MILESTONES

HOSPITALIZED. CHRISTOPHER REEVE, 42, actor; for a broken neck and injured spinal cord; in Charlottesville, Virginia. Reeve, who leaped to stardom in the 1978 big-screen version of Superman, was competing in an equestrian event when his horse refused a jump and Reeve was thrown to the ground, breaking two vertebrae at the base of his skull. Reeve is on a respirator, paralyzed below the neck, but reporting sensation in his chest. Doctors will operate this week to prevent further damage to his spinal cord.

DIED. STANLEY ELKIN, 65, darkly witty, language-obsessed novelist; of a heart attack; in St. Louis, Missouri. Author of 17 books, Elkin won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for George Mills, which-in a plot typical of his absurdist bent-follows a thousand-year lineage of losers with the same name, from a misguided medieval crusader to a furniture mover in present-day St. Louis. Elkin remained a prolific writer despite suffering from multiple sclerosis.

DIED. JEAN MUIR, 66, fashion designer; of breast cancer; in London. Though Muir first made a mark in the early '60s, her mastery of starkly simple yet always elegant designs kept her on the cutting edge for three decades. Her practical credo: "When designing clothes, you must remember that you are covering a body that moves." Her specialty: the "little black dress."

DIED. MARGARET CHASE SMITH, 97, former Republican Senator from Maine; in Skowhegan, Maine. Smith was the first woman to win election to both houses of Congress and the first to be put forward as a presidential candidate at a national political convention (in 1964, when she was swept aside by the Goldwater rush). She showed a prickly independence that often put her at odds with more doctrinaire members of her party. She backed F.D.R.'s New Deal legislation, opposed two of Richard Nixon's Supreme Court nominees and was a withering early critic of her red-hunting colleague Joseph McCarthy.