People

By Guy D. Garcia

"The Greatest Show on Earth" has drawn acts from everywhere on the globe, except the People's Republic of China. But this year the "plentitudes of pachyderm precision" at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus have been joined by "a charismatic, candescent constellation of allegiant acrobatics," by which the circus shills mean the 15-member Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe. The booking took nearly 14 years of talks with the Peking government. To make their guests comfortable, the circus stocked up on rice "by the major bagful," built a special train car with a Chinese-style kitchen and put in a VCR on which the visitors play almost nothing but Kung Fu movies. "We've been a big hit in every town we visited," notes Deputy Director Xu Zhiyuan. After ten cities, the tumblers are still adjusting from the intimate Chinese circus style to what Xu politely calls "a very grand presentation that is to the American audience's taste." Meanwhile, their countrymen were adjusting last week to the American circus known as Super Bowl XX. The first 90-min. TV broadcast of "gan lan qiu" (olive ball) was watched by some 300 million Chinese.

Around the trendier haunts of Europe and America, she has long been considered the quintessential night creature. So when the producers of Vamp started looking for someone to play a vampire who not only swills but dresses to kill, they understandably turned to Disco Diva Grace Jones. Due out this summer, the film casts Jamaica-born Jones as Katrina, a 2,000-year-old Egyptian vampire who works in a U.S. nightclub. For a scene in which Katrina performs one of her drop-dead stage acts, Jones' friend, New York Artist Keith Haring, agreed to body-paint her with his characteristic style. True to fanged form, Katrina has a taste for high fashion as well as blood. Explains Jones: "I've never seen a badly dressed vampire." But one who drips paint is a little unusual.

Most people consider the plight of the homeless anything but a laughing matter, but for Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal it only hurts when they stop laughing. The three comedians were in Washington last week to promote a three-hour telethon they will host on HBO to raise money for health-care organizations serving the homeless in 18 cities. Scheduled to air from Los Angeles next week, Comic Relief will feature a gaggle of gagsters for every age group, from Michael J. Fox to Henny Youngman. HBO will let cable operators make the broadcast available to all subscribers by unscrambling the signal. Goldberg, once a welfare mother who escaped homelessness when friends took her in, says, "I am part of this because I want to cover my butt ... It could be me tomorrow, it could be you tomorrow, it could be Mr. R."

She has been there before--in a bind that is, and maybe even in another life. On location in the Peruvian Andes, Shirley MacLaine, 51, found herself and her script embroiled in an intercultural tussle involving extraterrestrials and ancient monuments. (No, Steven Spielberg is not the producer.) The project is Out on a Limb, a five-hour ABC mini-series for November based on her 1983 autobiography of the same title. Citing passages where MacLaine suggests that Machu Picchu and the giant desert drawings known as the Nazca Lines were made by visitors from outer space rather than by the Peruvians, the National Institute of Culture accused her of inadvertently aiding "neo-Nazism" to discredit the country's culture. MacLaine was dismayed. During filming, locals took to calling her La Grinka (a gringa who seeks to become an Inca), and at a press conference last week she sought to make amends: "I profoundly believe that Peru is the repository of a splendiferous culture. If there were extraterrestrial beings that had visited the earth, Peru would be the place they would choose." With that graceful apology, apparently, the Inca-Grinka-do was done. --By Guy D. Garcia