By Belinda Luscombe

Running Wild on the Runway

Somebody forgot to tell Thierry Mugler about '90s frugality. The Paris show introducing his fall collection last week was so brazenly theatrical that even the drag queens in the audience were taken aback. Supermodels like CLAUDIA SCHIFFER (with a swirly 'do) shared the catwalk with celebrities TIPPI HEDREN and PATTY HEARST, who stripped (somewhat awkwardly) down to sequins. Mugler wowed the crowd with ensembles made of tight black plastic, skirts that bloomed up from the waist and a robot suit that took six months to make. Said the designer to Le Figaro: "You can understand why I can't do this twice a year."

SEEN&HEARD

Comedian BILL MAHER caused a lot of static at the Radio-Television Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington. Before a crowd that ranged from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Kato Kaelin, Maher drew boos when he joked about Senator Phil Gramm deporting his Korean-American wife and said D.C. mayor Marion Barry would get drugs off the city's streets "one gram at a time." Tough room.

The man they call God's machine gun, BILLY GRAHAM, beat all his own records last week when he preached to 8 million people via satellite. But in two weeks that record will be broken, as TV and videotape deliver his sermons to an estimated 1 billion-nearly a fifth of the world.

Tears of a Clown

Back when JIM CARREY was the man of a thousand faces but only a few hundred dollars, he wrote out a $10 million check to himself for "acting services rendered." Carrey tells Barbara Walters in her pre-Oscar interviewfest next week that two days before his father's death last September he signed to do The Mask II-for $10 million. "I put the [old] check with him in the casket," he says, tearing up for Walters. "I'd done the thing that he'd hoped his whole life for me to do."

House Mom

Utah Republican ENID GREENE WALDHOLTZ is one elected official who will deliver. The freshman Congresswoman is pregnant, and colleagues are treating her with the care reserved for tax-cut legislation. Advised Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, the only other woman to have a baby while in Congress (in 1973): Wear low heels, and "introduce all the bills you want now, because everyone will be afraid to debate you."