A Gala with a Grim Side

By William R. Doerner.

The lines of stretch limousines and crowds of celebrity gawkers at Los Angeles' glassy Westin Bonaventure Hotel last Thursday signaled a Hollywood gala in progress. The collective star power of those in attendance would have done Oscar or Emmy proud. Elizabeth Taylor served as hostess and co- chairperson. Carol Burnett and Sammy Davis Jr. belted out a medley of show tunes. Fast-footed Hinton Battle strutted his stuff from the Broadway musical The Tap Dance Kid, and Rockers Cyndi Lauper and Rod Stewart teamed up to sing a pounding version of Time After Time. The audience was even treated to a message from Old Trouper Ronald Reagan, whose ties to Tinseltown remain close and fond.

But this particular gala also had its grim side. Alternating with the show- biz stars were people like Helen Kushnick, a Beverly Hills mother who lost her three-year-old son Sammy in 1983 to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, the deadly disease known as AIDS, and the Rev. Stephen Pieters, a minister with the North Hollywood Metropolitan Community Church, who has suffered from AIDS since 1984. The message from President Reagan, who had made his first public mention of the widely feared and often stigmatizing illness at a press conference two evenings earlier, also concerned the scourge of AIDS. Read by Actor Burt Reynolds, the statement urged all Americans to "reflect conscientiously on their responsibility to do whatever is in their power to ensure that this pernicious syndrome is halted in its tracks and ultimately cured."

For many, the most moving moment occurred when Actor Burt Lancaster read a telegram from Rock Hudson, the veteran movie and TV star who acknowledged last July that he had been stricken with the illness, which is almost invariably fatal. Hudson's disclosure sent shock waves through the West Coast movie establishment. More than anything else, it accounted for the sellout attendance at last week's $250-to-$500-a-plate dinner, raising an estimated $1.2 million for AIDS Project Los Angeles, a group that provides assistance to victims of the disease. Too sick to attend, Hudson referred poignantly in his message to his new and unwanted recognition. "I am not happy that I have AIDS," he said. "But if that is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth."

Although primarily a fund raiser, the well-publicized dinner was also the film capital's way of confronting a growing panic. Though health authorities issue new assurances almost daily that AIDS cannot be spread through casual contact with its victims, Hollywood performers and directors have joined dentists, parents of schoolchildren and many other Americans in developing their own set of phobias about the disease. The film community, for example, is widely assumed to include at least its share of homosexual men. Male homosexuals constitute the largest single group of AIDS victims. For Hollywood's female stars, the most pressing career decision of late has become how to handle a kissing scene. The issue is not entirely frivolous. The AIDS virus sometimes shows up in an AIDS sufferer's saliva, though no known cases of infection have resulted from kissing. Said Shirley MacLaine: "I have decided that I would not be justified in being nervous about kissing."

A far more wide-ranging dilemma faces political leaders and parents of schoolchildren over whether youngsters with AIDS should be allowed to attend school if they are physically able to do so. New York City's decision to permit a single unidentified seven-year-old girl with AIDS to enter a second- grade class provoked an angry parental boycott in two Queens school districts, and a lawsuit has been filed seeking a reversal of school-board policy. In a bizarre twist to that case last week, the attorney representing the second- grader announced that there is evidence that the child does not have AIDS after all. The city health department stuck by its contention that the youngster has AIDS. Mayor Edward I. Koch said last week that he would appoint a medical panel to review the recommendations of the existing committee that decides whether to admit AIDS patients to school.

Reagan was equivocal on the issue. "I'm glad I'm not faced with that problem today," said the President, whose four children are grown, in response to a press conference question. He expressed sympathy for the predicament of a child who cannot comprehend "why somehow he is now an outcast." Yet the President also said he "can well understand the plight of the parents and how they feel" about possible dangers. New York Governor Mario Cuomo told the New York Post that he "would be scared to death" to send his 15-year-old son Christopher to a class with an AIDS victim, but urged compassion for children with the disease. Another view was expressed by former First Lady Betty Ford, who at the Los Angeles benefit received an award for her involvement in social causes, including the AIDS crisis. While she ^ sympathizes with parents who fear for the safety of their children, said Ford, "a greater harm will come when they lose their education."

Another disagreement that is almost certain to deepen as more and more Americans fall victim to AIDS (the current count: 13,228, of whom 6,758 have died) is whether the Government is devoting sufficient resources to eliminate the disease. Reagan contended last week that the fight against AIDS has been "a top priority," to which his Administration has allocated "over half a billion dollars," including $126 million to be spent in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. In fact, the Federal Government has budgeted only about $330 million for AIDS research, including the 1986 allocation, and in four of the past five years Congress has increased Administration funding requests. AIDS researchers both in and out of Government insist that much more support is needed. "The funding is totally inadequate," says George Washington University Immunologist Allan Goldstein. "The nation has been put at risk with AIDS because of a lack of public leadership."

Research programs elsewhere have made some advances that are only now reaching the U.S. Last week the Food and Drug Administration approved HPA-23, a potential anti-AIDS drug developed at Paris' famed Pasteur Institute, for testing on humans in the U.S. This antiviral compound has previously been used to treat several dozen American AIDS sufferers, including Hudson, who entered experimental programs in Paris. While it proved ineffective in Hudson's case, HPA-23 has been credited with at least temporarily slowing the replication of the AIDS virus in some others. In no known case, however, has it completely cured a patient or restored his impaired immune system. Initially, American testing of HPA-23 will be restricted to AIDS patients who began the treatment in France and want to continue it in the U.S.

Other new research indicates that more prostitutes are carriers of the AIDS virus than previously thought. In studies reported by the Centers for Disease Control, five of 92 prostitutes tested for the AIDS virus in Seattle and ten of 25 in Miami showed positive results. The rate of infection in both cases was far higher than that for the general population, estimated to be only 1 in 300 to 400 (most of whom will never show AIDS symptoms themselves but could give the disease to others). Many prostitutes are also intravenous drug users, the group at second-highest risk of developing AIDS because of the frequent - sharing of needles. Researchers speculate that male customers of infected prostitutes may risk absorbing the AIDS virus into their bloodstream from vaginal discharge during intercourse, though that form of transmission has not been proved.

On the brighter side, said acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health Dr. James Mason, recent studies show declines in the rate of syphilis and gonorrhea, indicating that some Americans have already become less promiscuous, possibly out of fear of AIDS or herpes. As a result, the spread of the AIDS virus may be slowing. "This disease is controllable now," said Mason. Despite some of the frightening evidence to the contrary, he insisted, "the feeling of helplessness that many Americans feel is absolutely unnecessary and counterproductive."

With reporting by Patricia Delaney/Washington and Melissa Ludtke/Los Angeles