People

By Guy D. Garcia

The past few weeks have been especially good ones for Eppie Lederer, 67. First she celebrated 30 years of dispensing advice on money, love and marriage to 85 million readers each day as Ann Landers. "I cannot imagine a job that could have provided me with more satisfaction or a better opportunity to touch the lives of so many people," she wrote on the anniversary. Then last week the columnist was named (along with two Nobel prizewinners) among five recipients of the 1985 Albert Lasker medical research and public service awards. Mary Lasker, 84, who with her late husband Albert established the prestigious honors 40 years ago, presented Landers with a statuette and a $15,000 honorarium "for her 30 years of tireless commitment to improve the physical and emotional health of the American people." Health inquiries, once just 5% of Landers' mail, now amount to nearly a third. "People began writing to me with their medical problems," she says, "because I was a good, easy and cheap way for them to get a medical checkup. The price was right." And unlike a lot of free advice, hers was worth it.

For years experts have known that many of the works attributed to Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69) were actually by his students or other admirers. One critic suspects that as many as 300 of the great Dutch artist's supposed 720 paintings are not actually Rembrandts. So far 170 have been reclassified, and last week came word that experts have determined that two more works were painted by someone else. Special neutron photography confirmed that The Man with the Golden Helmet, a beloved masterpiece housed at West Berlin's Staatliche museum, does not match known examples of Rembrandt's work. After that dismaying news, London's National Gallery announced that its Scholar in a Lofty Room bears the signature of a Rembrandt imitator. "The fact that Helmet is not a Rembrandt may be disappointing, but it is still a very good work," says Berlin Curator Jan Kelch. While the museum will rehang it and has no intention of selling it, the raw realities of the art market are not nearly so aesthetically pure. The painting's estimated value has dropped from $8 million to a mere $377,000 or so.

Since the fame of William ("the Refrigerator") Perry has spread far and wide in recent weeks, no one should mix him up with Tab Thacker anymore, right? For those with a slim memory: Perry was a star defensive lineman at Clemson, class of '85, while Thacker was the national collegiate heavyweight wrestling champ from North Carolina State, class of '84. Now as Perry carries on his football career with the Chicago Bears, Thacker is branching out to try the movies. In Wildcats, Goldie Hawn, 40, plays a Chicago high school football coach stuck with the roughest athletes in the city. To help whip her charges into shape, she recruits a shy, oversize over achiever and A student, played by Thacker. The 6-ft. 5-in., 410-lb. thespian tried not to be thrown by his lines but had no trouble throwing around the 5-ft. 6-in., 117-lb. Hawn. "She's a whole lot easier to lift than some of those 300-lb. wrestlers," he says. Now put the coach down gently, please.

"If this is hard work, I feel guilty," joked Congressman Bill Nelson, 43, who is training at Houston before blasting off on the space shuttle in three weeks. "In addition to learning how to use the toilet, I have another purpose. I want to understand how NASA works and how it's been successful," said the Florida Democrat, who by no coincidence is chairman of the Space Science and Applications subcommittee. His special assignment during the five-day flight will be to grow crystals in space for cancer research. But first he will have to learn to be a bit more careful. Despite warnings about the disorientation he would feel during simulated zero-gravity training on a plane, Nelson did what came naturally. "I used to think how it would be great to push off and sail through the air," he says ruefully. "So I did and crashed into the ceiling." --By Guy D. Garcia