People, Aug. 7, 1978

In music Jimmy Carter has catholic tastes. Among his favorites: Mozart, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson, 45, carousing king of outlaw country. At the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., the shirt-sleeved President and his pantsuited wife Rosalynn helicoptered in from Camp David to join the ranks of 12,000 fans and hear Willie match vocal cords with Emmylou Harris, 31. When Willie finished Georgia on My Mind, Carter emerged from the sidelines, and the two good ole boys who made good wrapped each other in a hug.

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“Music knows neither frontiers nor race nor nationalism,” the promoter told the crowd of 2,000 Italian and French jazz lovers. With that, Count Basie, 73, the grand old master of keyboard swing, stepped up to a piano placed smack on the Franco-Italian borderline on the Pont St. Ludovic, and with his band launched a medley of such crowd pleasers as Sweet Georgia Brown and Freckle Face. Meanwhile traffic was blocked on both the Italian and French sides of the bridge, and a cacophony of auto horns accompanied the Count. “I’ve played outdoors before but never like this,” said he. “I’ve never closed a frontier before.”

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The backdrop is Wales, with wild flowers in brilliant bloom. And in the foreground is another vision of natural beauty: Katharine Hepburn. If she looks a bit like some high-spirited English school mistress, that’s because she is. On location for a television remake of Broadway’s 1940 success, The Corn Is Green, Hepburn is cast as the indefatigable Miss Moffat, a sturdy spinster who moves to a Welsh mining town and opens a school. The man in the director’s chair is close friend George Cukor, 79, the grand old master who guided Hepburn through nine previous films. For the crew it’s an ideal summer frolic amidst flint hedges and yellow gladioli, and it leads to a little pastoral reflection. Says Hepburn: “First God made England, Ireland and Scotland. That’s when he corrected his mistakes and made Wales.”

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She may never shake the image. At 43, Francoise Sagan is still, in the minds ofmany, the enfant terrible of French letters whose precocious first novel, Bonjour Tristesse (1954), was so successful that it enabled her to adopt areckless life-style of expensive fast cars, gambling and good whisky. True, true. But Sagan has also found time to spin off twelve more novelsand nine plays. Her latest dramatic effort, scheduled for a Paris openingin the autumn, is called It’s Nice Day and Night and is laced with familiarthemes: an adulterous affair, alienation, the triumph of good over evil. Of course, work demands some reward, and so, with the play completed, the playwright has left her Paris home for an August breather in Germany’s Black Forest. “My head is empty at the moment,” she says. “I just want to walk, walk, walk.” And then of course there is a casino in Baden-Baden and, for her, gambling still casts a spell. Confesses Sagan: “Good God! Once fate leads you to these habits, there’s no stopping.”

On the Record

Isaac Bashevis Singer, storyteller and novelist (Shosha) whose Yiddish characters bare universal passions: “A writer, like a woman, never knows why people like him, or why people dislike him. We never know.”

Bernard Hinault, marathon bicyclist, explaining the philosophy that won for him the 1978 Tour de France: “I have no complexes. That’s the only way to succeed.”

George Burns, 82, cigar-smoking ex-vaudevillian featured in the teeny-bopper movie Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: “Now, they say, you should retire at 70. When I was 70 I still had pimples.”