August 26, 1992

Sprawled across 130 desert acres on the southern slope of Camelback Mountain, the $300 million Phoenician resort is one of the most expensive hotels ever built. The guests have tea amid a $1.7 million art collection, play on a top-notch irrigated golf course and swim in a pool that is lined in mother-of-pearl tile. Some travel magazines rate it among the top resort hotels in the world. "It's a spectacular property," said Saul F. Leonard, hotel consultant based in Los Angeles. "But was it built to make money or as a monument?"

AS more people have moved to the suburbs in the last generation, life has become increasingly hidden and private. The gradual but inexorable exodus from cities has been inspired in part by the desire for a personal piece of paradise, for a backyard bit of greenery conducive to tossing a football or barbecuing some chicken. Essayists and trend watchers have been saying that life in this country has become "privatized," both in cities and suburbs, with families retreating into cocoons, watching videos and ordering in food, and avoiding the messy social contact that is a part of community life.

T was 1 P.M. on a Tuesday. Robert Sietsema and Abdoulaye Kamara were lunching near Times Square in a two-room apartment, up two flights of stairs, known to devotees from the Bronx to Brooklyn as Bettye and Fatou's. Bettye M'Baye and her mother, Fatou M'Baye, are recent immigrants from Senegal, and in their living room there, which also happened to be their tiny restaurant (it has since moved), they were proprietors, cooks, waitresses and dishwashers. Then situated just a few steps from Restaurant Row, the block of West 46th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, Bettye and Fatou's had one four-burner stove, one table and six chairs, a mattress on the floor for extra seating, a color television set that was almost always on (tuned that day to Greek dancing) and a view of an air shaft. Lunch was an astonishing $4 for all you could eat.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the powerful Republican from Utah who is a member of the Judiciary Committee, worked behind the scenes on behalf of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International while at the same time pressing the bank to make a $10 million loan to a close business associate. From documents and interviews with bank lawyers, a picture emerges of Mr. Hatch and an aide as integral parts of the bank's efforts to escape Senate scrutiny and avoid bad publicity after the bank pleaded guilty in 1989 to Federal charges of illegal laundering of drug money.

The world of this city's young car thieves is one mapped in skid marks and the latitudes of a survivalist ethic of "Do what ya gotta." Stealing cars and challenging authority while doing it is merely part of growing up, and no one should be shot and killed for that, according to the logic here. And so there was not just grief, but anger and outrage about the weekend slayings by off-duty police officers of two teen-agers who were riding in a stolen car. "It's real messed up," said Deanae Starks, an 18-year-old woman who spoke as she took a break from spraying graffiti on the pavement of a street in her downtown neighborhood about midnight. "They didn't have no business shooting at them."

One of the century's most powerful hurricanes barreled across the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Louisiana coast last night, carrying torrential rains and gale force winds into coastal Mississippi and Texas, as the storm's toll in lives and property climbed in South Florida. Gov. Lawton Chiles of Florida said the number of people killed had reached 12, but the figure seemed certain to rise as relief crews sifted through the rubble of thousands of houses destroyed by Hurricane Andrew's 160-mile-an-hour winds.

ROB MORROW was looking nothing like a petulant small-town doctor as he padded in to dinner in a baggy blue suit that could have been fairly cheap or very expensive: it was hard to tell. (Expensive, it turned out. "Issey Miyake," he confessed, abashed. "I'm a clothes horse and wish I wasn't, but I am.") Mr. Morrow seemed a bit smaller in person than he does on television, and his face was overwhelmed by a thicket of hair and a beard he had let grow between seasons of his show, "Northern Exposure." He is now in Seattle, shorn again, filming episodes for the show's third season, which begins on CBS next month. He plays Joel Fleischman, a persnickety doctor from New York forced to begin his career in a backwater Alaskan town to repay the state of Alaska for sending him through Columbia medical school.

After months of quiet campaigning and a week of bitter exchanges over personal integrity, the race for the Democratic Senate nomination from New York has at last moved squarely onto the real battleground: your television set. With character fast becoming a central campaign issue, candidates have begun spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads to show themselves as they would have voters see them, and to take their rivals down a peg -- all in a three-week push to position themselves not only against one another but also against the Republican incumbent, Alfonse M. D'Amato. A Caustic Ad Yesterday, City Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman, trailing badly in the polls, released a blistering 30-second commercial that is to begin appearing today, attacking the front-runner, former Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro, for taking more than $300,000 in rent from a pornographer who was a tenant in a building owned by her husband and a partner. Ms. Holtzman says that would make a tempting target for Mr. D'Amato.

Gov. Bill Clinton asked the nation's veterans today not to vote against him in November because he did not serve in the military during the Vietnam War. In an unusually frank discussion of an issue that has repeatedly troubled his candidacy, the Democratic Presidential nominee called on Americans who have been in uniform to "judge me fairly, because that's the American way."

International Senator Orrin G. Hatch worked on behalf of B.C.C.I. behind the scenes and pressed the bank to lend $10 million to a close business associate, interviews with bank lawyers and an examination of documents showed. The Utah Republican and an aide became an integral part of the bank's efforts to escape Senate scrutiny after it pled guilty in 1989 to Federal charges. [ Page A1. ]

Israel gave Palestinian negotiators a detailed set of proposals today for Palestinian self-rule in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. On the second day of the latest round of Middle East peace talks, the Israelis, representing the new Labor-dominated Government, said the proposals would allow the Palestinians to run many aspects of daily life through an elected "administrative council." Elections could be held in April or May of next year, the Israelis said.

President Bush's gains from four days in the spotlight at the Republican National Convention have almost completely evaporated, as the President failed to convince the public that he is committed to change and to reviving the economy, the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll shows. Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas re-established a strong lead, holding a 51 percent to 36 percent edge in the poll, which was taken Sunday and Monday. That is about the same margin he held before last week's convention.