She was a chain-smoking con girl in Paper Moon, a hard-throwing Little League pitcher in The Bad News Bears. For her next number, Tatum O'Neal, all of 12, will dance back to the screen as a budding hoofer in Nickelodeon, Director Peter Bogdanovich's new film about 1920s Hollywood. Not to be outdone by Co-Star Jane Hitchcock, who once studied with Choreographer George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet, Tatum took a six-week crash course in tap dancing before stepping into her new role. Sums up Tatum: "I guess it's much more practical for me to be a hoofer than a pitcher."

Rather like a roving medieval Irish clan, Senator Edward Kennedy and 20 relatives and friends sallied forth into western Massachusetts last week on a camping trip. Among those accompanying Teddy were Wife Joan, Sisters Jean Smith and Eunice Shriver and Children Kara, 16, Ted Jr., 14, and Patrick, 8. They all lived off the fat of the land --cookouts at local friends' homes--endured scraped knees and capsized canoes, and at an amusement park, braved the roller coaster. As ever, the Kennedy holiday was no swing in a hammock.

Her paintings are etched with hard desert lines and spaces, and at times, Artist Georgia O'Keeffe has seemed like a prickly flower blooming in one of her own solitary landscapes. To a reporter visiting her isolated home in Abiquiu, N. Mex., she once offered this insight into her work: "If you don't get it, that's too bad." At the mellowing age of 88, however, O'Keeffe has decided there is a bit to be said after all. The result is a book of reflections on her life as a painter due to come out this fall (Viking Press). Her straightforward reason for writing: "No one else can know how my paintings happen."

He already owned nearly 30 honorary degrees, but for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 49, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the offer of another --an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University in Israel--was too good to resist. Moynihan, whose anti-Arab stand in the U.N. won the hearts of Israel, is now seeking the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in New York and needs the Jewish vote. So there he was campaigning, in a sense, 6,000 miles from his constituency. One problem: the Israeli leaders he met seemed distracted. "My mind was somewhere else," confessed Defense Minister Shimon Peres after meeting with Moynihan. As Moynihan learned hours later, "somewhere else" was Uganda, where the dramatic rescue of 104 hostages was taking place. -

When his first-string caddy tore an Achilles' tendon at Royal Birkdale in Southport, England, last week, Jack Nicklaus Sr. brought up a substitute to carry his clubs in the British Open --Jack Nicklaus Jr. At 14, the 6 ft. 2 in. Nicklaus fils is already down to a five handicap, but as he watched his father practice, he promised to hold his tongue. "Believe me," he said, "I would never tell him what club to use." Out on the course, however, that promise proved easier to break than par: "When I asked for a six-iron," reported Jack Sr., "he answered 'I'd play a seven.' " Nicklaus was pleased with his son's performance, although not with his own--and with reason. He finished six strokes behind Johnny Miller, who won his first British open.

Side by side in a box for a game at Yankee Stadium last week, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--long a Yankee fan--and Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn--under threat of a lawsuit by the Yankees (TIME, June 28)--may have been secretly wondering what it would be like to switch jobs for a while. Kuhn could use shuttle diplomacy to bring about detente between team owners and players, whose contract impasse is as hard a problem to solve as the one in the Middle East. And Kissinger could use some advice on how to negotiate a no-cut contract.

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