I'll Take Manhattan

By MARGARET CARLSON

The Gorbachevs came to Manhattan, Charles and Di with substance and multiple warheads. They gave their regards to Broadway and Bloomingdale's and proved that all it takes to keep traffic moving in New York is the near imposition of martial law: 6,600 of the city's finest, plus the peacekeeping forces of the U.N., the FBI, the FAA, the KGB, the Secret Service and the Coast Guard. Like tourists in for the holidays, the Soviet Union's First Couple took in all the right places, both high (the World Trade Center's 107th-floor observation deck) and low (Times Square's movie district).

Style wars. Despite the warming trends in U.S.-Soviet relations, Nancy and Raisa would be at home in the frozen-food section of a supermarket. At lunch in the Sutton Place townhouse of U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, Mrs. Reagan interrupted Mrs. Gorbachev's lecture on the need for the two nations to become more open with one another. "Haven't we? Haven't we?" she cut in. Amid the shop-till-you-drop types, Barbara Bush was the only guest wearing the kind of suit a grandchild could spill apple juice on with impunity. She raised the room temperature 30 degrees by engaging in the kind of small talk that keeps international incidents from breaking out ("How do you say cheese in Russian?").

First things first. Mrs. Gorbachev squeezed in a pilgrimage to the Fifth Avenue headquarters of Estee Lauder, which hopes to open a Moscow shop soon, and left smelling as if she had run a gauntlet of aggressive salesclerks on the first floor of Macy's. The empress-dowager of cosmetics first splashed Raisa with White Linen, then doused her with Beautiful, despite the protest "I have too much on already."

Gorby the sequel. One-upping his walk on the wild side of Washington's Connecticut Avenue last year, Gorbachev twice leaped from his ZIL limo: in front of Bloomingdale's, and earlier on the Great White Way in sight of the Times Square display screen alternating WELCOME GENERAL SECRETARY GORBACHEV with an ad for My Stepmother Is an Alien.

How'm I doin'? Raisa Gorbachev may be one of the few people left on the planet who think Mayor Ed Koch is doing fine -- probably because she doesn't speak English. Koch once called her government the pits and more recently wondered why, if the Soviet President is such a nice guy, he needs 6,000 cops to guard him. After the U.N. reception, Koch recounted Raisa's observation to him that he was so different from those lazy mayors back home who "always complain when they're given extra work to do."

Nyet this time. Donald Trump, who had taken to describing the quasi-summit as a Gorbachev visit to the Trumps with a stop at the U.N. squeezed in, was scratched from the schedule before the Soviet General Secretary ever came to town. But the developer's hopes revived when he heard that Gorbachev was in front of Trump Tower. He raced down from his 26th-floor office, but the man waiting on the street turned out to be a Gorby impersonator who had won a look-alike contest. Trump shook hands and posed for a picture anyway.

With reporting by Martha Smilgis/New York