PEOPLE

By Belinda Luscombe

WHAT WOULD AUDREY THINK?

Couture season in Paris: that bizarre time of year when the world's most beautiful women parade around in the world's most impeccably tailored, insanely expensive and unusual clothes. Certainly it doesn't get much odder than at the house of 28-year-old Alexander McQueen, Givenchy. His show, held at a Parisian medical school festooned with swaths of red velvet and caged ravens, had been plagued by rumors that it would feature real human bones and teeth. Not so. The handlike skeletons under the lace mantilla were made of resin. The swan around SHALOM HARLOW'S neck, right, was as faux as the eyelashes, eyebrows and pupils adorning CHRYSTELE, left. "There are two or three pieces I'd love to have," said Demi Moore after the show. Of course, that doesn't mean she would wear them.

KAPOW! BATMAN ATTACKS ROBIN

Add to the Riddler, the Penguin and Poison Ivy another Batman nemesis--the Photographer. Batman & Robin star GEORGE CLOONEY, on promotional duty in Australia, visited Melbourne's Hellfire Club, an S&M night spot. But his sojourn among the whips-and-chains crowd was interrupted by the activities of free-lance photographer Robin Dallimore. Clooney snatched Dallimore's camera but was unable to remove the film and asked Dallimore to do it. The photographer obliged, then tried to flee with it, angering Clooney, who, Dallimore says, "ripped my shirt and started to claw me," leaving scratch marks on his neck. Police declined to lay charges, perhaps figuring that's the sort of thing Hellfire patrons pay for.

THANKS ANYWAY

These days, it seems better to refuse than to receive. LARRY KRAMER, bellicose playwright and activist, wanted to bequeath several million dollars to Yale for a tenured chair in gay and lesbian studies. Yale, which doesn't like to take instruction from benefactors, said "it was inappropriate to endow in perpetuity a professorship in an academic area yet to be well established or defined," and wanted to put his money elsewhere. Kramer opted out. "It has been a very distasteful experience," says the playwright. Meanwhile in St. Paul, Minn., artist LEROY NEIMAN withdrew an offer to donate $4.5 million worth of his works to a proposed museum in his honor--he was born and raised there--after a local art critic said his work "stank." He says he might reconsider, and Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson will visit him this week to soften him up. Finally, poet Adrienne Rich has declined the 1997 National Medal for the Arts, because "the very meaning of art," she said, "is incompatible with the cynical politics of this Administration."

SEEN & HEARD

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a Muslim, and Yisrael Lau, one of Israel's two chief rabbis, doesn't shoot hoops, but the two were eager to meet in Jerusalem this week. A family friend of Abdul-Jabbar's, Leonard ("Smitty") Smith, was among the first American soldiers to enter Buchenwald. He found Lau, then seven years old, and held him up to show people who lived in the nearby town of Weimar, saying, "Look! This is your enemy." Said Abdul-Jabbar: "I just wanted to complete the circle."

Debbie Reynolds has the mother of all money problems. Both she and her namesake Las Vegas hotel have filed for bankruptcy protection. "I never dreamed I would, at this time of my life, be subjected to this painful situation," said Reynolds, 65, whose son Todd Fisher is president of the hotel firm. The hostelry has endured a series of setbacks, among them the removal of its slot machines and a sale that fell through at the 11th hour. Trouper that she is, Reynolds will still perform there.