Miko Rising

This is a big year for Miko Hughes. He has his first co-starring role with a member of the box-office Big 10--Bruce Willis--in Universal’s “Mercury Rising.” And now that he’s hitting his 10-year mark with SAG, he’ll soon be vested with pension and health benefits.

It’s nice being able to count on a comfortable retirement. Now all the 12-year-old Hughes has to worry about is whether he has enough Silly String to torture Willis with.

“Almost every day at lunch, we’d have a Silly String fight,” Hughes says of life on the Chicago set. “I love Silly String. I have five cans.”

You might call Hughes a veteran child, professionally speaking. He’s spiffed up in Beverly Hills black for the “Mercury Rising” premiere at the Motion Picture Academy. Downstairs, Willis and Madonna are doing the star thing, but upstairs, it’s

Hughes who’s bringing out the amateur paparazzi--which is ticking off the academy’s security people, who don’t like flashers.

“You’re going to get an Oscar for that,” coos an outlaw blond grown-up aiming a smuggled camera at the giggling Hughes. “You were the best.”

Grown-ups seem to like Hughes. In fact, the ones known as critics seem to like him better than they like the film. In it, he plays Simon, a 9-year-old autistic child with an uncanny ability to unravel the National Security Agency’s new billion-dollar Mercury code. Nasty Big Brother Alec Baldwin goes after him, but first he has to get past renegade FBI man and surrogate dad Willis, who leads everyone on a chase across Chicago.

Critics in Boston and Sacramento called Hughes’ performance “appealing” and “astonishing.” Bennett Leventhal--”a really big doctor on autism,” in Hughes-speak--gives the star-ette the ultimate compliment before scooping him up in his admittedly big arms at the premiere: “Even I believed you,” he purrs. Leventhal, head of the child psychiatry department at the University of Chicago, spent six weeks before the shoot tutoring Hughes at a school for autistic children.

“To do this role,” Leventhal says, “you have to learn to give up all the things we usually use in social interaction. Like we use vocal inflection when we speak. He had to flatten it out. And it’s hard not to look at people. It’s hard not to be responsive to all the nuances of their voice and communication.

“I’m usually trying to make these behaviors go away, so to take it apart and help him create a role was a real challenge.”

But, hey, look at the raw material he had to work with, which wasn’t so raw. We ask Hughes about his other films. We get a one-word answer.

“PetSematary KindergartenCopJackTheBear Cops&Robbersons; WesCraven’sNewNightmare Apollo13ZeusAndRoxanne SpawnAndMercuryRising.”

A star was born. And almost immediately went to work. Miko’s Native American mom, Mary, who had Miko, her youngest son, at 45, realized her bundle of joy could make good use of head shots when he was 14 months old.

“We were driving and the car pulled up to a light,” Mary says. “There was a service station on the corner. He pointed to it and said, ‘M-o-b-i-l.’ [Miko’s parents] both looked at each other. We pulled into a Target store. We bought an alphabet book, and he knew 90% of it.

“My theory on the terrible twos is that kids can’t communicate and they can’t understand. But you could ask him to do something and he would do it. I said, ‘This would be perfect for a director.’ ”

Nine months later, Miko (“chief” in Chickasaw), landed three commercials and an agent. When he was a little over 2 years old, he got his first movie gig, Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary.” He played “a possessed demon child who goes around hacking everyone up,” Miko says sweetly. “That was pretty fun.”

Miko’s dad, John, gave up 30 years in special effects and began managing the tot’s career with his wife. Now the family from Tishomongo, Okla., spends most of the year in Apple Valley, where Miko keeps 30,000 pets in the backyard, a hive full of bees.

So how much do they pay you?

“I don’t know. Mom and Dad take care of that.”

Do you get an allowance?

“Fifteen bucks a week.”

Just about enough to keep any movie star in Silly String.

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Diva of Decorum: Where is Margaret, the Duchess of Argyll, when we really need her?

“When she walked into a room, she would simply walk from one end to another and everyone would stare and just admire her,” recalls Letitia Baldridge, of the late Scottish society figure.

These are desperate times. Style has no style anymore, sighs the duchess of etiquette, protocol and all things bearing white gloves.

