante investors from enjoying a bit of Emperor's-new-clothes schadenfreude at the near collapse of Long Term Capital Management, the secretive multibillion-dollar hedge fund based in Greenwich, Conn.

The fund was founded in 1994 by John Meriwether, a former vice chairman of Salomon Brothers, and its partners included Nobel laureate economists Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, whose market models helped give Long Term Capital an aura of near infallibility. Until September, that is, when word leaked that the firm was in danger of suffering losses so catastrophic they could send the already troubled world financial system into a tailspin. A $3.6 billion rescue package was cobbled together by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a consortium of 14 U.S. and foreign lenders.

So far, the bailout seems to have worked, thanks in large part to autumn's upturn in the global markets. But the real hero of the story is probably Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who lowered interest rates three times since September, prompting overseas banks to do the same. Long Term Capital's assets rose more than 20% in November alone, giving it a profit for the first time in at least seven months, though that gain may be partly wiped out now that markets have turned softer.

No, the golden days have not returned for the firm, where management must now report to an oversight committee. The original investors, relegated to a measly 10% share of the fund, have recovered only a sliver of their pre-August stakes. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating whether Long Term Capital violated securities laws by withholding information on its financial health. Moreover, the entire debacle may prompt long-term changes in the hedge-fund industry: Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is examining whether such funds should be more closely regulated. --Reported by Bernard Baumohl/New York

LIPINSKI AND KWAN Victory Laps

Here's what you get if you win a gold medal in Olympic figure skating: endorsement contracts from Snapple, Capezio and autoweb.com (an online car store), plus a deal for four prime-time skating specials with CBS.

Here's what you get if you win the silver medal: an endorsement contract with Caress and a deal for four prime-time skating specials with ABC.

Ten months after the defining moment of the Nagano Winter Olympics--Tara Lipinski's dramatic victory over Michelle Kwan, in which the two athletes skated as if they had, respectively, nothing and everything to lose--the rivalry continues, at least in the endorsement arena. Unfortunately, since Lipinski retired from competitive skating shortly after the Olympics, the pair has yet to meet again on the ice with anything at stake, though they both appeared together this summer on an exhibition tour of 50-plus cities. Still defined by the rivalry, they are friendly, but not genuine friends.

Lipinski has said she gave up amateur competition so that she could spend more time with her family, making her perhaps the only teenager in America who actually wants to live at home. "More time," however, is a relative term. Lipinski's days are filled with promotional appearances at department stores and malls (even before the Olympics she had scored deals with DKNY and Mattel); her nights are filled with fund-raising galas and movie premieres. In her rare spare time, she tools around her home state of Texas in the black Corvette she got as part of her deal with autoweb.com Fans can keep up at taralipinski.com where her online diary--"I'll be in Dallas Sunday for Snapple"--gives one a fairly vivid and unintentionally depressing sense of what the daily grind is like for a 16-year-old sports celebrity. On the other hand, she's had the opportunity to meet Brad Pitt twice and to judge the Miss Teen USA pageant.

For her part, Kwan, 18, continues to skate at an elite level, showing no loss of determination in the wake of Nagano. She won this year's national and world crowns--titles Lipinski had taken from her the year before--and is already pointing toward the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. She also found time to graduate from high school in September with a 3.61 grade-point average; having taken the SATs three weeks ago, she is currently trying to decide whether college makes sense for her. "I always live with no regrets," she says, reflecting on the past year and, implicitly, Lipinski. "I can't say I didn't train hard enough because I did. People say you change after the Olympics, but it's not that way for me--no matter how many medals I win, no matter what I do. You always have to focus on something, and for me, that's skating." --Reported by Alice Park/New York

With reporting by Julie Grace; Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles; Bernard Baumohl/New York; Alice Park/New York