People: May 25, 1981

As photographers, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Margaret Bourke-White were as alike as an Instamatic and a Hasselblad. But as subjects in two upcoming movies, both are being portrayed by camera-sly actresses who admire their subjects: Jaclyn Smith, 33, and Candice Bergen, 35. In Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, a three-hour ABC-TV movie to be aired in the fall, Smith has doffed her Charlie’s Angels halo for the bouffant hair and pillbox hats the 31st First Lady helped popularize. Voice lessons and video tapes of Jackie’s White House tours helped Smith tone down her Houston drawl to a Vassaresque whisper. Scenes filmed around the capital included one dealing with Jackie’s $42.50-a-week stint in the early ’50s as the “Inquiring Camera Girl” for the now-defunct Washington Times-Herald. Though the former First Lady eventually covered the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, she never quite clicked with the bulky Speed Graphic cameras then favored for news photography. Said Jackie later: “I always forgot to pull out the slide.” As Margaret Bourke-White in the film Gandhi, Bergen (Carnal Knowledge, Starting Over) should have had no such difficulties. In 1965 Director Richard Attenborough, 57, (Young Winston, A Bridge Too Far) told her that if he ever managed to make a film biography of the Indian leader, he wanted her to play the part of the star photojournalism Bourke-White captured in the pages of FORTUNE the gritty, yet poetic texture of industrial America in the 1930s, and her shot of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam graced the first cover of LIFE. Bergen took to the shutter when her film career faltered, and in 1972 also made the cover of LIFE with her portrait of Comedian Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona. Still, it will take all of Bergen’s technique on both sides of the camera to convey the legendary perfectionism of the fabulous original. Gandhi, who was photographed by Bourke-White in 1946, captured her technique with an admiring nickname: the Torturer.

Lectures to teen-agers on the harmful effects of cigarettes most often go in one ear and out the other. So to plug their antismoking message, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services decided on a role model: Actress Brooke Shields, 15 (Pretty Baby, Blue Lagoon and the soon-to-be-released Endless Love). But before Brooke had a chance to give her peers a puffless primer, the proposed $68,000 federal campaign was extinguished. Said HHS Chief of Staff David Newhall III: “I did not have sufficient confidence that the majority of smokers would be discouraged.” The announcement certainly irritated the American Lung Association, which charged that the ads had gone up in smoke because the Government had bowed to pressure from the tobacco industry. The association’s directors, who met with the model last week, plan to puff Brooke’s message in an independent campaign. That is fine with her. Brooke does not fret at being Calvinized as a teen sex symbol, but, says she: “I don’t want to be typecast as a smoker.”

—By E. Graydon Carter

On the Record

Hugh Carey, 62, newly wed Governor of New York and father of 13, on the possibility of his having more children: “My record speaks for itself.”

Dolly Parton, 35, on why she had her romantic scenes beefed up in the film version of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas: “If you think that I’m going to be in a movie with Burt Reynolds and not get in a little huggin’ and kissin’, you’re crazy.”

Elizabeth Hanford Dole, 44, presidential assistant, on the White House coterie: “The President doesn’t want any yes men and women around him. When he says no, we all say no.”