Allison Samuels

AUTUMN JACKSON, THE 22-YEAR-OLD college dropout accused of squeezing Bill Cosby for $40 million, wept into her hands when the guilty verdict was read last Friday. ""How could they?'' she asked her lawyer, seemingly dazed by the jury's decision after three days of deliberations.

ST. CLAIR AND EAST 99TH STREET IN Cleveland is a tough neighborhood to call home. A smaller version of Compton, Calif., complete with drive-bys, crackheads and street pharmacists, it's the kind of place where young black men die almost every day.

MARTIN LAWRENCE WAS SUPPOSED to be the next Eddie Murphy. Five years ago he'd just costarred in back-to-back hit movies, ""House Party'' and ""Boomerang,'' and signed a deal with Fox to star in the network's first African-American sitcom, ""Martin.'' Now Lawrence sits in his publicist's office looking fragile, sounding sedate and talking guardedly about getting his life back on track after months of chaos, both personal and professional. ""I want more kids,'' he says quietly. ""That's the only...

THE MEMBERS OF EN VOGUE REALLY sort of like each other, and they 're about to prove it. Terry Ellis, Cindy and Maxine Jones are in an L.A. studio, finishing remixes for their new album, "EV3." Nobody's floating airs.

THE POLICE FOUND MALCOLM SHAbazz, 12, in the early hours of Sunday, June 1, disoriented and reeking of gasoline. He was a few blocks away from the Yonkers, N.Y., apartment where he had recently moved to live with his grandmother.

MARY J. BLIGE HAS BEEN TO CHARM SCHOOL. Back in 1993, she was still overwhelmed by success and reportedly showed up at interviews high, drunk or not at all.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, IN the middle of a storm, in the middle of an ocean, 53 Africans break out of their chains and slaughter the crew of a Cuban slave ship called the Amistad.

BILL AND CAMILLE Cosby made a point of keeping their five children out of the meat grinder that can chew up the children of the rich and famous. But it's not like America didn't know their only son, Ennis.

EVEN IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT the man, Dr. Dre's ""Been There, Done That'' is a video strange enough to freeze a channel-surfer's thumb: a Busby Berkeleyan ballroom-full of sleek couples in evening dress, all of them black, doing the tango in subtly infernal light, to violin music as eerily insistent as the soundtrack to a fever dream.

LOS ANGELES IS NO PLACE FOR THE shy, and Shaquille O'Neal feels right at home. Here he is one recent evening onstage at a Sunset Strip club, celebrating the launch of his new record label, T.W.IsM. (This World Is Mine).

SNOOP DOGGY DOGG DOES NOT RUN with the pack. After he and his bodyguard were charged with the 1993 killing of an alleged L.A. gang member--both were acquitted earlier this year--the rapper decided to stay out of trouble for good.

IT'S BEEN 10 YEARS SINCE BOBBY Brown and New Edition worked together, but some things never change. On a Friday evening, the other five members of the most popular R&B group of the '80s -- Ronnie DeVoe, Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, Ralph Tresvant and Johnny Gill -- are gathered at a Hollywood recording studio, waiting for Bobby.

THERE MAY BE A GAG ORDER IMPOSED on O. J. Simpson for his upcoming civil trial, but you would have hardly known it last week. Sure, he didn't say anything substantive about the trial (set to begin Sept. 17).

WILL SMITH BATTLES ALIENS IN ""Independence Day,'' but that's nothing. Right now he's battling his own bodyguard. Tron is a 6-foot-4, 300-pound superhuman life force, and he has something Smith wants very badly: a newspaper.

THE TAN LEATHER SWIVEL CHAIRS were still at the bar -- the same bar at which Det. Mark Fuhrman parked Kato Kaelin while he went rooting around out back for some evidence.

REGRETS, HE'S HAD A FEW, but fewer than you'd think. ""I regret not making "Ghostbusters','' says Eddie Murphy, 35. It's a Sunday evening in San Francisco, a couple of weeks before the release of his new comedy, ""The Nutty Professor.'' The actor's on the set of ""Metro,'' sporting baby dreadlocks and a small hoop earring, and lounging in a trailer full of peach-scented candles. ""We had just finished "Trading Places','' Murphy remembers, ""and Dan said, "How about making a movie about fighting...

THE STORY OF TONI BRAXTON'S hair is the story of triumph over tragedy. In 1993, she launched a trend with her short pageboy cut after an overheated curling iron burned off a chunk of her hair.

By the millions they have descended on the malls and multiplexes of America, women who paid their dues, women who have been down hard roads and encountered life at its lowliest.

The working-class blocks of Compton, Calif., the birthplace of gangsta rap, are a far cry from the mansion-studded hillsides of Calabasas in the San Fernando Valley.

R Kelly is a changed man. It's 1 a.m. deep in the mountains in Canyon Country, Calif. The R&B superstar--best known for graphic pillow talk like "Your Body's Callin'" and "Freak Dat Body"--is shooting a video for a new ballad called "You Remind Me of Something." The video is meant to showcase Kelly's sensitive side, and it finds him lounging comfortably in silk pajamas on a gold-plat-ed chair while a young woman in black lingerie feeds him grapes. "You remind me of my Jeep," he sings. "I wanna...

With his smooth, jazzy R&B hit single "Brown Sugar," singer D'Angelo has thrown the world of hip-hop a long-overdue curve- and earned a reputation as the new "son of soul." That's just fine with D'Angelo. "When you listen to Marvin Gaye, Prince or Curtis May-field, all you can do is just shake your head at how smooth their stuff was," says the corn-rowed 21-year-old. "I get my inspiration from listening to those guys and just grooving." D'Angelo's own groove has seduced the fickle but hugely...

For a couple of guys who were taking on Bob Dole, the far right and a major media conglomerate, Daz and Kurupt of Tha Dogg Pound sure were enjoying themselves.

The soul train arrived in St. Martin on Memorial Day weekend, kicking reggae off the West Indian island for a few days. During Sinbad's '70s Soul Music Festival, a five-day extravaganza of concerts, street fairs and grooves deeper than the ocean, Pelican Bay Beach looked like a giant, open-air house party.

Michael Gross got his first close-up look at modeling back in the '70s, when he was writing about what, at the time, seemed like the most overindulged creatures on earth: rock stars.

Between dodging bullets in manhattan last November and entering prison on a sexual-abuse charge, rapper Tupac Shakur found time to release his third album, ""Me Against The World.'' As in ""2Pacalypse Now'' and ""Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z . . . ,'' Shakur takes the angst of young urban black males and sets it to a funky ""old school'' beat.

Holidays. relatives. ugh. still, a few big names decided to throw caution to the wind and acquire some new in-laws in time for Christmas. Christie Brinkley, 41, may have been Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl," but the supermodel mommy ascended yet further to marry her new husband, developer Ricky Taubman, 46.

Focus groups agree: FABIO means romance. And what could be more romantic, more sensual, than butter-flavored cooking spray? No wonder the folks launching I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!

Who was Brooke Shields kissing on a New York sidewalk last week? None other than her beau, former longhair Andre Agassi. Maybe he knitted her a sweater.

RONALD REAGAN WORRIED about strategic missiles. His daughter Patti Davis concerns herself with ""strategic body parts.'' She covered hers recently with Kimberley (Mrs.

THE MAN ONCE DUBBED ""Obsequio'' for his fawning demeanor won't have to worry about that nickname anymore. In his final week on the air, Arsenio Hall invited media execs to ""kiss my black ass'' and stridently told ""Empty Nest'' star Park Overall that racism rages unabated.