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Mariel Hemingway. Her latest film is Woody Allen's Manhattan, and she is the most striking figure in it, a girl whose extraordinary face—all cheekbones and eyebrows and spring-fed soul—is lit with love for the 42-year-old bumbler played by Allen. Yet it is hard to imagine her living in New York. Mariel Hemingway does share an apartment there with another young actress when she is in town, but this parents' home summer in she is Ketchum, hanging out Idaho, next door to Sun Valley, and that is where she seems to belong. Ketchum was a favorite place of her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, and it was there, four months before Mariel was born, that he committed suicide. Mariel, up at 6:30 a.m. for a run with the family's two Labradors, dirtyblond ponytail bouncing, is hardly a brooder about the past. "People tell me I look like him. I dunno. I never really thought about being his granddaughter."
City Mouse Woody Allen (who became a friend during the shooting of Manhattan, though she finds the rumor that he was actually her lover grotesquely silly) couldn't understand Mariel's attraction to Ketchum. "What do people do out there after dinner?" he would ask. Well, they ski in the Sawtooth Mountains, ride horses through the cotton woods by the Big Wood River, work out on the trampoline, drive into town for an ice cream cone (Mariel is a vegetarian who also disapproves of refined sugar, and she eats her cone with a stop-me-before-I-lick-again expression). They also grow big and strong; nearly 5 ft. 11 in., Mariel is a bit shorter than Margaux, 24.
Getting into movies was an accident, Mariel says; it wouldn't have happened if Margaux hadn't become a top model and then an actress. But success hasn't been an accident: "People say now that I'm a natural, and was just playing myself in Manhattan. That's not really right. I was working hard up there." These days, she is limbering up to play a track star in a film by Robert Towne (Chinatown, Shampoo). The exotic caperings of the coke-and-kink part of the film world seem to have little appeal for her. She flew to the Cannes festival with her father Jack for a screening of Manhattan, got sick just before the film's final scene and had to leave the theater. It was coincidence—jet lag and a too-rich meal—but nausea wasn't far from her feeling about the raging egos and the clicking Nikons at Cannes. She applies the standards of Ketchum, which have served her well enough so far, and dismisses the whole scene in her own emphatic teen-age terms: "It was screwy."
Brooke Shields. A curiosity of Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby is that the only major character who does not seem to be damaged by her life in a Storyville whorehouse is a girl of twelve played by Brooke Shields. An interviewer who meets Brooke and her mother Teri two years after the filming sees a cheerful parallel in real life. "Brookie," as Teri calls her, is a happy, confident teen-ager now, not in the least awed by her fame or the astonishing beauty that caught the world's eye. She appears to love her life, for reasons that seem appropriate: "I get to meet a lot of movie stars. And I wouldn't have a horse now if I weren't an actress."