People: Nov. 14, 1983

The 300 civil rights leaders who gathered on the South Lawn of the White House last week greeted one another boisterously. But the mood was much more restrained and solemn when President Reagan appeared to sign a bill making the third Monday in January a national holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Among those present were King’s widow Coretta, 56, and their four children: Yolanda, 27, a New York City actress; Martin III, 25, a lobbyist in Washington who worked for passage of the King holiday; Dexter, 22, a corrections officer in Atlanta, and Bemice, 20, a junior at Atlanta’s Spelman College. Said their mother, after a brief, private meeting with the President: “All right-thinking people, all right-thinking Americans are joined in spirit with us today. It feels great.”

“I just have had enough of this label that sticks to me,” Marcello Mastroiami, 59, told a French newspaper unhappily. But it is hard to look so damnably dashing and avoid being considered a lady-killer. In truth, the Italian actor has lately been playing against type, most notably as an aged and mellowed Casanova in La Nuit de Varennes. And in The General of the Dead Army, a burlesque, Grand Guignol black comedy, which opened recently in Paris, Mastroianni plays the flamboyant General Ariosto, who does not so much get the woman as argue with her over possession of the remains of her late husband. “In most of my roles,” he protests, “I am more often the victim than the conqueror.”

“Michael didn’t outdance Paul, and Paul didn’t outsing Michael,” says ever so diplomatic Director Bob Giraldi, 44, of the newly released Paul McCartney-Michael Jackson rock video Say Say Say. The mini-epic stars Jackson, 25, McCartney, 41, and his wife Linda, 41, as a team of vaudeville con artists on the run in the Wild West. McCartney and Jackson collaborated last year in the writing and singing of The Girl Is Mine, one of the half-dozen hit songs on Jackson’s phenomenally successful Thriller LP. Next came their current hit, Say Say Say, a track on McCartney’s new album, Pipes of Peace. With so much talent on hand, keeping harmony on the set was, well, no day at the beach. “It was hard work,” says Giraldi. “The egos could fill a room.”

The heavily armed U.S. marshals waiting last week outside the gates of Porn Peddler Larry Flynt’s Bel-Air, Calif., mansion were taking no chances. Flynt, 41, who had been paralyzed by a would-be assassin’s bullet, had been quoted as saying he would shoot anyone who came to get him “right between the eyes.” But this time, at least, he was not true to his word. “If any of you want to know if this is a publicity gimmick, yes, it is,” he told reporters, “and thank God you all fell for it.” Then, wearing a LARRY FLYNT FOR PRESIDENT shirt, the raunchy, paunchy publisher of Hustler magazine was taken before Judge Robert Takasugi. The judge had ordered Flynt to surrender an audio tape that Flynt said was a recording of former Auto Magnate John Z. De Lorean being coerced by federal agents into participating in the $24 million cocaine deal that ended with his arrest. In court, Flynt stuck to his story that he no longer had the tape because it had been stolen. Later he went before a grand jury, where he ran on at the mouth until disgusted federal prosecutors gave up. Afterward, Flynt tried to explain his grand design: “If a man bites a dog, that’s news. I try to bite a dog every day.”

—By Guy D. Garcia