By E. Graydon Carter

Gary Coleman and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The tiny dynamo of TV comedy and the towering inferno of the N.B.A. It was bound to happen. And so it does, early next month when the pair (mean height: 5 ft. 7 in.) team up, and down, for that milestone of broadcasting, the 100th episode of Coleman's NBC series, Diff'rent Strokes. Abdul-Jabbar, 35, guest-stars as a rigid substitute teacher against whom Coleman, 14, and the other students rebel. The plot, unfortunately, does not thicken.

Before an audience of some 800 foster grandparents and children on the South Lawn of the White House last week. Nancy Reagan, 61, enlisted the help of an old friend when she introduced To Love a Child, the theme song for her pet cause, the Foster Grandparents program. Even without a rehearsal, the First Lady and Frank Sinatra, 66, managed a creditable duet. The number is the work of Veteran Songwriters Hal David, 61, and Joe Raposo, 45. (Sample lyrics: "To love a child/ You start with a smile/ And after a while/ A hug and a kiss/ It takes no more than this/ To love a child.") Sinatra's solo recording of the song precedes by a month the publication of Nancy's book about the program, also called To Love a Child (all profits from the book and the record go to Foster Grandparents). What of future additions to the First Lady's repertory? Says David: "If she's ready to sing, I'm ready to write."

Elegant examples of both past and present Aegean treasures were on display at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art last week. But only fleetingly. One treasure, Actress Melina Mercouri, 57 (Never on Sunday), had to return home after paying a social call on "The Search for Alexander," the traveling collection of 180 works of art from the time of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.). The artifacts will follow her home when the show ends its seven-city, three-year tour next July. But Mercouri, Greece's Minister of Culture, has not had much luck getting back some of her country's valued possessions-no-more: the famed marbles from the

Acropolis taken by Lord Elgin at the beginning of the 19th century and now permanently housed in the British Museum. Although a United Nations committee recently voted for their return to Greece, British authorities, and the marbles, are unmoved.

"I saw something," said Sergeant L.P. Eckert, "and sure enough it was the bear." The animal, which disappeared again, was Boo-Boo, the 20-month-old, 250-lb. black bear cub that belongs to Broadcaster-Sportsman Ted Turner, 43. Boo-Boo had escaped from the pen she shares with Yogi, the other bear that Turner keeps for his children on their 5,000-acre South Carolina plantation. Away on business, Turner has missed the ensuing ten-day bear hunt, which by week's end had resulted in only two uneventful sightings. Says Johnny Godley, Turner's plantation manager, about the chance of recapturing the prized Boo-Boo: "It looks poor right now."

For those who missed last week's episode in the popular series Palace--the continuing saga of a colorful, wealthy family whose lives are all centered beneath one gilded roof--the handsome and dashing young Prince Andrew, 22, had cut short his Caribbean vacation with fetching onetime Porn Starlet Koo Stark, 25, in hopes of stilling the wicked quills of gossip. Alas. An opportunistic companion on the trip, Elizabeth

Salomon, 27, reportedly repaid the prince's hospitality by recounting fond recollections of her sojourn like this nugget: "Everyone was sitting around the swimming pool looking glum, when Andrew suddenly grabbed Koo and ripped off her bathing suit. Then he went to another girl and pulled at hers." Among her other dispatches from the isle of Mustique: the prince running around in the buff and attempting to jam a live lobster down the bathing suit of a young lady. Prince Charles, 33, meanwhile, is plagued by rumors about a "royal tiff" with his wife Diana, 21. Newspapers, after apparently talking to loose-lipped servants, headlined the news that following two weeks of sodden weather at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, Diana was "bored to tears" and insisted that Charles return with her to London. In addition, the racy British tabloid the Sun, citing no reliable source, calculates that since the royal wedding, Diana has added more than 50 ball gowns to her wardrobe (at an average cost of $ 1,700 each) and almost 200 dresses and suits (at over $340 apiece). Repelled by all the tacky reportage, the conservative weekly Spectator intoned, "The British monarchy has survived worse threats, but it has seldom suffered such indignities." Doubtless they will continue. Stay tuned.

Another film about a pair of lovable oldies in the twilight of their days, starring two Hollywood legends who had never worked together before. Detect a trend here? From the same sentiments that poured forth On Golden Pond (box office to date: $118 million) comes another tear-duct wringer, called Right of Way, with Bette Davis, 74, and Jimmy Stewart, 74. In the made-for-cable TV movie, due out next year, Davis is stricken by a terminal illness, and Stewart, not wishing to continue alone, decides to end his life too. The match-up of the two stars seems so perfect that it is a mystery why it never happened before.

The face may seem familiar, and so may the military bearing. In four years of film acting, David Keith, 28, has had trouble getting out of boot-camp. He was a G.I. in Friendly Fire, a sailor in Back Roads and a spit-and-polish Navy flyer candidate in An Officer and a Gentleman. In The Lords of Discipline, Keith is back in uniform again, as a cadet at a Southern military academy. He gets the girl--Sophie Ward, 17--and by now has got military technique down permanently. "After all these movies," says Keith, "I've at least learned how to drill a platoon."

The young couple fell in love at Longlea, Millionaire Charles E. Marsh's mock 18th century manor, set on 1,000 acres of Virginia hunt country. He was an awkward, ambitious, first-term Congressman named Lyndon Johnson, and she was Alice Glass, then 26, a stately and bright young beauty with blond-ochre hair that one admirer said "shimmered and gleamed like nothing you ever saw." The previously undisclosed love affair is described by Pulitzer Prizewinner Robert Caro in Volume I of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, excerpted in the November Atlantic Monthly.

Nurtured in the 1930s, the romance between the married politician and the lady friend of Marsh, who was

Johnson's mentor and benefactor, flourished throughout L.B.J.'s career and even after Alice finally married Marsh, 24 years her senior. Until Viet Nam. She hated Johnson's obsession with the war and ended their relationship. Though L.B.J. often boasted of his later infidelities, he never discussed his affair with Glass, who died in 1976, perhaps out of deference to the lady's reputation, perhaps to that of Marsh's political and financial might. It was a relationship, says Caro, that "juts out of the landscape of Johnson's life as one of the few episodes--perhaps the only one--that threatened his personal ambition."

--By E. Graydon Carter

On the Record

John Kenneth Galbraith, 74, on the delegation of military power: "Death and taxes, one notes, have long been the two great certainties of mankind; we would not dream of surrendering power on taxes; we do it quite casually on death."

Elaine Johnson, golfer, after a shot hit a tree and landed in her bra: "I don't mind taking a two-stroke penalty, but I'll be damned if I'm going to play the ball where it lies."

Nguyen Co Thach, 59, Vietnamese Foreign Minister, on his country's economy: "We are not without accomplishment. We have managed to distribute poverty equally."

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