People, Oct. 22, 1979

Different folks paint with different strokes. But that is no reason why a 20th century artist like Andrew Wyeth should not come to the aid of an 18th century portrait painter like Gilbert Stuart. To buoy Bostonians who are trying to raise $2.5 million by year’s end to keep Stuart’s famous paintings of George and Martha Washington from eloping to the National Portrait Gallery in that other Washington, Wyeth came down from Maine to contribute to Boston’s “Save Our Stuarts” campaign. The guru of Chadd’s Ford even posed, check in hand, with Curator Theodore Stebbins Jr. at the Museum of Fine Arts under Stuart’s George.

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Each of them was an imperious ruler of Egypt, albeit 32 centuries apart. Perhaps that was why President Anwar Sadat, the present ruler, leaned so solicitously over the glass-topped coffin of Pharaoh Ramses II last week at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Three years ago the mummified pharaoh, who built Abu Simbel in the course of his 67-year rule, developed—well, a fungus and parasites. He was shipped to Paris to be cured of the condition. Back in Cairo, Ramses II went on display again, along with a plaque noting that in 1258 B.C. he and Hattusilis, great chief of the Hittites, ended a 20-year war with an agreement that neither would pass into the land of the other “or take anything therefrom.” “Good, good,” nodded Sadat, reading the plaque. Of course. It was a Middle East agreement 3,236 years older than his own Camp David concordat with Israel’s Menachem Begin.

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Thou shalt, Writer Gay Talese earnestly hopes, covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife. That’s the title of the latest book by erstwhile New York Timesman Talese, 47, who spent eight intriguing and, some suspect, interminable years in bedrooms, board rooms, massage parlors, even on a free-love farm, researching the changing sexual mores of middle-class America. The conclusions are so enticing that the book, with the publication date still six months away, already has earned nearly $4 million, including a $2.5 million film-rights agreement last week. Now that the sex epic has climaxed, Talese wants to write about the sociology of baseball. “I’m a baseball addict,” he confesses. “More of a sports fan than a sex fan.” To be called Thy Wife’s Lament, perhaps?

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Seven years ago, when she turned pro, Chris Evert was a chunky teen-ager with a pretty frown of concentration and a strong game. She still has the frown and the form but Evert, 24, now the bride of fellow Pro John Lloyd, 25, has become a lissome beauty. Particularly in a bikini, as on the beach at Maui, where she dutifully draped Lloyd with leis during a recent vacation. Advantage, Evert, as they say.

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Chauvinists in the Corps of Cadets always maintained that it would be a cold day before West Point bestowed its prestigious Sylvanus Thayer Award on a woman. Well it snowed, in early October on the Plain last week, and there stood Clare Boothe Luce, 76, accepting that award from General Andrew Goodpaster for her accomplishments in politics, diplomacy and the arts. “I suspect,” said Luce, “that the fact that this is the first year that there are women in all four classes [at the Point] is not unrelated to my good fortune.” Luce accepted an engraved saber from ranking cadet Vincent K. Brooks, 20. Brooks is the first black cadet ever to wear the six stripes and star of first captain.