‘The Schwarzenshriver’ and Other Expectations

THAT GRAND actress Sigourney Weaver and her director-hubby, Jim Simpson, are expecting their first child in the early spring. They have been married for five years.

Down in D.C., the “Charlotte’s Web” gossip column of the Washington Star says Kelly McGillis, acting with the Folger Library repertory company, and her businessman-husband, are also expecting for their very first time.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has never been a daddy before, expects any minute via Maria Shriver of NBC and the Kennedy family. Arnold now refers to his coming heir as “The Schwarzenshriver!”

HAVE A FLASH--one of the world’s best-known, most prolific novelists says he is going to hang up his typewriter after he finishes his current one, “The Piranhas,” for Simon & Schuster. This will mark the 20th work of fiction to come from Harold Robbins, who wrote such best sellers as “A Stone for Danny Fisher,” “Where Love Has Gone” and “The Carpetbaggers.”

THEY ARE trooping up the gangplank to get aboard the good ship “National” with captains Frank Deford and Peter Price at the helm. The lures these publishers are holding must be wonderful ones indeed. The gang now includes the New York Daily News’ star Mike Lupica, the New York Times’ Peter Alfano, the Washington Post’s John Feinstein, the L.A. Times’ Scott Ostler. And get this--when The National daily sports newspaper bows in January, they’ll have a gossip columnist. Smith grad Kim Cunningham, formerly of World Tennis and US magazine, will write a column called “Eagle’s Eye.”

IT HAS taken Freddie Fields five years to bring his crowning glory, a movie titled “Glory,” to the big screen. This epic tribute to the first all-black fighting regiment in U.S. history, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, has been a labor of love. Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman are the marvelous stars of this story of how blacks helped turn the tide for the Union Army in the Civil War.

Fields has already distinguished himself in many areas of entertainment. He founded one of the world’s biggest talent agencies, CMA, now ICM. He was production chief at MGM/UA. He has managed the careers and presented such stars as Judy Garland and her ilk. I’ll be rooting for Freddie when “Glory” bows on Dec. 10 at the Ziegfeld in New York for the American Film Institute.

I NEVER cease being amazed at how articulate and witty Sylvester Stallone is when most people think he goes around yelling “Yo!” In the new M mag, Stallone says this about image vs. reality: “I entered this business as an actor, not as an icon, not as a rough-and-tumble guy, right-wing, jingoistic, sociopathic--that’s not me. I’m subject to the whims and perceptions of a fictional character. I am a verbal person and ‘Rambo’ is an Elizabethan dumb show, almost a mime. It isn’t as if I’m in the gutter drinking Woolite, but it has jaded and distorted the image of who I am.”