By E. Graydon Carter

That long-famous but never-released photograph of Jimmy Carter and his "killer rabbit" finally surfaced last week. It should lay to rest any doubts as to the former President's bunny tale. Fishing alone in 1979 in a small watership down in Plains, Ga., Jimmy was alarmed to see "a fairly robust-looking rabbit" hissing menacingly, with teeth flashing and nostrils flared, paddling furiously toward his skiff. When the furry creature got to within a hare's breadth of the craft, Carter took oar in hand and began flailing frantically to chase it away--or maybe even to split a hare. Aides scoffed when Jimmy first regaled them with his rabbit feat, until they learned that a White House photographer had recorded the incident. No doubt about it. The hare-rowing tail was fur real.

A murderous schizophrenic on the soap Search for Tomorrow. A rich daddy's girl in the series Flamingo Road. A testy starlet in the TV movie The Dream Merchants. Actress Morgan Fairchild, 31, has certainly perfected a biting style of bitchcraft. But in the film The Seduction, due to be released late this year, she temporarily gives her bristling image the broom. Morgan plays a TV newscaster who catches the evil eye of a psychotic viewer with more on his mind than pillow talk. The actress certainly seems to cotton to her satin sheet role. "I'm so tired of menacing everyone," she says. "Now at last I get to be menaced." Though the part alters her wicked persona, Morgan has not grown too big for her bitches. This fall, she will return to roost on Flamingo Road.

As the 2,000 members of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations considered their ballots for the eight open seats on the organization's 27-person board of directors, Henry Kissinger, 58, who was running for his second three-year term, had to seem like a shoo-in. There were, after all, only nine candidates in the race: Kissinger, former Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal, 55, Xerox Chairman C. Peter McColough, 58, Citibank Chairman Walter Wriston, 61, Economist Marina von Neumann Whitman, 46, Chicago Sun-Times Publisher James Hoge, 45, former State Department Official William Rogers, 54, Washington Post Columnist Philip Geyelin, 58, and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, 64. But when the vote was announced last week--gasp --Kissinger was dead last. Said one council member: "It just stood out on the ballot--a chance to vote against Kissinger. It was too good to pass up." Council President Winston Lord, 43, a former Kissinger protege, had a different view. Said he: "It's really a fluke."

The double-breasted, eggshell blue, worsted herringbone suit; the candy-striped, English-cuffed, high-necked Herbert Hoover shirt; the custom-made blue suede monk strap loafers. It is hard for Journalist Tom Wolfe, 50, (The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby; The Right Stuff) to keep his identity under his hat, especially when it is a hand-blocked and brushed blue felt bowler like the one he is sporting in front of the studiously garish former Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art on Manhattan's Columbus Circle. The Wolfe in chic clothing, having savaged much of the modern art world in The Painted Word (1975), unleashes his hell-bent prose on the architectural profession this fall in From Bauhaus to Our House (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $10.95). At Hartford's old gallery he got an edifying uplift from an edifice he admires. The building's designer, Edward Durell Stone, fares well by the writer's architext, but most practitioners will wish that they had kept this Wolfe from the door. "The stiff regulations for becoming an architect," says he, "make no more sense than those for undertakers. There is nothing you couldn't learn at a Berlitz engineering school in two weeks."

If ever a prince enchanted an imperial city, Britain's Prince Charles did so last week on his first visit to New York for a gala benefit in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Royal Ballet. With Lady Diana Spencer, 19, back in London preparing for the royal wedding on July 29, it was the last official jaunt to the U.S. as a bonnie bachelor for Prince Charles, 32. But it was not without problems. Never far away during his 24-hour stay were shouting throngs of I.R.A. sympathizers. A small army of 1,700 New York City police and 300 State Department and Secret Service men protected the Prince at every turn--a level of security generally reserved for a visiting head of state and one that cost the city $300,000.

Moments after Prince Charles landed at Kennedy International Airport, he was whisked away in a twelve-passenger Sikorsky helicopter for a tour of Manhattan. Greeting him at the Wall Street heliport was Chief of Protocol Lee Annenberg. Bowing to criticism of her curtsy when the Prince visited Washington last month, she welcomed him this time with a modified bob.

At the South Street Seaport, Prince Charles and First Lady Nancy Reagan, 59, boarded Publisher Malcolm Forbes' 126-ft. yacht Highlander, but only after Navy and police divers had combed the ship's hull for explosives. Cruising up the Hudson with the Prince and the First Lady were some 60 other guests. They lunched on all-American fare: Long Island duckling, cold Maine lobster, California strawberries in New Jersey heavy cream. "Nobody got seasick," said Prince Charles, patting his stomach, "but I ate too much."

An afternoon nap in his suite at the Waldorf Towers took care of that. Later the Prince donned evening clothes for a reception at Lincoln Center. Out front, some 4,000 pro-Irish demonstrators taunted the arriving guests, but the Prince slipped in through a back entrance. Thus he never got to see the fluttering placards vilifying the British presence in Northern Ireland. Read one of the more temperate messages: "The sun never sets on the British empire because God doesn't trust the Brits in the dark."

Inside, the Prince sipped a glass of rare Moet & Chandon pink champagne and made his way down a lengthy reception line, shaking hands and chatting with patrons who had paid up to $1,000 for tickets to both the gala performance of Sleeping Beauty and a black-tie ball. Among the guests at the ballet were a number of pro-Irish protesters, who disrupted the performance three times with anti-British outbursts. But the dancers barely missed a step, and afterward Charles and Nancy went backstage to congratulate the troupe. At the ball later the Prince guided Nancy about the dance floor a number of times, then quietly departed shortly after midnight. By noon, he was on his way back to London and the flurry of activities leading up to his wedding. In his wake, he left a city still glowing in its royal flush. --By E. Graydon Carter

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