Lookout

UPDATED 12/17/1979 at 01:00 AM EST Originally published 12/17/1979 at 01:00 AM EST

Lee Heh Margolies, 15, was chosen from hundreds of applicants to join a select group of 101 congressional pages in Washington, D.C. It requires up to 12 miles a day of legwork, and the glamor consists of glimpses of stars like Senator Kennedy or Goldwater in the Capitol Hill corridors. Otherwise "It's gofer work," she admits, but it's also a chance to "toss amendments in the hopper" and learn "how the system works." She heard about the job in her eighth-grade class at Washington's National Cathedral School and applied through her senator, then John Culver. She had already been a legislative cause célèbre after an unmarried TV reporter, Marjorie Margolies, fought for the right to adopt her from II San orphanage in Korea when she was 6. Margolies later married former Congressman Ed Mezvinsky (Dlowa), who has tapped Lee Heh to stump for his upcoming race for the senatorial nomination from his new base in Pennsylvania. She lives in a residence hall with other pages and wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to attend classes between 6:15 and 9:30 before beginning the day's run. Meeting the public is not new for Lee Heh—she played the talk shows on the adoption issue, appeared on Mario Thomas' Free to Be You and Me TV special and interviewed Chicago's late Mayor Daley and anthropologist Margaret Mead, among others, for Children's Express Magazine. With background in two splashy fields, politics and showbiz, which will she choose? "Entertainment," smiles Lee Heh. "I want to be famous." But, she insists, "I'll always be levelheaded."

David Copperfield is an accomplished illusionist who has headlined on two networks at 23. Trained in dance and drama, he combines sleight of hand with romantic plot lines—some inspired by films like To Catch a Thief and An American in Paris. "Magic amazes people," he observes, "and I was searching for something that would move people as well." This fall his second CBS special, titled The Magic of David Copperfield, included sketches with such straight men as Loni (WKRP) Anderson. The son of a New Jersey haberdasher, David (who pulled his new moniker out of a hat but dislikes shattering the illusion by divulging his real surname, Kotkin) began conjuring for friends at 10. Stagestruck, he attended New York's Herbert Berghof Studio to learn traditional acting and by 18 was making a living with productions for companies from Western Union to IBM. His network debut came in 1977 in The Magic of ABC, in which then program boss Fred Silverman used David to showcase a preview of the fall's new series. CBS then raided him away, and between TV gigs, Copperfield works the club circuit from his Hollywood Hills apartment base and sees steady girl Susan Norton, an aspiring fashion designer (and his assistant, below). Copperfield's ambition is, perhaps justifiably, not modest: "I would like to achieve in magic what Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly have accomplished in dance."

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