POP/ROCKFab Sales: The Fab Four still know...

POP/ROCK

Fab Sales: The Fab Four still know how to sell records. The Beatles’ “Anthology I,” which includes the new song “Free as a Bird,” sold 450,000 copies in its first day of release last Tuesday, the most single-day sales ever for an album, a Capitol Records spokesman said. The double CD could break the one-week sales mark set by Pearl Jam in 1993 when the group sold 950,000 copies of “Vs.” in its first week of release. . . . In other Beatles news, a BBC producer said the three surviving Beatles are again recording secret messages backward into a song. Simon Clifford said he heard John Lennon say, “Turned out nice again” backward at the end of “Free as a Bird.” Clifford first noticed the phrase while watching the video, which ends with a man playing a ukulele. The late George Formby, a popular ukulele-playing comedian from England, used to end his act with the phrase, “Turned out nice again.” The Beatles’ use of tapes spooled backward on songs prompted rumors over the years, including reports that Paul McCartney was dead.

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They Write the Songs: The National Academy of Songwriters will honor Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, and Randy Newman with Lifetime Achievement Awards on Wednesday night at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. Newman, Lou Rawls and Bryndle, the group featuring Karla Bonoff and Kenny Edwards, are set to perform at the event hosted by Harry Shearer. Among other things, the Bergmans are known for writing “The Way We Were,” Gamble and Huff for “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” and Newman for “I Love L.A.” and his score for the musical “Faust.”

LEGAL FILE

Clothing Suit: Roseanne and her former husband, Tom Arnold, are together again--if only as parties in a civil lawsuit. The two have sued New York-based CelebSales for allegedly failing to make good on its end of an agreement to put their famous names on a line of clothes for big people. CelebSales has countersued for $24 million-plus, contending the couple not only reneged on agreements to market the clothes on television, but generated publicity so vile that nobody would want to buy its product. Under a November, 1993, agreement, the Arnolds would get $1 million in installment payments for allowing CelebSales to use their names and images for the line of clothes. According to Roseanne and Arnold, a second $250,000 advance check never arrived. They went to court seeking the $750,000 balance. Roseanne also contends CelebSales was working up a second-rate line of clothes--she wanted better duds. The trial is set for Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

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Universally Cleared: A suit claiming Jean-Claude Van Damme’s 1992 film “Universal Soldier” was based on a Florida company’s script was rejected by a federal court judge in New York. The judge dismissed the lawsuit brought by Historical Truth Productions of Tampa, Fla., saying it contained “numerous outright falsehoods.” The company had claimed the movie about slain soldiers revived as killing machines was based on the script “The Last Boxer,” developed by the company’s president in 1989. But the judge found the 15 points of alleged similarity were either misrepresented or involved “stock” elements of action films.

ART

Behind Mona Lisa: Two Italian Leonardo da Vinci scholars believe they have solved one of the mysteries of the “Mona Lisa”--saying that they have identified the portrait’s background as the countryside around the village of Ponte a Buriano, on the River Arno near the Tuscan city of Arezzo. According to Italian press reports, Carlo Starnazzi and Claudio Santori spent four years researching their theory about the famed portrait, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris. The pair then tested their ideas using computer models of the local topography. Da Vinci is thought to have painted the “Mona Lisa” between 1503 and 1506.

QUICK TAKES

Singer Lisa Loeb will sign copies of her new album “Tail” at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard on Tuesday at 7 p.m. with an added perk--a 30-minute in-store acoustic performance. . . . President Clinton and veteran blues man Van Morrison will meet in Northern Ireland, a White House official said, speculating that they might even join in a saxophone duet. Clinton will be switching on the Christmas tree lights in Belfast during an upcoming visit; Northern Ireland native Morrison will give a concert after the ceremony.