By Claudia Wallis

"I'm afraid of heights," complains Actor Stacy Keach, 39. "I don't have any trouble on planes, but I can't go near edges." No wonder Reach's preparations for the title role in the national touring company production of Barnum put him on edge. Not only would he have to sing onstage for the first time, he had to master the art of tightrope walking. "It took six weeks and a lot of intimidation," he admits. "I finally made it after a friend kept calling me chicken and walking away in disgust." Reach's schedule for the rest of this year is a balancing act in itself: twelve months of touring in seven cities, marriage in May to Landscaper Jill Donohue and a traumatic birthday two days after that. Says he: "I don't know which scares me more --walking the high wire or turning 40."

"Every time I visit Chicago, I have new ideas to take back to Cairo," said Jehan Sadat, 47, in the Windy City last week before wrapping up her two-week, seven-city good-will tour of the U.S. Egypt's First Lady was particularly "happy to see that the mayor of Chicago is a woman." For Sadat's accomplishments in the "advancement of women's rights in Egypt" and "commitment to social causes," she received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the city's DePaul University. "Women are now contributing significantly in Egypt," she observed. But they have a long way to go. An Egyptian woman still needs written permission from her husband to set foot outside the country.

Empire State wags call them "Cash and Carey" --Governor Hugh Carey, 61, that is, and his flame of recent weeks, Evangeline Gouletas, 44, the widowed Chicago condominium millionaire he met at the Reagan Inaugural. The romance has worked quite a change on the fast-living politician. Why, his silver-gray locks and eyebrows have gone a rakish shade of auburn. "This is budget season," says the dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. "That and the beginning of spring give me energy that flows to my hair roots." Even before they noticed the sapphire-and-diamond "friendship ring" on Gouletas' finger last week, reporters were asking if a wedding was in the works. "A slip of the lip can sink a ship," replied Carey, "and I don't intend for my ship to sink." The lip slipped later in the week on the subject of U.S.-made automobiles. Disposable "Rleenex cars," he called them. Former Girlfriend and Ford Motor Heiress Anne Ford Uzielli would not have liked that.

"You hear so many rumors in prison," says Alexander Jenkins, "you can never be sure which are true." So when Jenkins became warden of New York's Rikers Island prison last summer, he decided to check out one that was especially intriguing. Was the rather grim watercolor of the Crucifixion hanging in the prison mess hall for 16 years and signed Dali in fact the work of the famed Spanish surrealist? The answer, obtained from a Dali dealer earlier this month, is yes, and the work may be worth upwards of $75,000. Learning this, Benjamin Ward, commissioner of the city's strapped corrections department, made plans to sell it and use the money for an inmate art program. Then he changed his mind. The painting itself, he decided, might "inspire" an art program. Said he: "Many of the prisoners enjoy doing artwork," and Dali's opus, completed by the master in 90 minutes flat, "looks like something you might want to try yourself.''

--By Claudia Wallis

On the Record

David Louis, member of the Kansas legislature, endorsing a bill proposing to make the channel catfish the state fish: "We send this measure to our largemouth lasses and laddies in the senate. We pray, by cod, it does not flounder there."

Barbara Stanwyck, veteran actress, on how Hollywood has changed since the '40s: "Today someone buys a book or a play and asks, 'Who can we go to the bank with?' not 'Who is right for it?' Hollywood today is like a series of Mobil stations leased to a distributor."

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