By E. Graydon Carter

As a Marine lieutenant from South Dakota with a spotty athletic history, Billy Mills, now 44, came from nowhere to win the 10,000-meter run at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. In the long tradition of turning athletic accomplishment into movie magic, Mills' story is being beamed to the screen in Running Brave. (Mills is a Sioux Indian; running brave, get it?) For the movie, due out next year, Actor Robby Benson, 26 (The Chosen), ran five miles a day for three months. "Runners have a certain look about them," says Benson, "and there's no way to cheat that."

Huddled in the dark with his sketchbook and his Venus HB pencil at a thousand out-of-town tryouts, Al Hirschfeld has deftly cartooned the casts of Broadway-bound plays for the Sunday New York Times since 1925. And with his distinctive, fine-lined style, Hirschfeld continues to be the foremost practitioner of his trade, a long-lived original with nary a successor in sight. Turning 80 next June, he will be the subject of a number of planned retrospectives, including a major show next spring at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum. Despite all his years on the aisle, Hirschfeld confesses to no special expertise in picking hits. "Once a play lands in New York," says he, "its future is in the lap of the gods." After it has had its turn in his lap, of course.

The entry in the 1954 Phillips Academy yearbook did not inspire confidence. No college destination, no extracurricular activities and no nickname (the crudest of blows at a Northeastern prep school). In fact his sole distinction as a senior was being voted "most cynical." Still lacking a nickname, Contemporary Artist Frank Stella, 46, returned to the school at Andover, Mass., where he first got a taste for art. The occasion was the opening of an exhibition of his and other artists' work at the Addison Gallery of American Art, the only full-scale museum in the country run by a secondary school. "That's the advantage the wealthy have. They don't have to go far to see great art," says Stella, managing a little cynicism.

She still subscribes to Variety, of course, but for Deborah Raffin, 29, the hottest flash on her career these days comes from China. It seems that a few years ago her Nightmare in Badham County--one of those young-girls-from-the-city-up-against-a-violent-small-town TV dramas--was released in Chinese movie theaters and became a monster hit, with more than 2.5 million seeing it in Shanghai alone. So when her 1980 movie, Touched by Love, is released in China next month, she will fly over for the first movie promotion tour ever by a Western actress.

Flushed of face, a little white in the knuckles and after a send-off of what appeared to be one tee many martoonies, Science Fiction Novelist Ray Bradbury, 62 (Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles), nervously strapped himself into his seat. The master of intergalactic fiction was embarking on his first airplane flight. (He doesn't even drive, a rare feat for someone from Los Angeles.) Bradbury, who set out by train and limousine, was returning home from Orlando, Fla., where he had taken part in the opening ceremonies of Disney's new Epcot Center. After over 40 years of earth-bound travel, how did he like it aloft? "The stewardesses petted and smoothed my feathers," he said happily. Will he go up again? "No, not often."

--By E. Graydon Carter

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