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∙PAULA PRENTISS, 5 ft. 9¼ in. and perhaps, at 22. still growing, is turning in consistently fine performances with all the easygoing, offhand grace of a basketball center, which she used to be. She has too many deep-eyed good looks to be an all-the-way comedienne and too much height for a standard ingenue, so she has balanced herself neatly between the two — in Where the Boys Are, with Brigid Bazlen in The Honeymoon Machine, and in Bob Hope's Bachelor in Paradise, scheduled for release in November. While at Lamar High School in Houston, Paula sold a poem to the Atlantic Monthly, went on to Virginia's Auntie Bellum Randolph-Macon College, became something of a campus rebel ("They cling to a tradition that doesn't exist"), protested against her election to exclusive Pi Phi by announcing: "I don't want any girl to be my sister or mother." Later, at Northwestern's famed acting school, Paula impressed an M-G-M scout, who was hunting young talent for Writer-Director Joe Pasternak and Where the Boys Are. Paula flew west — "and there," she recalls, "was itty-bitty Pasternak. The first thing he said was 'Take something off.' I said: 'Listen, I can outrun you.'" She will.
∙CLAUDIA CARDINALE is a new sex bomb, deliciously ticking. With an Italian father, a French mother, a Tunisian birth place and a Sicilian girlhood, she is a 22-year-old gift from the Mediterranean Sea. with dark hair, burnt-olive skin, perfect white teeth and a profile that drops exquisitely across her Palladian nose, mouth and chin, then pours forward boldly before it plunges past an urn of hips to the floor. Daughter of a railroad worker, she has been to all the right schools: a Sicilian beauty contest, the Venice Film Festival, the cover of Paris Match. French critics saw her in an Italian film called La Viaccia, and the fellow on L'Express won the ensuing contest with "A great actress? Perhaps net yet. But beneath the glycerine tears, what a lovely face, what carnal splendor, what a future!" Opening this month in a new Franco-Italian film called Le Bel Antonio, she is currently working as a gypsy opposite Jean-Paul (Breathless) Belmondo in a picture called Cartouche, now being shot in Languedoc. Along the way, she has even developed a professional philosophy: "If only one spectator were to see me. I would die of shame; but I have no modesty before dozens of thousands."