By Guy D. Garcia

After three days of hammering and sawing, Jimmy Carter, 59, looked more like a seasoned construction worker than a former President, with good reason. While most Americans were using Labor Day to putter around the house or relax, Carter and about 40 members of a Georgia volunteer group spent their holiday renovating a six-story tenement building in downtown Manhattan. "I'm liking the work," said Carter, who was joined on the second day by former First Lady Rosalynn, 57. "I've done a lot of carpentry before, but not like this. The tallest building in Plains, Ga., is two stories high." After work the former Chief of State read from the New Testament at a local Baptist church, whimsically relating his group's good deed to the Bible: "If Christ came to New York he would probably spend lots of time on the Lower East Side -before it's gentrified that is."

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When we last saw David Bowie, 37, the neon rocker had cleaned up his glitter-king image in order to bask in "the serious moonlight." But Bowie has more disguises than a chameleon, and in his new 20-minute video for the song Blue Jean, from his soon-to-be-released album Tonight, Bowie assumes two roles. Sometimes he is Lord Byron, sometimes he is a sign painter named Vic, vainly trying to convince his girlfriend that he and the randy aristocrat are buddies. Seems like old times, but the period is mid-20th century. "Blue Jean is a '50s-style short," explains Bowie. "This is where videos are going."

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His ability to evoke a world of childlike innocence has made him the Peter Pan of rock. But the same androgynous appeal has also spawned some fantasies about the true nature of Michael Jackson, 26. Fed up with speculation that he is bisexual or gay, Jackson threw down his spangled gauntlet and called a press conference last week. In a statement read by Manager Frank Dileo in Los Angeles, Jackson, who lives with his parents in Encino, Calif., categorically denied that he had ever "taken hormones to maintain my high voice" or "had cosmetic surgery on my eyes." Furthermore, he threatened to take legal action against any publication that suggested otherwise. That was the bad news. The good news, according to Jackson's publicity agent: "If little girls want to grow up and marry Michael, now they know they've got a chance."

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If Princeton University assigns a sophomore paper on "How I Spent My Summer Vacation," Brooke Shields, 19, who returns to school there this week, should have no problem finding something to write about. While her classmates may have been hiking in Nepal or holding regular summer jobs, Brooke spent four weeks on location in Nassau for a made-for-TV movie called Wet Gold. She plays a waitress who goes on a treasure hunt with her boyfriend, a scuba diver and the salty survivor of a sunken ship (Burgess Meredith, 75). The two younger men fight over Brooke and of course everybody rights over the gold. "She's quite a girl," says Meredith of his coed costar. "She has no movements or moods that are not lovely."