By Claudia Wallis

Just 2 1/2 years ago, she was Lisa Halaby, daughter of a former Pan Am president, Princeton grad, aspiring architect and freewheeling all-American girl. Then she became the fourth wife of Jordan's King Hussein, now 46, and nothing --not her name, nationality, religion or rank--is the same. Jordan's 29-year-old Queen Nur has mastered Arabic, become involved in her country's arts and environmental movement and, after a miscarriage, borne her husband a son, Prince Hamzah, now nine months old. Shortly after posing next to an oil portrait of Nur at Amman's Nadwa Palace for the photograph shown here, the royal couple announced that another child--the King's tenth--is expected next spring.

"The world is deteriorating morally, and if there is a chance of doing something beautiful, I want to do it," said Singer Joan Baez of her determination to give a Christmas Eve concert in front of Paris' Cathedral of Notre Dame. But doing something tres belle can be tres difficile in France, Baez found. To arrange her hour-long concert, to be attended by 50,000 and televised on both sides of the Atlantic, she spent four years negotiating with Paris' city hall, archdiocese and police. "In the end they were genuinely excited about it," says she, "but still a little nervous because I'm a calculated risk." True to form, the politically controversial Baez dedicated tunes to nonviolence and Soviet dissidents. But she also bestowed bilingual praise on her hosts and on two French institutions: the "magnificent edifice" of Notre Dame and the imposing tangle of bureaucracy. Trilled Joan: "There's no red tape like French red tape."

"If New York City is the Big Apple, you could describe Jerusalem as the apple of God's eye," observed Edward Koch, mayor of New York. Koch was in Israel and in Egypt on an unofficial nine-day tour to see the ancient sights and create a few new ones. Outside the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza, he gamely wrapped himself in Arab robes and called for "the toughest camel." Cracked Edward of Arabia as he mounted the snorting beast: "I want to look like Henry Kissinger looked." But the majestic surroundings also left Hizzoner humbled: "Will the ruins of New York City have the same grandeur 1,000 years from now?" Even the Big Apple's chief polisher had to admit, "I don't think so."

It is not easy being a bombshell on a battlefield. While filming High Risk, in which she plays a dizzy drug runner on the lam from a Mexican jail, Lindsay Wagner was repeatedly pelted and singed by bullets and shells. "I got third-degree burns from a machine gun," she groans, "and no matter what I did, the shells kept bouncing off me. The men in those sequences had jackets, boots and dungarees, while my body was exposed in this off-the-shoulder blouse and a sack skirt." Wagner was comforted somewhat by a cuddly black panther cub, one of her costars, but mostly, she says, "I applied a lot of ice" to that not-so-bionic skin. --By Claudia Wallis

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