On the Record: Jun. 6, 1983

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At times it seems that the spotlight at college graduations is directed not at the expectant graduates but at celebrity speakers and recipients of honorary degrees. Some of the scholarly glamour was visible last week at Stonehill College in North Easton, Mass., as well as at Vassar and Yale. At Stonehill, Bianca Jagger, 38, former wife of Rock Star Mick, was awarded an honorary doctorate for humanitarian work in her native Nicaragua and in El Salvador and Honduras. Recalling her 1981 adventures as a jungle paparazzo in Honduras with two friends, she told of rescuing a group of refugee hostages from a band of armed guerrillas. "We had no weapons, but we had a camera, and we used that as a weapon," she said. "I guess they felt we could do them harm if our pictures were shown. The people were let go." Meanwhile, over at the Vassar campus in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Alumna and two-time Academy Award-winner Meryl Streep, 34, gave the commencement address and credited her alma mater with instilling in her "a taste for excellence." But, she added in a cautionary note, "if you can live with the devil, Vassar has not sunk its teeth into you." He would have to catch up first. The next day Streep was off to New Haven to pick up an honorary degree in fine arts from Yale, where she had done graduate work at the drama school.

"I waited a lifetime, more than 30 years, to hear those three words, 'Mrs. Howard Hughes.' " And the three words were worth perhaps eight figures to Terry Moore, 54, actress (Peyton Place, Come Back Little Sheba) and Korean War pinup girl. Back when she was a starlet in 1949, Moore maintains, she and Billionaire Hughes, then 43, were secretly married on a sailing trip to Mexico and were never legally divorced, even though he remarried at least once and she has since married and divorced three other men. After Hughes' death in 1976, Moore went public with her claim, which was pending before the Nevada supreme court last week when the other heirs to Hughes' estimated $2 billion agreed to pay her an undisclosed settlement within six weeks. The sum will be enough, said Moore, "to live comfortably on the interest for the rest of my life." But she has further plans, including adding a new final chapter to a tale-telling book on her open-ended marriage. As for Hughes' other heirs, 24 relatives of varying closeness, they may at last get their shares, since Moore's claim was the last major obstacle to the distribution of his estate. —By Guy D. Garcia

On the Record

Sally Ride, 32, astronaut set to be the first U.S. woman in space on the second voyage of the shuttle Challenger, asked at a press conference if she will weep in tough situations: "Why doesn't anyone ask Rick [Hauck, her fellow astronaut] those questions?"

Paul Weitz, 50, crew member on the 1973 Skylab mission and commander of the first Challenger voyage last April, on the early astronauts' descriptions of the earth as "a beautiful blue marble": "It was blue in the beginning, and now it's a gray planet. What's the message? We are fouling our nest."