Bookends

MY MOTHER'S KEEPER by B.D. Hyman Morrow; 347 pages; $17.95 Scandal began with the first motion picture, but the modern sharper-than-a-serpent's-tooth era can be traced to 1978 and the appearance of Mommie Dearest, the harsh memoir of Joan Crawford. My Mother's Keeper, by B.D. Hyman, is even more acrimonious. Joan Crawford was dead a year when the revenge was taken. Bette Davis is still alive and ticking. B. (for Barbara) D. (for Davis) Hyman declares that the front door is always open to her estranged mother. But only a masochist would enter after the appearance of this seething volume. According to the author, the Mother Goddam of movies for four decades was something else offscreen. The paranoid figure saw herself as a feminine version of Gulliver. "Never relax," she warned B.D., "or the Lilliputians will climb up your legs and devour your soul." No defect goes uncharted, from the star's alcoholism to violent maledictions from her fourth husband, Actor Gary Merrill: "The only people who can be around you for long without wanting to kill you are faggots."

Physical catastrophes of old age, among them strokes and a mastectomy, follow like biblical punishments. If pity is contained in these pages, it is intended for the author, not her subject. B.D. now lives in the Bahamas, 3,000 miles from Hollywood, but My Mother's Keeper has distanced her even further from her mother, and from reticence and common decency.

CONFESSIONS OF A HOOKER by Bob Hope as told to Dwayne Netland Doubleday; 230 pages; $17.95 Since he first visited an indoor driving range in Manhattan back in the '30s, the standup octogenarian has played on nearly 2,000 golf courses around the world. With an amalgam of Friars roast hostilities and fund-raiser geniality, Bob Hope says thanks for the memories to the pros and putters who have helped the game. Along the fairway he observes the links style of most Presidents since Eisenhower. When Ike met Hope in wartime Algiers, the general's first words were "How's your golf?" The athletic J.F.K. was too "restless" to play well, and Richard Nixon displayed a strange combination of obsession and guilelessness. Gerald Ford, of course, "made golf a contact sport." Reagan "once broke 100 and that's pretty good for a man on horseback." Hope saves his real affection for celebrities little known for their low handicaps, including Humphrey Bogart and Ruby Keeler. The wildest amateur: Babe Ruth. The smoothest: Joe Louis. Even nongolfers can enjoy the gossip, the jokes and some 100 black-and-white photographs of performers and politicians. Although Hope claims that his scores are now closer to his weight than his age, his follow-through has seldom been better.

SMART WOMEN/FOOLISH CHOICES by Dr. Connell Cowan and Dr. Melvyn Kinder Clarkson N. Potter; 204 pages; $13.95 A man may be a "wolf in sheep's clothing." This insight, which should be carbon-dated for year of origin, is offered as fresh material by two doctors whose degrees are not in medicine. The Ph.D.s dispense many prescriptions to a constituency they obviously assume is female, desperate and born yesterday. Smart women, they advise, are "willing to forgo short-term thrills in favor of the long-term satisfactions." As for the quarry, ideally he is vulnerable. After all, "the truth is that most men don't want to be tough all the time." The doctors warn that there are men out there who prey upon innocent, lonely women, then amplify the statement with some profiles of the malefactors. They omit clinical psychologists who practice in Beverly Hills and peddle bromides in cloth covers.

JUBAL SACKETT by Louis L' Amour Bantam; 375 pages; $16.95 Keokotah, Kickapoo Indian, speak like no man on earth. That is because he is in Jubal Sackett by Louis L' Amour. The author's white men talk deliberately, like John Wayne in a Bible picture: "I knew I would not see them again even as both my father and I had known his time was near, for we were of the blood of Nial, who had the Gift."

Indians have no money and precious few verbs: "One leg no good." Never mind. L'Amour is the real hero of this book. He has verbs, and he has energy. So much that he has written 92 books, 18 of them about the Sackett clan. This is the latest novel of the English family in the New World and of their migration west. As before, there are fights, deaths, acts of cowardice and bravery, all of them from L' Amour's Frontier Factory. More than 160 million copies of the author's works are in print. That is more than enough for every adult Kickapoo and white settler now in the Great Plains. They can read the book or wait for the mini-series. It should be along any minute. Given L' Amour's rate of production, so should the next novel.