Chameleon

HIS SMALL EYES BORE INTO HIS AUDIENCE WITH THE INTENSIty of searchlights. A few hundred Young Republicans reciprocate with worshipful focus. They are jammed, Jos. A. Banks-by-Laura Ashley, into some concrete auditorium on George Washington University's campus. They are mesmerized. "The challenge to your generation is not to find creative new ways to use the bureaucracy," says Newt Gingrich. "The challenge is to be creative and to make a real difference.

Tears flow uncontrollably from Jason Tucker's eyes as he bows his head and sits alone in the stands of a dark stadium at Newbury Park High in 1991. The source of the sophomore running back's pain is several letters that his best friend, Panther sophomore quarterback Keith Smith, received earlier that day. The letters are from college recruiters congratulating Smith on an excellent season. His friend's success pleases Tucker, but he wonders: "Why not me too?"

Is this a great country or what? You fly here from Chicago and suddenly everything is different. Shaquille O'Neal is no longer a no-account, free throw-missing hulk but a symbol of the exuberance of youth. Dennis Rodman is no longer an adored outlaw, striking a blow for individuality, but a lunatic on the loose. It's not just home cooking.

Strains of electric guitar drift through the halls of a shabby brick building. The sound and rhythm are familiar. John Fogerty is back there somewhere, locked in a rehearsal room, playing the way he did 20 years ago with Creedence Clearwater Revival. He's working at new songs in a recording studio that recently reopened after being abandoned, an odd musical relic on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

A year after a segment on an Amsterdam television show led to his arrest, a man dubbed "the chameleon fugitive" by American authorities has been extradited from Italy to stand trial in a 1988 Glendale murder. John Barrett Hawkins, 29, had assumed at least six identities and had lip injections and a chin implant to alter his appearance while traveling around the world for three years, authorities said. He was dodging arrest on charges of murdering a North Hollywood man to collect $1.

Robert Duvall, says Richard Harris, "is the closest thing you've got in America to Alec Guinness. As great as Guinness." A chameleon who disappears into his roles, Duvall has also become one of the country's busiest actors since his debut as Boo Radley in "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1962.

Pete Wilson will soon be campaigning for President in New Hampshire. When he arrives, the national press corps ought to ask him this question: Who is the worst governor in the history of California? Does he still believe, as he did in 1976 when he campaigned in New Hampshire for President Ford, that it was Ronald Reagan? If so, perhaps he could explain why he now characterizes himself as a "Reagan conservative."

Before he was even old enough to drink, Carlos Fernandez had already engineered his first big bust--a three-day police raid confiscating $1.3 million in counterfeit NBA and other major league sports jackets. Six years later, the 25-year-old private eye is still going strong, commanding his Intellectual Property Enforcement Co. on the front lines of business' war against counterfeit goods.

Life, as it turns out, was the death of Peter Sellers. There was the charming, talented public Sellers, jet-setting through a starlet-drenched world. And there was the irrational, abusive, self-loathing private Sellers, who all too often left his charming self at the front door. A complicated comic genius -- both tortured and torturer -- he would die in 1980 of a heart attack at 54 at the top, and the bottom, of his game.

Walk the district that Anaheim is trying to revitalize as a downtown "urban village" with honest-to-goodness street life and you'll see the usual suspects: Mickey, Minnie and Goofy, on posters in the windows of a low-slung office building that houses the travel and reservations operation for Disneyland, less than two miles away. But turn the corner and you're seized by the austere, curly-bearded, marble visage of the Roman emperor Hadrian, on a poster three stories high.