PEOPLE

By Belinda Luscombe

NOW, SANDRA ALSO RISES

SANDRA BULLOCK, for one, is fascinated by her love life. "I relive in the tabloids all these relationships I'm having with people I've never met," she says. One of her faux beaus, CHRIS O'DONNELL, is her co-star in In Love and War, the story of Ernest Hemingway and the nurse he met while working for the Red Cross during World War I. "Everything I know about myself had to leave," says the exuberant Bullock of playing the reserved Agnes von Kurowsky. "That's why I did it." Plus she learned all that nurses knew in 1918. "Everything from making an egg cream to amputating a limb," she says. "I can do it."

HOME LOAN

MACAULAY CULKIN was onstage at four, on TV at six, a star at 10. Now, at 15, he wants to bail out his feuding parents. According to court papers, Culkin has asked to be allowed to spend $2 million of his estimated $17 million trust fund on an apartment for his family. With legal fees mounting and Mac and his siblings not acting, the Culkins will soon be unable to pay the rent on their three Manhattan apartments (one for Mac, one for mom Patricia Bentrup and five kids, one for dad Kit). Mom likes the plan; Dad doesn't. A draft of Home Alone III is reportedly nearly finished, but maybe Mac is too.

SEEN & HEARD

After one of the most agonizing of journeys to the Olympics, one that sportswriters called "epic," you'd think Dan O'Brien would have soldered his gold medal to his neck. But shortly after winning the decathlon, O'Brien lost the medal. He put it in a gym bag, which he left in the back of the vehicle that took him to his car. Luckily, Jim Reardon, his sport psychologist, retrieved it. After all, O'Brien couldn't be expected to wait another four years.

Karen Carpenter, late princess of quaintly melancholy pop, may yet surprise us all. In October A&M Records will release an album Carpenter recorded in 1979, four years before her death. Two songs on the experimental solo record were by Rod Temperton, who wrote Off the Wall and Thriller for Michael Jackson. Alas, Carpenter's album was considered too left field at the time, which makes it--A&M hopes--perfect for now.

YOU SHOULD WRITE A BOOK

In the latest chapter in the life of PATTY HEARST, she's a novelist. Murder at San Simeon, written with fellow rebel blue blood Cordelia Frances Biddle, is the story of a death on the property of granddad William Randolph Hearst. "My parents never talked about him," says the novelist. "Except that he liked animals and Citizen Kane wasn't about him." Meanwhile, F. Lee Bailey, who defended Patty--a.k.a. terrorist Tania--in the 1970s, has his own book idea. According to Variety, it will feature O.J. Simpson and Hearst, who he says breached attorney-client privilege by badmouthing him. So he's breaching it too. Scoffs Hearst: "That's like saying motor-traffic laws no longer apply to him."