A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

West Coast Bureau Chief Dan Goodgame approached the assignment of reporting this week's main cover story on teenage Actress Molly Ringwald with a mixture of curiosity and dread. "I've covered school-board meetings and murders, wars and paper-airplane contests," he says, "but I had never profiled a movie princess. How, I wondered, was I going to make conversation with a woman of 18 over the space of several days, much less keep pace with her?" Goodgame, a TIME correspondent since 1984 and formerly a Miami Herald reporter in the Middle East, is a venerable 31.

His doubts dissolved at their first meeting, in a small Los Angeles restaurant of Ringwald's choosing. "She turned out to be good company," Goodgame reports. "The conversation wandered easily from her films to the novels of Salinger and Fitzgerald, from snorkeling in Australia to the Lebanon war and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans."

The maturity displayed by Molly and her coterie of rising young stars made a similar impression on Correspondent Michael Riley. While interviewing Laura Dern and Ally Sheedy, Riley found "it was hard to remember that behind an actress's grownup face lurks the mind and heart of a playful girl." Reporter- Researcher William Tynan, who interviewed Rebecca De Mornay, is himself a former TV and stage actor. For Tynan, a story about Hollywood's newest generation evoked old memories. "It was fun to talk about the kind of work I had done years ago," said Tynan. "Also, I could empathize with a performer's desire to be an interesting personality and yet protect a private life."

Ringwald in particular combines cinematic charisma and unaffected behavior, as Goodgame discovered when she drove him to his car from a photo session at the beach. She became so involved in talking and listening to the music thumping from her tape deck that she was soon doing 60 m.p.h. in a 35-m.p.h. zone. "A motorcycle policeman pulled her over," says Goodgame, "and I anticipated an Oscar-winning performance." But instead of blandishing smiles, Ringwald soberly admitted speeding and took her citation. "As she wheeled back into the traffic," Goodgame says, "I asked why she made no appeal. 'Because I was speeding, and I deserved to get the ticket,' she answered. She doesn't seem capable of doing anything false."