People: On the Record

He has a tin ear for dialogue, but otherwise Catherine Deneuve and her current costar, Manfred, get along fine. "I give him orders," she says, "and, thank God, he has no initiative." To be that way around Deneuve, any man would have to be a robot, which is exactly what Manfred is. In Deneuve's latest film (working title: It's All Dad's Fault), now being shot in Nice, Manfred serves drinks, cleans house and also helps French Actor Claude Brasseur escape from jail. Even though she finds her sidekick's metallic utterances and mechanical behavior a bit offputting, Deneuve is unfailingly polite about him. Says she: "It's an exceptional occasion to work with a robot."

After 110 years Jefferson Davis is once again a U.S. citizen, thanks to a bill signed into law by a fellow Southerner, Jimmy Carter. Shorn of citizenship by a punitive Reconstruction Era Congress, Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, died in 1889. In 1975, General Robert E. Lee's citizenship was restored, leaving Davis the sole Confederate leader still ostracized. Carter agreed that enough was enough. Said he: "Our nation needs to clear away the guilts, enmities and recriminations of the past."

The Los Angeles World Affairs Council thought it would be a good idea to invite Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith as a guest speaker, but to Actress-Demonstrator Jane Fonda the notion amounted to unmitigated gall. She and 500 other protesters with pickets and bullhorns denounced Smith as a symbol of white-ruled Africa's racial policies. "We have enough problems here," Fonda declared, "without propping up a minority military regime. It is important to let him know that his philosophy is not welcome to millions of Americans." To Smith the hostility was nothing new: he has been greeted similarly in Washington, New York City and Houston.

The craftsmanship and the tone are suggestive of Andrew Wyeth, but the new painting of Lady Bird Johnson is in fact by New Yorker Aaron Shikler, best known for the official White House portraits of President John F. Kennedy and his widow Jacqueline Onassis. Commissioned by Jane Engelhard, widow of Industrialist Charles Engelhard, the Lady Bird canvas was painted in Texas last spring when the bluebonnets were in bloom, and will be on permanent display at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin. Said Lady Bird last week: "I'm crazy about it. I feel very much in tune with it."

How to win the heart of a lady fair? Be her bodyguard, or so two famous young ladies would attest. Susan Ford, 21, freelance photographer and only daughter of former President Gerald and Betty Ford, plans to marry Charles Frederick Vance, 37, a Secret Service agent and divorcee who met his future bride in June 1977 when assigned to a year's duty as a guard for the Ford family. Patty Hearst, 24, still in jail for bank robbery, is planning to marry Bernard Shaw, 30, a San Francisco cop who was one of her bodyguards when she was free on bail last year.

Ray Kroc, McDonald's Senior Chairman, in Tokyo to open stand No. 5,000, on his other role as owner of the San Diego Padres: "The club is a helluva lot of fun, like my wife, but there's no profit in either one."