It would hardly have been shocking to learn that, beneath her ultrachic veneer, the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had a blemish or two, perhaps a few personal issues to contend with. Unfortunately for her many admirers—and for anyone who doesn't care to see the private lives of leading citizens picked clean—the author of this bio didn't stop at a blemish or two. According to Andersen, the former First Lady was—in alphabetical order—anorexic and bulimic, a battered wife, a chain-smoker, a gold digger, an obsessive spender and a speed addict. Not to mention a serial flirt who trysted with—again, alphabetically—Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, Bobby Kennedy and Frank Sinatra.
If this sort of dirt-digging is for you, then you're bound to enjoy Andersen's book, a sequel to his equally unflattering 1996 bestseller Jack and Jackie. The author of 18 books, including bios of Madonna and Michael Jackson, Andersen draws on FBI documents and interviews with Jackie pals like Gore Vidal to create his sordid portrait. Among the lowlights: Jackie bedding Brando months after JFK's death; Jackie taking steroid and amphetamine injections; Jackie callously shopping and dining out while others gathered at the deathbed of her husband, Aristotle Onassis (who, we are told, struck his wife and bragged about it).
Forget about scholarly analysis or psychological insight; there's no denying, however, that Andersen's scavenged clues to the reality behind the Jackie myth make for compelling reading. (Morrow, $25)
by Anita Brookner
Since becoming a widow, Londoner Dorothea May has beat a thorough retreat. At 70, she spends her days in the garden and her nights sifting through memories; she takes solitary meals in a nearby cafe and suffers weekly calls from her concerned cousins-in-law. But Thea's placid routine is shattered when Ann, a distant American relative, arrives in London to get married. Thea is persuaded to put up the groom's best man, a carefree fellow who stirs memories of life with her husband, and Ann's presence becomes the catalyst for the unveiling of painful family secrets.
Booker Prize-winning novelist Anita Brookner (Altered States, Hotel du Lac) draws a cast of sad characters but resists sentimentality: Confronting her past, Thea comes to see the desperation behind others' cheerful sociability as well as the extent of her own joylessness, and she resolves to change. Her triumph is subtle—not the stuff of great drama, but quietly true to life. (Random House, $23)
by Jackie Collins
Jackie Collins has made an impressive living spinning her 16 best-selling novels, which usually explore Hollywood's dark and frequently flabby underbelly. But that can be pretty limited terrain, and it would take a writer more gifted than Joan's younger sister to offer readers something fresh every go-round.
In this one, fastidious movie actress Lara Ivory seemingly has it all—beauty, money and fame. And she's also one heck of a nice girl who wants only to shake off memories of her ghastly childhood and find true love. Ivory thinks she may have found it in a talented, if unknown, hunk—a champion mattress tester who gives up those wild ways for the sake of his Ivory girl. The only thing standing between them and a glorious, Technicolor ending is a tangled plot involving Ivory's film director ex-husband (now married to Lara's best friend) and a celebrity photographer who has taken to stalking her. Ho hum.
Collins's characterizations and plot turns are growing repetitive. Even Thrill's not inconsiderable seaminess has a same old, same old quality. (Simon & Schuster, $25)
by Luc Sante
Like all autobiographical writing, The Factory of Facts begins with personal narrative. Born in Belgium, author Luc Sante emigrated to New Jersey with his parents as a child in 1959 after the failure of the iron foundry where his father worked. But unlike the typical memoir that trudges predictably toward the disclosure of some filthy family secret, Sante's book moves beyond the private to consider the contradictions of memory, the origins of individual and national identity, and the formation of a self through the daily accretion of experience and sensation. We learn not only about Sante, his parents, grandparents and their neighbors in his hometown of Verviers, but also about the social history of his native and adopted lands. With its smart meditations on art and sensibility, and on the demands of navigating in a second language, Sante's memoir demonstrates how a thoughtful writer can turn his own life story into the story of several generations and two very different countries. (Pantheon, $24)
by Peter Carey
There's more than a dash of Dickens to Peter Carey's hugely enjoyable new novel: He has retold Great Expectations with many new twists and from a different point of view. The character Jack Maggs, like Dickens's Magwitch, is an escaped convict. Transported to Australia, he has sneaked back to London, risking execution, to find Henry Phipps (a decadent version of Pip), a young man of leisure with a mysterious benefactor. Unlike Dickens, Carey lets the convict take center stage, and he proves a dangerous, beguiling hero.
The lively supporting cast includes an irrepressible kitchen maid "with a pretty sweep to her back and a soft, white neck"; a "humble grocer" transformed into a bookish gentleman by an unexpected legacy; and a talented, ambitious writer with slippery ethics and a scientific interest in mesmerism. The writer hopes Jack's secrets will yield the key to the Criminal Mind. Meanwhile the reader, hooked by the tale of Jack's childhood training as a silver thief, can barely wait to learn what happens next.
