Everyone knows that the Detroit Pistons are an unhappy basketball team. But to prefer jail to playing with them? For part of last week, that seemed to be the decision of Marvin Barnes, the $300,000-a-year Piston star. Barnes faces a jail term for violating parole, stemming from a 1974 conviction for assault, and he said he would rather begin serving his sentence now than perform with his team in the N.B.A. playoffs. His main gripe against the Pistons: for a player of his quality--and on a good night he can be incandescent--he does not play enough. If Coach Herb Brown thinks his play has fallen off, it is, he says, because jail looms. "I've got to serve time. It's affecting my game mentally and physically. It's on my mind. It's a heavy weight, a burden." But, reminded that by the terms of his contract he must play in the playoffs, Barnes said he would not let his team down.

What Lady Bird Johnson did for flowers and trees, Joan Mondale may do for art. To that end, she has crowded the turreted, Victorian Admiral's House that serves as the Vice President's official residence in Washington with 52 works by U.S. artists--sculptures, paintings and handicrafts. Joan, a longtime art buff, helped Martin Friedman, director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, choose the loan collection from museums in the Middle West. "We tend to forget," she said, "that there is an active and deeply committed world of art out there between the East and West coasts."

Actress Catherine Deneuve fears that the heydey of French cinema is over. "Today, the explosion of a new New Wave is unthinkable," she told Paris Match. Her own career, however, is thriving. Lost Souls, an Italian movie in which she stars as a subdued, fragile and fearful wife, opened in Paris last week, and this week she starts filming Love at First Sight, a story of World War I. Some scenes will be shot at Maxim's, where Deneuve's two lovers, a French aristocrat (Philippe Noiret) and his German cousin (Sam Waterston), meet to celebrate her birthday. Deneuve is happy with her "beautiful part."

It is "better to err on the side of free speech." So saying, Judge J. Edward Lumbard of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals snatched back $125,002 that Author A.E. Hotchner thought he had won last year in a libel suit. Hotchner, a longtime friend of Ernest Hemingway and writer of the memoir Papa Hemingway, had successfully sued Doubleday & Co. for publishing Spanish Author Jose Luis Castillo-Puche's opinion in yet another Hemingway memoir that Hotchner was a "toady," a "hypocrite" and an "exploiter" of Hemingway's friendship. But because Hotchner and his lawyers failed to prove "reckless disregard for the truth" on the part of Doubleday, Judge Lumbard reversed the pro-Hotchner decision. Publishers, the judge continued, cannot self-censor every opinion expressed in their books; if they did, free speech would vanish. Hotchner, in Paris to write another book, greeted the news of the court's decision with a stoic composure under adversity that Hemingway would have admired: "You win some, you lose some."

Greta Garbo spotted her possibilities in the baby carriage, and Photographer Francesco Scavullo booked her for Ivory Snow ads before she was even a year old. Photogenic Brooke Shields went on to become a child model and actress (with Christopher Plummer in After the Fall). Her fourth role is that of an adolescent prostitute in French Director Louis Malle's first U.S.-made film, Pretty Baby. "It's a social picture of life in New Orleans in 1917," explains Brooke, 11. "It focuses on me and how I live with the other girls." But even though she is the star of the film, Brooke says the role isn't her dream part. What she really wants to play is comedy. "I've always been the clown in my class," she says. "I'm quick on the comebacks."

Gunning the engine of a racing car, says Actor Gene Hackman, is "a pervading male fantasy." Hackman owns a company that builds racers, and did some semipro dirt-track driving near Danville, Ill., as a kid. On April 3 he will enter his first race as a pro, driving a Toyota Celica in the 22-mile Grand Prix West in Long Beach, Calif. "Imagine going down a city boulevard at 100 m.p.h. with a chance to win a prize instead of getting a ticket," says Hackman. He hasn't had such a kick since he smashed up three cars in the famous chase scene in The French Connection.

Artist Jamie Wyeth has had a busy year painting portraits of Jimmy Carter, Andy Warhol and Pumping Iron Star Arnold Schwarzenegger. During Rudolf Nureyev's appearance on Broadway, Jamie ran into him at a dinner party and persuaded the dancer to be his latest subject. "I wanted to paint him because his body is so perfect, and his face is so changeable," explains Wyeth. "One minute he looks impish, the next minute he looks Slavic and haughty." During their three weeks of togetherness, Jamie, 30, found Rudi, 39, not only a master of ballet but also a critic of art. When Wyeth was sketching him practicing at the bar, Rudi would glance over his shoulder and snap, "Get that right!" or "Watch that foot!"

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