West Coast Bureau Chief Dan Goodgame approached the assignment of reporting this week's main cover story on teenage Actress Molly Ringwald with a mixture of curiosity and dread. "I've covered school-board meetings and murders, wars and paper-airplane contests," he says, "but I had never profiled a movie princess. How, I wondered, was I going to make conversation with a woman of 18 over the space of several days, much less keep pace with her?" Goodgame, a TIME correspondent since 1984 and formerly a Miami Herald reporter in the Middle East, is a venerable 31.
His doubts dissolved at their first meeting,...