“Now what do we have? We have movie stars. We have models with everything hanging out. And it’s not even the real McCoy. That’s not style.”

So what is style?

“It’s an art, and it is from within. It’s knowing how to edit.”

That’s not something we want to encourage. Anyway, Baldridge--who sailed through town recently to promote her 16th book, “In the Kennedy Style: Magical Evenings in the Kennedy White House” (Doubleday)--says we Angelenos have our work cut out for us, especially those of us enamored of trends, if you can imagine such a thing in this town.

“There’s this vogue of 5 o’clock shadows on young male actors. Those things are bad. Really bad. It looks dirty and unkempt, plus the fact that any woman with sensitive, beautiful skin would be scratched to death with that kind of beard. Maybe they don’t kiss anyone.”

Maybe they don’t kiss women.

“There was a whole ritual, men tipping their hats and taking them off in the elevator. Now you see men with baseball caps worn backward in church and even weddings. I just say, ‘Letitia, don’t be an old croak, a critical old fuddy duddy,’ but I think it’s disgusting.”

All right, guys. Sit up straight, fly right and get some help. Baldridge, 72, has come from Washington, D.C., to offer a 12-step program for the style-impaired. You might start with her book on Kennedy style, something she knows something about as the former social secretary to the Camelot White House.

Jackie Kennedy was, of course, our very own Margaret, the duchess of Argyll. Lest we forget.

“So many books have been so unfair and exaggerated,” says Baldridge. “It’s appalling what they say. All her affairs. Balderdash. I was there. Even when I wasn’t there, I know Jackie. She wouldn’t have behaved in that fashion.”

The zenith of style didn’t mess around. What she did do was entertain graciously, practice the lost art of conversation and throw such elaborate state dinners that today they’d cost the equivalent of a small nation’s GNP. Learn how to spend your own bloody fortune using White House recipes and style tips with Baldridge’s memoir and how-to. How to entertain like a head of state, that is.

So listen, California, no more excuses. No more dressing for a nice meal as if you’re doing yardwork, or you’ll have to answer to the protocol police.

“There are certain things we have to change going into the next millenium,” says Baldridge. “I’m on a horse with a sword.”

So much more stylish than an Uzi.

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Getting Odder: How about this vehicle for Energizer actors Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon: “Sexy Old Men”?

The still-ticking duo show that life begins at 70 in Neil Simon’s “Odd Couple II,” which recently had its premiere on the Paramount Studios lot. Revelers at the party benefiting the Music Center of Los Angeles County included Music Center Chairwoman Andrea Van de Kamp and former California Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, Paramount Motion Pictures Group Chairwoman Sherry Lansing and William Friedkin, the film’s director, Howard Deutch, and Leah Thompson, screenwriter Simon and wife Diane, ICM President Jim Wiatt and Elizabeth Rieger, Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti and Barbara Sinatra.

Despite the many moons that have passed since the first “Odd Couple,” Lemmon and Matthau can still get the girl--or at least a chance to hit on her. Not that they need the practice.

In 1995’s “Grumpier Old Men,” the robust Matthau bellied up to Sophia Loren. And in his latest incarnation as Oscar, Matthau flirts with biker babe Christine Baranski, who attests to the value of experience.

“The dancing sequence was very short in the film, but we did a lot of dancing,” she says. “He’s a great grabber, let me put it that way.”

“The passion is still there,” says Jonathan Silverman, who plays Matthau’s son. “He’s the world’s biggest flirt. He thinks he’s 25 years old. He drives all the women absolutely crazy. If I were a girl, I would hope he’d chase me a little.”

Do something about that goatee then.

With the success of the Grumpies, the studios are finally catching on to the fact that sex--or at least flirtation--sells to riper adults, too. Just recently, septuagenarian Paul Newman was as juicy as ever in the noir-ish “Twilight.”

“It’s true in reality that as you get older, your love life doesn’t disappear and your feelings and emotions don’t disappear,” says Lansing, who resurrected Simon’s 8-year-old script. “Sometimes they get more intense.”

Especially when it comes to box office.

“I like to think that life continues for everybody. There’s a huge demographic of an over-40-year-old audience, and life goes on,” says Lansing.