PEOPLE

By Belinda Luscombe

OLD WAR WOUNDS DO DIE

The Civil War was over before they were born, but they knew its bitterness through their spouses. DAISY ANDERSON, 96, and ALBERTA MARTIN, 90, are two of the last widows of Civil War veterans. Daisy's husband Robert Anderson was a former slave and Union soldier. Alberta married Confederate infantryman William Jasper Martin when she was 21 and he was 82. When he died, she married his grandson. The two widows met for the first time to lay a rose each on the coffin of an unknown soldier whose remains were found on a Gettysburg battlefield and reburied.

SEEN & HEARD

A robe got Joseph in trouble with his 11 brothers, and now a robe has got the Rev. Robert Schuller in hot water with his fellowman. A United Airlines flight attendant claims the televangelist assaulted him after arguments about where Schuller could hang his robe. Schuller denies all, saying, "I have not broken any of the Ten Commandments."

When it comes to replacing Millie, any old mutt just won't do. So on their way back from Poland last week, Barbara and George Bush picked up a new liver-and-white springer spaniel, trained by Queen Elizabeth's very own dog trainer in London. As it comes from the land of Shakespeare, maybe the pooch will have even more literary ability than its best-selling pawbear.

A ROLE THAT SUITS HIM

It's hard to imagine RICHARD GERE turning down the chance to work on Red Corner, a movie in which he gets to act and be an activist too. Gere, silvering up nicely at 47, plays a lawyer who finds himself accused of rape and murder while in China. If you're thinking of this as an opportunity for the longtime Tibetan activist to educate his fans on the peculiarities of the Chinese judicial system, you're on the right track. Director Jon Avnet says that several Chinese judges and lawyers put themselves at risk to be consultants on the movie. "The catchphrase of the Chinese courts is 'Severity for those who resist,'" says Avnet, who got offered a lot of pirated copies of his last movie, Up Close and Personal, while in Beijing researching this one. "I'm lucky because I get to make a movie about China that the Chinese artists couldn't."

HER ROYAL HOST

Having done the children's book, the memoir, the juice commercial, the lecture tour, the newspaper column and the Weight Watchers-spokeswoman thing, what will the Duchess of York do next? Why, a network-TV special, of course. ABC has signed SARAH FERGUSON to be the anchor of a show in which she travels around the U.S. talking to and working with inspirational people. "It's not a Diane Sawyer situation. She wants to do more than just sit down and talk to them," says a source close to the production. If the first special flies, the plan is to do several a year, perhaps branching out overseas. Word is, some of the funds will go to her U.S.-based charity, Chances for Children. After all, she doesn't exactly have the kind of wardrobe one could auction off.