Supporters of Jimmy Carter have been calling her two-faced ever since she dumped the incumbent to support Edward Kennedy's quest for the presidency. Speaking cosmetically rather than politically, however, Chicago's Democratic Mayor Jane Byrne really is. The Windy City's feisty mayor is given to impromptu press conferences at which she appears without television makeup. Embarrassed by the bags beneath her eyes that looked particularly heavy under bright TV lights, Byrne, 45, slipped into a hospital over Thanksgiving for a facelift. Reappearing in public last week, the mayor said nothing about her operation but was unperturbed when photographers rushed to record her new, more youthful look.

She's pretty as a picture, but in this case the picture was worth nowhere near a thousand words. Cast as a young German in The Formula, French Actress Dominique Sanda appeared for a first reading with George C. Scott, who stars as a Los Angeles detective involved with both her and a synthetic-oil conspiracy, whatever that is, while investigating a routine murder. Scott found Sanda's French accent so thick that he had difficulty understanding her. That would make for bad acting and a bad movie. Change the fraulein, as Hollywood often does, to a mademoiselle? Great Scott, not in this case. At Scott's insistence, Sanda was paid $350,000, packed off to Paris and replaced by Swiss Marthe Keller. At least that's the reported denouement. Neither Scott nor Sanda would talk about it. Her only comment was a brusque "No comment." No accent there.

At 83, Lillian Gish has finally become slightly age sensitive. "Whenever I tell anyone what's on my birth certificate," complains the stage and movie actress, who began her career as a child and became a silent screen star with late Sister Dorothy, "they always add a few years." But Gish is not altogether bashful about her fourscore and three. Holding court at a White House reception last week honoring the performing arts, she recalled the first time she and Dorothy were invited to the presidential mansion. It was for a special showing of their movie, Orphans of the Storm, and "my sister had a knot in her stomach from the excitement. But since both we and the President were from Ohio, everything went just fine." The President was Warren Harding, the year 1922.

It wasn't a May and December marriage. More like March and April. Bridegroom Shaun Cassidy, who reached stardom early as teeny-bop's biggest rock idol and then moved smoothly into television acting on Sunday night's The Hardy Boys Mysteries, is 21. Bride Ann Pennington, a former Playboy Playmate who models in bouncy commercials for a Los Angeles men's clothing chain, is seven years older. But that gap mattered not to a romance that began 19 months ago when Cassidy spotted Pennington on the Hardy set. Nor to the groom's mother, Actress Shirley Jones, who was on hand to toast the couple following a quiet wedding at the Cassidy home in Beverly Glen, Calif.

She protested coyly that she was suffering from fallen fanny. Actually, former Alabama First Lady Cornelia Wallace looked fetching at 40, wearing a stunning white decollete bathing suit and water skis for her appearance in an aquaballet at Cypress Gardens. Wallace, who trained as a water-skier at Rollins College in Florida and spent a year skiing professionally at Cypress Gardens, returned to participate in a special program marking the 50,000th water show at that Sunshine State tourist attraction. Wintering at Palm Beach this year, she still water-skis as often as she can, but that's less and less these days. The onetime Aquamaid is hard at work on a novel dealing with civil rights and loosely based on the careers of two Alabama Governors, her Uncle James E. ("Kissing Jim") Folsom and ex-Husband George Wallace. Says Cornelia, who also figures in the book: "I think it's going to be the most significant contribution to literature from the South since Gone With the Wind."

On the Record

Helen Hayes, actress, on discrimination: "There is no racial or religious prejudice among people in the theater. The only prejudice is against bad actors, especially successful ones."

Bill Bradley, New Jersey Democratic Senator and former professional basketball player, on senatorial privileges: "I prefer to eat lunch in the Senate dining room than sweat in the Senate steam bath. I have had my share of sweating."

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