On the Record

By E. Graydon Carter

Scratch an Italian, you find a pasta buff. Scratch an Italian expatriate, like Film Producer Dino De Laurentiis, 63 (Serpico, Ragtime), and you find an epicure with the complaint that no one makes pasta like Papa. The son of a spaghetti-factory owner, De Laurentiis last week opened his new $3.5 million, 12,000-sq.-ft. gourmet emporium in Manhattan, the DDL Foodshow. He has filled his showpiece with a 32-ft. counter for cold salads, 20 ft. of charcuterie and 139 chefs, bakers and pastrymakers. De Laurentiis is no stranger to the delights of kitchen duty. "When I cook." says he, "my brain stops completely."

Among presidential audiences, one of the more curious is surely the annual live gift from the National Turkey Federation. Last year's wattled visitor set off a flapdoodle when it squawked and beat its wings at the approach of President Reagan. This year's 50-lb. gobbler had been exposed to human contact for a couple of months to avoid a repeat performance, although in the Rose Garden one observer noted that the turkey "looked like he was on 'hides." (The fowl, which will be used for breeding, was not on tranquilizers, insisted N.T.F. representatives.) The President recalled another bird from a Thanksgiving past. Then Governor of California, Reagan had been carving the turkey, he said, when he became alarmed at the sight of blood. Subsequently, he discovered "that I had cut my own thumb."

Stopping by a luggage store in Beverly Hills, Australian Author Thomas Keneally, 47 (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith), struck up a conversation with the shopkeeper, Paul Page, 70. Discovering that Keneally was a writer, Page hauled out letters and documents and recounted how Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist, had saved the lives of 1,300 Jews who had been assigned by the Nazis to work at his factory in Cracow, Poland, during World War II. Page, one of the 1,300, said that Schindler, a Roman Catholic, had died in 1974 and was buried in Jerusalem as one of Israel's honored dead. Two years after that meeting, Schindler's List, Keneally's account of Schindler's heroics, is selling briskly, was just bought by the movies for $500,000 and has won Britain's prestigious Booker McConnell prize for fiction. It was an award that somewhat mystified the author, since the book was intended as a work of nonfiction. There was no doubt, however, among one group of readers about the veracity of Keneally's book: the surviving "Schindlerjuden," who at a reunion in New York last week gave Keneally a warm reception and lavished praise on the work. Said the author with some relief: "As a gentile from Australia, you do wonder if you got it right."

--By E. Graydon Carter

On the Record

Pat Buckley, socialite, after being asked by the wife of a dentist why she does not accompany her husband, William F. Buckley Jr., 57, on his crosscountry lecture tours: "Do you assist yours when he's drilling teeth?"

Paul Westphal, 32, professional basketball player, on making his debut appearance on a television soap opera: "I've never had any acting experience, except for trying to draw fouls during a game."

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