No Eggs

ANYBODY CAN Do ANYTHING (256 pp.) -- Betty MacDonald -- Lippincott ($2.75).

"Last winter I paid $49.50 for a pair of real alligator pumps and though they are comfortable and have stayed sewed even in snow, I miss those old exciting days when a sudden storm might mean the dissolving of my brand-new pair of brown simu-calf pumps and leave me standing at a busy intersection in my stocking feet."

In such breathless prose, well-shod, bestselling Author Betty MacDonald, 42, rummages back through her life in an effort to shake the last giggle out of her job-seeking days during the Depression. After Betty walked out on her husband and deserted the chicken farm (The Egg and I), but before she came down with TB (The Plague and I), she went to live in Seattle at her widowed mother's house. There her bossy big sister Mary, a live-wire private secretary with a city full of contacts, thrust her into the hands of one employer after another, including "a rabbit grower, a lawyer, a credit bureau, a purse seiner, a florist, a public stenographer, a dentist, a laboratory of clinical medicine and a gangster."

Most of timid, inefficient Betty's jobs were as dull in the doing as they are in the telling. And she was a failure at most of them. After ten years at night school studying shorthand, she felt that she deserved "some kind of medal for being the slowest-witted, most-unable-to-be-taught and longest-attender-at-school-studying-one-subject." Then one day sister Mary told her to write a bestseller. Result: The Egg and I the $49.50 pumps and $100,000 from movie rights alone.

"From that day on until I wrote my second book, Mary waved that 'Nobody likes a one-book author' slogan around like an old Excelsior banner. When I finished my second book she changed it to 'Nobody likes a two-book author.' Then three . . ." Betty's attempt to lay another golden Egg is sure to coax thousands of readers into the bookshops, only to learn that Betty is cackling over an empty nest.

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