By Belinda Luscombe

DON RICKLES, AUTEUR BAIT

You know it has to be a Martin Scorsese film when it stars ROBERT DE NIRO and ... DON RICKLES? "Marty said I have the perfect face for Las Vegas," says the veteran comic, who seems to think that's a compliment. In Casino, due out in November, Rickles plays casino manager Billy Sherbet. He hasn't one funny line, but made up for it between takes. "Everyone told me Bob was a serious actor, but within days he was my slave," says Rickles. "The man was laughing at 'Hello' and killing himself at 'Hello, Bob.' " Casting Rickles wasn't the only counterintuitive choice. Tommy Smothers plays a Senator, and Sharon Stone, who seems as surprised as everyone else that she's in a Scorsese film, plays casino owner De Niro's wife. It's a Mob film, but everyone behaved offscreen. "In 35 years of working Vegas, I've never gambled," says Rickles. "I wouldn't even know how to play a card game." Some Vegas face. READ MY LIPS: GLUB GLUB

Being swallowed up by a bog is not a very presidential exit, so it's just as well that a Mountie and a Secret Service man accompanied George Bush when he took an unplanned constitutional during a fishing trip in Newfoundland. "Bogholes in Newfoundland can look like hard ground," says Corporal Les Noble, the Mountie. "All of a sudden the President went into a boghole, and he was in above his waist." Noble, who had one foot in the quicksand-like bog himself, managed after a 10-minute struggle to extricate Bush with the help of Secret Service man Ed Flynn. "It was a hard pull," says Noble, placing blame on the bog, not the slender ex-President. Shaken but undeterred, Bush slipped on new trousers, borrowed socks and pressed on with the day's fishing.

THEN AGAIN, MAYBE I DON'T

Nobody can accuse CHRISTIE BRINKLEY of being slow. This, after all, is the woman who thought to take photos of herself minutes after a near fatal helicopter crash to sell to PEOPLE magazine. Two months later, she agreed to marry a fellow crash survivor. Now "after much thought and consideration" --and seven months of togetherness--she is separating from that man, real estate developer RICK TAUBMAN, whose son she bore but eight weeks ago. Apart from Brinkley's tendency to overthink issues, it's unclear why her third marriage went sour, although there's ugly talk that money is an issue. Musings from the model's mind don't shed much light. "Life is short," she told PEOPLE at the time of her nuptials. "Ricky and I want to be together all the time."

SEEN & HEARD

Elizabeth Hurley is having one of those years. After surviving a mugging by a gang of feral girls in London in November and the indiscretion of her beau, Hugh Grant, in June, she discovered last week that her flat had been burgled. But hey--maybe the burglary will win the actress some much needed headlines.

Most stars prefer to summer in places other than Moscow, so a bona fide celebrity gets noticed. And Richard Gere has been noticed ducking out early from screenings at the film festival he's attending, kissing a woman called "Masha" onstage at the festival's opening, and getting a police citation for fishing illegally.