Fan Mail: Hollywood writers ought to love...

Fan Mail: Hollywood writers ought to love the new series of Al Hirschfeld caricatures featured on upcoming 29-cent postage stamps. Look for likenesses of Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, among others. The stamps will not include the 88-year-old artist’s famous signature--but they will include the name of the artist’s daughter, Nina, hidden in the squiggles. U.S. Postmaster General Anthony Frank said, “Nina has become such a distinctive element” in Hirschfeld’s art that the stamps would not seem genuinely his without it.

Stop the Presses: Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko wrote what he thought was a spoof on nasty computer messages LAPD officers send each other. But Royko’s colleagues thought the column sounded racist and complained to their boss, who killed it. Royko complained to the boss’s boss, managing editor Dick Ciccone, who reinstated the column. When it ran last week, Royko got only one phone call from an irate reader.

Bankable: New Zealand’s central bank may remove Queen Elizabeth II’s image from its dollar bills--possibly replacing it with that of rocker Rod Stewart’s wife, supermodel Rachel Hunter. When citizens were invited to submit names they thought suitable for the honor, Hunter became an early front-runner. Now, Nobel Prize winner Lord Ernest Rutherford--a physicist who split the atom--has pulled ahead. Bank execs say a final decision will be made in September.

Sly Wins: Sylvester Stallone won big money and a big legal battle in London on Wednesday, when the Spectator magazine and the author of an article on Stallone agreed to pay “substantial damages” to the actor for suggesting in print that he was a coward for “ducking the Vietnam War.” Stallone’s lawyer, Michael Skrein, would not disclose the amount of the award, but reiterated what he had told the judge: that the February, 1991, article inaccurately implied Stallone was cowardly, when in truth he had “never sought to evade his call-up” and that these facts were now accepted by the writer and the magazine.