Bruff Stuff

CIDER FROM EDEN (331 pp.)--Nancy Bruff--Duff on ($2.75).

Sultry, sensuous Chloe Delaplain, 18, flew into a rage. "Obscene--obscene picador," she screamed that day in 1875, in a voice that shook the Delaplain brownstone mansion in Brooklyn, N. Y. Selfish sister Ellen, 22, paid no heed, hummed tralala, wrinkled her "grotesque and powerful" nose, turned to give a gracious welcome to Homer Henshaw, a Harvard man. There was nothing left for Chloe" to do but to walk in the family garden. Almost before she knew it, handsome Gerrit Van Fleet was "grinding his blonde mustache into her lips."

And almost before the reader knows it, years & years have passed and Chloe is drifting to her death in Latin America, having made derelict love to all comers, including an Argentine tenor, a Nicaraguan politico and a Grace Line purser. Readers of drugstore novels, as soon as they spot the heroine's name, will know this is for them; for Chloe is to this season's novels and soap operas what Sandra and Brenda were to the trash of previous years.

This is the second novel by Manhattan Glamor-Matron Nancy (The Manatee) Bruff, who is the wife of a Wall Street investment counsel. She tried to do some writing in Connecticut, but the birds "screaming on the windowsills" drove her back to Park Avenue. She finished Cider from Eden in a maid's room. It reads as though it had been started in a high-school study hall and completed in a girls' locker room. Miss Bruff used to have Publicity Man Russell Birdwell do her advertising, but no more. "I have had enough personal publicity," she explains. "I am going to let my books speak for themselves." The Manatee spoke to the tune of about 170,000 copies. First printing of Cider from Eden: 25,000.

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