WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE CLASS OF 1996?

By Richard Lacayo

Just last week WYNTON MARSALIS, musician, composer and keeper of the flame of jazz tradition, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Blood on the Fields, a three-hour, 22-movement oratorio for orchestra, ensemble and vocalists. It was the first jazz-based composition to win the Pulitzer since music was added as a category in 1943. The prize clinched his position as the man doing the most to bring jazz, a great art form of the 20th century, into the 21st.

Well, we told you so. Last year Marsalis was one of TIME's 25 Most Influential People. For many of the rest, the past 12 months also bore out all expectations. For some others, what a difference a year makes. Before we sweep them all offstage--to keep the Influentials game intriguing, none were eligible for the '97 list--we wanted to look at the fate of a few.

ROBERT REDFORD was chosen last year because his Sundance Film Festival has spearheaded the rise of independently produced films against the ever more formulaic product of the major studios. Each January at Sundance, filmmakers whose edge hasn't been worn smooth by Hollywood meet distributors willing to take a chance on chancy films. (One of those is '97 Influential Harvey Weinstein of Miramax.) This year's Oscars should have been called the Indie 500. Four of the five Best Picture nominees were independents. Two big winners, Fargo and Shine, were launched at Sundance.

Since last year, OPRAH WINFREY, the greatest force in television, has practically saved the alphabet. It's simple. Oprah selects a title for the book-discussion club she launched on her show last fall. Then everyone in America buys it. This gives her the market clout of a Pentagon procurement officer. Architect FRANK GEHRY saw a long struggle culminate in a huge achievement. His $100 million Guggenheim Museum is scheduled to open later this year in Bilbao, Spain.

For others among the 25, it was a so-so year. Harvard professor WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON published When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, which he had hoped would influence the debate on welfare reform. It did, but it was too late to head off a welfare bill he opposed. PHIL KNIGHT, CEO of Nike, saw a 77% increase in profits last quarter. That was clouded by the report of a Vietnamese-American labor activist that many Nike shoes are produced at plants in Vietnam where the mostly female work force faces corporal punishment and 12-hr. workdays. All that for about $1.60 a day. Nike promised changes.

Fortune smiled on AL GORE, who was re-elected Vice President. He was also a very successful party fund raiser, a mixed blessing. Gore's see-no-evil attendance at a Buddhist temple donorfest and the fund-raising calls he made from his office badly compromised his forthright image. Worse, they led to the March press conference where Mr. Clean became Uncle Wiggly. Though he's still the Democratic front runner for the year 2000, his troubles have encouraged rivals like Dick Gephardt and Bob Kerrey.

When he made the TIME 25 last year, DICK MORRIS was little known to the public but crucial to the White House. In campaign '96 he "triangulated" Clinton into the political center and sold the idea of a massively expensive media buy that kept Democrats scrambling to pay the bills (see above: Al Gore, problems of). But just as Morris emerged on the cover of TIME and the President headed for his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, the supermarket tabloid Star pushed the plunger on the dynamite Morris rested upon. A paid companion told just how she had companioned Morris in his Washington hotel suite and played footsie with his face. Later it came to light that he had fathered a daughter by a woman in Texas, news that did nothing to smooth relations with his (now estranged) wife. Morris consoled himself with a $2.5 million book advance. He remains a much quoted political analyst, one gamely attempting to reach the ear of a President who holds him at arm's length. It's a tricky position.

After the Million Man March on Washington, which got him on last year's list, LOUIS FARRAKHAN trekked across the Middle East and Africa. He dropped in on Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who promised $1 billion in support of minority business ventures in this country. Whether Gaddafi would make good was a moot point: U.S. sanctions against Libya blocked acceptance. Last year PATTY STONESIFER directed Microsoft's move from software into "content," meaning movie-quality games, online publications like Slate and news services like msnbc, a step that will change the shape of news and entertainment. In December she left in a company-wide shake-up. People who think Microsoft is a teenage boy's tree house say she was shaken out of the tree.

MARTHA STEWART rearranged a lot of her furniture. Buying out most of her corporate partner, Time Warner, which owns this magazine, she took control of hers, Martha Stewart Living, as well as of her syndicated TV show of the same name. She switched her network appearances from the Today show to the CBS Morning News. She started a new line of products at K Mart. What all this means is that an encounter with Martha will go on being an experience not so different from getting hit by a Mack truck full of daisies. As you peel yourself off the macadam, you're free to cry out against all that is filigreed, twice marinated and hand dipped. You may even be allowed to live. But you will know you have met the woman who sold colonial Williamsburg to Levittown.

The most amazing journey of all was taken by COURTNEY LOVE. Last year she was still rock's open wound. Tread-marked and track-marked, widow of Kurt Cobain and primal scream of the rock band Hole, she was the id other rockers warmed their instruments against. This year she's Audrey Hepburn. O.K., not quite. But for her sizable performance in The People vs. Larry Flynt, in which she played Flynt's formidable and doomed wife Althea, a druggy ex-stripper, Love won the New York Film Critics Circle Award as Best Supporting Actress. Last month the same woman who used to apply lipstick the way toddlers mash crayons was demurely turned out for the Oscars in a chiffon Versace gown. It was the most thorough transformation since Eliza Doolittle met Henry Higgins. If Courtney does become the next Audrey Hepburn, don't say we didn't warn you.