ASSOCIATE Editor Gerald Clarke picked up his phone one day last week and found Liza Minnelli on the line with a surprising question. Why, she asked, had he missed the previous evening's premiere of her film, Cabaret? His excuse, Clarke assured her, was entirely legitimate: he had been busy most of the night writing a cover story about her for this week's issue.

The actress had perhaps grown accustomed to having Clarke within note-taking distance. Though TIME correspondents in Hollywood, New York, Paris and London were digging into Minnelli's past and present, Clarke felt that he had to get to know his subject personally. Writers, of course, usually have that feeling when the subject is a movie star of the opposite sex. Nonetheless,

said Clarke: "She's a sprite, all fire and air, and it's difficult to put that on paper."

To capture that quality, Clarke conscientiously lunched with Minnelli in New York, spent hours interviewing her at her hotel suite, and traveled to San Juan to catch her nightclub act and do a bit of pub-crawling with her and her friends. Minnelli is always a fast-stepper, and one Sunday night after a particularly exhausting performance, she changed clothes, gathered her friends and set out to sample San Juan night life.

She ended up in an impromptu jam session with Musician-Actor Desi Arnaz Jr., her current beau, and Australian Singer Lana Cantrell. Clarke too can be nimble. Though he switched from TIME Essays to Show Business and Television only last month, he managed to finish his cover story on Flip Wilson for the Jan. 31 issue just in time to meet the challenge of getting to know Liza Minnelli.

When the President's trip to China was announced last year, no publication knew how many correspondents it could send, but TIME and LIFE had no doubt about their first choices: Jerrold Schecter, our White House correspondent, and Hugh Sidey, Washington bureau chief and LIFE columnist. This week the two are exploring Peking with President Nixon, along with TIME-LIFE Photographer John Dominis, one of the few still cameramen on the trip. For Schecter it is almost like going home. He began China watching in 1960 in our Hong Kong bureau, later viewed the mainland from another angle as Tokyo bureau chief. After a tour of duty in Moscow, he returned to the U.S. in 1970 to cover the President. Sidey, one of Schecter's predecessors on the White House beat, has covered the careers and travels of three Presidents, starting with John Kennedy, and revisited the Far East last fall.

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