The heroine is a “journalist,” but we never see her at work. Here, complete, is the tale of her interviewing Lt. William Calley about My Lai: “The interview with him had been brief, and in some ways very painful.” And after 26 of these novels, Steel can’t write a sex scene. “She responded to him as she never had to anyone,” goes a typically soft-focus passage. “Everything was different with him. What she thought, what she did, what she felt.” So who’ll be offended?? More conscientious pop novelists; Steel gives scandalously little bang for the buck.
At a glance, Roy Blount Jr.’s first novel looks wearisomely high concept: the story of the first female U.S. president’s husband. Yeah, you think, this is exactly the kind of notion that Big Publishing and Hollywood-and no one else-are having fun with these days, so include me out. In fact, it’s nothing of the sort. Guy Fox-narrator, Country Monthly columnist and husband of Clementine Fox, the veep who gets elevated when the president is killed in a freak accident-sounds just like Blount has sounded in his previous nine books: he’s bank-shot smart, congenially spacey and deadpan funny.
So, “First Hubby” (Villard. $18.95) turns out to be not slick at all, but sort of sweetly ramshackle. While the whole country falls in love with Clementine, who is equal parts Adlai Stevenson, Barbara Stanwyck and God, Guy struggles to keep himself and his marriage together. “I do mind being First Lady. It’s not so much the gender angle-well, it is the gender angle. But the main thing is that I want to be something that I want to be. " Along the way, he rambles on about everything from troublesome teens (“Not until you have a son who is a certain age do you realize why it is that old men start wars and send young men off to fight them”) to guestbedroom mattresses (“This mattress is kind of hard but spongy in a nice way, isn’t it?” she said. “I don’t know. Feels like ham”). Asides aside, “First Hubby” is an adroit domestic comedy with spunk, with cameos by notables from Muammar Kaddafi to songwriter Floyd (“This Cold War With You”) Tillman. In the unhappy families department, it’s not Tolstoy-but then Tolstoy was never this droll.
Here’s just the book to leave on the sand in Southampton this summer, along with the other pails and shovels. The late Slim Keith, nee Nancy Gross, was an exceptionally beautiful woman who also laid claim to an intelligence and wit that aren’t on view in the memoirs she constructed with Annette Tapert (Simon and Schuster. $22.95). In her milieu, however, beauty was enough-and that is on view in the book’s many photos. “I had no career aspirations at all,” Slim says. She aspired instead to the luxuries that attend success in Hollywood.
Film director Howard Hawks “was exactly the package I wanted. The career, the house, the four cars, the yacht-this was the life for me.” When she left him, she disparaged his movies. After her second husband, producer Leland Hayward, left her, he never had another success. Clark Gable wanted an affair with her, so did Ernest Hemingway; Slim implies she kept both at friendship’s distance. As for Truman Capote, who was so rude to her in his notorious story “La Cote Basque”-well, Slim spears him on a silver fondue fork. Even for a material girl (the last husband she divorced, Sir Kenneth Keith, gave her a title), life’s not all souffle Furstenberg.
That cover shot of Dian Fossey in fetal position among dank African greenery says it all. She may have saved the mountain gorilla, but couldn’t save herself. The late Harold T. P. Hayes’s “The Dark Romance of Dian Fossey” (Simon and Schuster. $21.95) suggests that if the celebrity primatologist hadn’t been murdered in 1985–probably because of her terrorism against poachers-depressive self-neglect might have killed her. Hayes, editor of Esquire in its glory days, writes better (though not by much) than Farley Mowat, Fossey’s first biographer; he tells more about her work and knows uglier secrets: e.g., her traumatic abortions. If Hayes shows less of her charm, it’s because he has a keener sense of the underlying misery.
