MILESTONES

By KATHLEEN ADAMS, ELIZABETH L. BLAND, DANIEL EISENBERG, LISA GRANATSTEIN, ANITA HAMILTON, NADYA LABI, LINA LOFARO AND ALAIN L. SANDERS

SENTENCED. MARTIN LAWRENCE, 32, strident star of the canceled sitcom Martin; to two years' probation, after pleading no contest to battery; in Los Angeles.

DIED. JIMMY WITHERSPOON, 74, smoky-voiced singer whose career both rode and propelled the post-World War II transition of jazz blues into rhythm and blues; in Los Angeles. His hits included Ain't Nobody's Business and No Rollin' Blues.

DIED. JUDITH MERRIL, 74, science-fiction dame of peerless anthologies and foreboding novels such as Shadow on the Hearth; of heart failure; in Toronto. One of the first female S-F writers, Merril voiced new--but still bleak--concerns, writing, for example, about a mother's love for her severely deformed baby.

DIED. GEORGES GUETARY, 82, French crooner who lost the girl to Gene Kelly's superior lovemaking in An American in Paris; on the French Riviera.

DIED. WILLIAM OATIS, 83, cold war correspondent for the Associated Press whose 1951 jailing by the Czechoslovak government transformed him into an overnight martyr for free speech; in New York City.

DIED. RED SKELTON, 84, rubber-faced, gentle-hearted clown who always seemed one laugh short of tears; in Rancho Mirage, Calif. His father, a clown, died before his birth--a mixed inheritance that sent him tumbling from carnival to walkabout, perfecting lugubrious pantomimes and uproarious pratfalls. He landed in such movies as The Fuller Brush Man and A Southern Yankee, but it was his TV sketches, his Mean Widdle Kid and Freddie the Freeloader, that made giddy audiences squeal--for mercy and for more. Skelton, too, often dissolved into giggles at his own antics, even after his son died of leukemia in 1958. Then he laughed louder, once saying, "A clown is a warrior who fights gloom."