This is Carey's sixth novel and his most accessible. He obviously wrote it with entertainment in mind, and he hits the mark on every page. (Knopf, $24)
by Jayne Ann Krentz
As director of the prestigious Leabrook Foundation, Eugenia Swift must catalog the items in a private glass collection willed to the foundation's museum by a kinky millionaire, shipping magnate Adam Daventry. One problem: His death may not be the accident police say it is, so Eugenia's boss hires a bodyguard to accompany the lithe, ambitious curator to Daventry's all-glass estate in an arts colony off Puget Sound.
That bodyguard, Cyrus Chandler Colfax, plays a pivotal role in this latest work from bestselling novelist Jayne Ann Krentz. A rugged, home-spun investigator who favors mirrored shades and Hawaiian shirts, he is there to demonstrate a time-honored axiom of romantic suspense: Opposites attract. Naturally, Eugenia and her love interest have separate, hidden agendas, but they manage to form a partnership: Eugenia wants information about a missing girlfriend, a painter who was Daventry's ex-lover, while Cyrus is actually searching for an unholy grail called the Hades Cup, a priceless glass bowl cut in the fourth century A.D. and probably last owned by Daventry.
The romance is telegraphed and the suspense slight, but thankfully, the dialogue in Krentz's 12th novel cuts through with enough sarcasm and snappy double entendres to make even predictable exchanges entertaining. (Pocket, $24)
by Willie Morris
Cappuccino-drinking filmmakers meet good ol' boys in this vivid, behind-the-scenes account of the making of Rob Reiner's 1997 film, Ghosts of Mississippi, in which Alec Baldwin plays Bobby DeLaughter, the young Jackson, Miss., assistant district attorney who succeeded, 31 years after the deed, in convicting white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith of murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers. It would be hard to imagine the collision of two more different worlds than Mississippi and Hollywood: In one memorable sequence, Reiner gets into a shouting match with district attorney Ed Peters over how the script portrayed members of the prosecutor's office. In another, Reena Evers, Medgar's daughter, is moved to tears by Baldwin's emotional summation of the evidence marshaled against her father's killer.
For noted author and Mississippi native Willie Morris (North Toward Home), who covered the 1994 De La Beckwith trial for a national magazine, this is rich soil, indeed. The film, which also starred Whoopi Goldberg and James Woods, wasn't a blockbuster, and Morris's somewhat cluttered account helps explain why. But most affecting is the author's sensitive rendering of the vivid human landscape of his Mississippi Delta homeland, a place still very much haunted by the ghost of Medgar Evers. (Random House, $23)
by Lawrence Block
Page-Turner of the Week
THERE MAY INDEED BE 8 Million ways to die, as crime writer Lawrence Block put it in the title of his 1982 classic, but for a seasoned snuff artist like Keller, Hit Man's deceptively ordinary-seeming antihero, a handful of favorites suffices quite nicely. You just can't beat the trusty gun or garrote, this self-styled "troubleshooter" believes, or, if that becomes too pedestrian, there's always the old potassium-cyanide-in the-salt-shaker ploy.
By expending less brain power pondering methodology, Keller allows himself ample time for more interesting musings—on everything from classic westerns to the question of whether a woman can ever have too many earrings—which provide much of the book's macabre charm. As he crisscrosses the country on his fatal missions, in what amounts to a series of interlinked short stories with more plot twists than the current White House imbroglio, Keller proves the perfect observer of life—clear-eyed, ironic and always dead-on. (Morrow, $22)
>Richard Zacks
UNAUTHORIZED VERSIONS
"EVERY TIME I READ ABOUT THE PAST, I find the approach far too logical, far too orderly," writes author Richard Zacks, 42, of New York City. He should know, having spent more than two years poring over obscure, musty reference works to uncover surprising, legend-altering facts for his new book, An Underground Education (Doubleday, $27.50). Among the dirty truths:
•Napoleon is always depicted with his hand inside his jacket because he suffered from "chronic nervous itching" and often scratched his stomach sores until they bled.
•The Puritans, considered the originators of the American work ethic, outlawed Christmas in 1659 because they found it too frivolous.
•Of the 282 children executed in the U.S., the youngest was George Stinney 14, who died in a South Carolina electric chair in 1944 after confessing he had beaten two girls to death.
•President James Garfield, assassinated in 1881, would probably have survived the incident if doctors had only used sterilized instruments and clean hands to treat him.
•Among the 49 women Mormon founder Joseph Smith married were 12 already-married women, five sets of sisters and one mother-daughter pair.
•George Washington never said "I cannot tell a lie" after being accused of chopping down a cherry tree. His biographer, Mason "Parson" Weems, made up the entire story in his 1806 book.
- Contributors:
- Alex Tresniowski,
- Paula Chin,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Francine Prose,
- Adam Begley,
- V.R. Peterson,
- Julia Campbell,
- Steven Lang,
- Pam Lambert.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
