People: Oct. 17, 1983

Shortly after she finished filming the spy thriller Gorky Park in Finland and Sweden, Polish Actress Joanna Pacula, 25, began mastering the fearsome Los Angeles freeways ("My car is like my purse, you have to take it everywhere") and polishing her English before a promotion tour to plug the movie, which will be released in December. Pacula plays Irina, a Siberian dissident who gets mixed up with a triple murder in the park and then falls in love with a Soviet detective, played by William Hurt. After such a heavy role, she says, "I'd like to do a romantic comedy." What is the difference between acting in the U.S. and acting in her homeland? "In Poland, it's just a wonderful job," she says. "Here it's power."

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It all began with a mistake: Senator Ted Kennedy, 51, was mailed a recruiting letter by the Moral Majority, the 4 million-member right-wing faction headed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, 50, his archfoe. When word of the embarrassing gaffe leaked out, the organization good-naturedly invited the Massachusetts liberal to speak at Liberty Baptist College, the group's education stronghold in Lynchburg, Va. Although Kennedy got along well personally with Falwell, he strongly challenged the views of his hosts in an excellent speech (largely written by his press secretary, Robert Shrum). Said Kennedy: "The controversy about the Moral Majority arises not only from its views, but from its name—which, in the minds of many, seems to imply that only one set of public policies is moral and only one majority can possibly be right." He added, "If the right to express ideas is denied, at some future day the torch can be turned against any other book or any other belief. Let us never forget: today's Moral Majority could become tomorrow's persecuted minority."

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Truman played the piano. Ford skied. Johnson rode horses. But Jimmy Carter, 59, had a more practical way of taking his mind off the pressures of the Oval Office: woodworking. Carter's down-home handicraft was on display last week at the highbrow address of Sotheby Parke Bernet in Manhattan. The occasion was an auction to raise funds for the Carter Presidential Library and the Carter Center of Emory University in Atlanta. The auction, which netted $320,000, featured two pairs of ladderback hickory chairs handcrafted by Carter last summer. Anonymous buyers purchased one pair for $21,000 and the other for $20,000. Not exactly peanuts.

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In the beginning there was Playboy, then came raunchy Penthouse, and now, for the man who is ready to settle down, there's One Woman, a quarterly that will faithfully—and exhaustively—show a single dream girl. The sexy subject of One Woman's 96-page premier issue, to be on newsstands for $3.50 next week, is Morgan Fairchild, 33, best known as the bitchy bombshell on TV's Flamingo Road. Six photographers portray Fairchild in relatively modest poses and attire. In a variety of interviews, Fairchild is only slightly more revealing, disclosing that she likes older men and as a youth was a "dumpy little pudgy-faced kid, with white hair and big glasses." Talk about aging gracefully.

—By Guy D. Garcia