People: Nov. 30, 1981

As Esmerelda, the gypsy temptress in the CBS-TV Hallmark Hall of Fame treatment of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, British Actress Lesley-Anne Down, 27, bounces through enough personal crises to earn her a guest spot on Phil Donahue’s show. During the two-hour special, to be aired next year, she is arrested, hauled off to the Bastille, kidnaped, ravished and accused of being a witch. In the gallows scene Lesley-Anne was forced to stand with a noose around her neck and her hands tied behind her back while she balanced atop a two-foot-high stool on a platform 15 feet above the ground. All this while Quasimodo, the hunchback bell ringer, played by Anthony Hopkins, 43, clumsily scrambled about trying to free her. “Anthony is no stunt man,” says Lesley-Anne, “and the makeup job left him with just one eye open. I’m still having choking dreams.”

The future seemed anything but rosy for Louis (“the Light Bulb”) Eisenberg. He was 53 years old, making $225 a week replacing bulbs in a Manhattan office tower and commuting by subway from a 2½-room apartment in Brooklyn that he shared with his wife Bernice. Then Lou strung together a number—31422242529, from childhood—and gambled $1 on New York’s Lotto game. Two days later Eisenberg learned he had won $5 million, reportedly the largest lottery prize in history. His first reaction: “Fifty-three years I’m eating bread, and I want to eat cake.” For a guy like Lou, though, old habits die hard. After he won, he ambled into work, said nothing and resumed his normal routine, deciding to quit only after he asked himself: “What kind of a nut am I? Who walks around screwing in light bulbs that’s a millionaire?”

President Ronald Reagan talked successful turkey last week in the White House Rose Garden. Presented with a live 50-lb. bird that squawked and flapped and nearly drove members of the National Turkey Federation to cover, Reagan hovered anxiously until calm was restored. Then the President, who had scored zero on a recent turkey shoot, patted his gift and dressed him down: “Look,” he said, “I had a chance to shoot a bunch of you the other day and I didn’t.”

To former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 58, it seemed like old times. After watching a soccer match in Rio, Kissinger flew to Brasilia, the capital, to deliver a university lecture. Some 300 protesting students pelted the lecture hall with eggs and tomatoes, and then pounded samba drums to taunt him. Hustled out by police into a paddy wagon, Kissinger took it all in stride: “I used to be a professor at Harvard, so I am used to this. But Brazilian students do have better rhythm.”

Word last week from the northern Italian village of Merano came 41 moves into the 18th game of the 30th World Chess Championship. Challenger Victor Korchnoi, 50, conceded his final defeat to Defending Champion Anatoli Karpov, 30, six games to two with ten draws. The pair, known to chess fans as “K-2,” traded off-court insults during much of their 51 days of play. Soviet Wunderkind Karpov takes home $280,000. Korchnoi, a defector from the U.S.S.R., $170,000. A nice check, mates.

—By E. Graydon Carter

On the Record

Prince Charles, 33, after explaining to Bristol factory workers that his pregnant wife Diana could not join him because she had morning sickness: “I’m quite prepared to take full responsibility.”

Diana, Princess of Wales, 20, feeling much better, and explaining where her husband Charles was, after a ceremony in which she switched on Christmas lights in Regent Square: “I’ve left him at home watching the telly.”