September 1, 1994

For years, Kroll Associates was Wall Street's private eye, specializing in digging up dirt in heated takeover battles. When merger mania cooled, Kroll kept its grip on the top rung by snaring such high-profile assignments as a request by the Kuwaiti Government to search for Saddam Hussein's hidden riches and revamping security at the World Trade Center after the 1993 terrorist bombing. Along the way, Kroll redefined itself and its industry by offering crisis management advice to corporations, negotiating kidnapping cases in Brazil and uncovering computer criminals in Tokyo.

So far, for Carla Gibson, the tension hasn't been terrible, considering that her husband is losing $1,600 a day and that his boyhood dream of pitching in a World Series for the hometown team may be vanishing. It's true, as the saying goes, that she married Paul Gibson, the New York Yankees pitcher, for better or for worse, but not necessarily for lunch. And breakfast. And dinner. But that's how it's been since the baseball strike hit on Aug. 12.

Companies Time Warner is negotiating to buy the NBC network and some of its cable services for about $2.5 billion in stock and cash. In another potential network deal, Walt Disney has apparently contacted CBS about buying that company. [ Page A1. ] John W. Kluge will merge four companies to form a company that will focus on Eastern Europe. [ D1. ]

As horrified office workers watched from their windows and people on the street scattered for safety, a man with an assault rifle attempted to enter a television studio in midtown Manhattan yesterday and fired at a stagehand who emerged from a stage door, the police said. The stagehand, who worked for the NBC News morning program "Today" in Rockefeller Center, died several hours later after undergoing surgery at Bellevue Hospital Center. He was identified as Campbell Theron Montgomery, 33, who lived two blocks away and was assigned to the night shift at the studio where the "Today" program originates.

THERE is a 200-acre public garden here that unfolds like a journey. You do not come away with a geometric plan in your head of terraces and perennial beds and a great lawn sweeping down to the lake. Rather, you remember wind in the pine trees, the sound of water trickling over rocks, and the satisfying spacing of three large rocks -- the Dragon, the Turtle and the Owl -- that sit with a certain humorous, animistic force on a point of land that juts into the 40-acre lake. It is a place of experiences -- of silent conversations with rocks and trees, of sunlight falling through the mist of a fountain in the woods that shoots water 60 feet up into the trees, of sitting, in the chilly air, on a slab of granite still warm from the sun.