Bookends

BLACK KNIGHT, WHITE KNIGHT

by Gloria Vanderbilt

Knopf; 299 pages; $18.95

Long before Baby M. there was Little Gloria Vanderbilt, focus of the 1934 custody trial that, she now writes, "captured people's imagination very much the way a television series like Dynasty does in this present day." The story of Vanderbilt's public childhood was well told in Once Upon a Time. Part two of the autobiography also has its share of notoriety. At 17, the budding beauty leaves Aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's cloistered Long Island estate for an extended visit with her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, in lively Beverly Hills. There she goes for older men, like the tall, dark and elusive Howard Hughes. She writes to a friend that she is to wed Van Heflin ("You've probably heard about him because he's a famous actor and he's going to be a Big Movie Star as soon as the movie he's doing now comes out"). But Mother V. pressures her into marrying Pat De Cicco, an undercapitalized Hollywood playboy who is tall, dark and abusive. Eventually the search for daddy leads to Conductor Leopold Stokowski, 42 years her senior. Gloria also holds hands with Orson Welles and spends some wee, small hours of the morning with Frank Sinatra. The armor of such black, white and occasional gray knights is not deeply penetrated. Vanderbilt is more absorbed in her younger self, which she encases in a shell of hard, polished prose. It is a stylish, though distinctly cool, portrayal of the realities of a fairy-tale life.

GRACE: THE SECRET LIVES OF A PRINCESS

by James Spada

Doubleday; 346 pages; $17.95

Said one former lover: "She was so proper, people thought of her as a nun. But when we were alone together, she used to dance naked for me to Hawaiian music." Said the wife of Director Henry Hathaway: "I have nothing good to say about Grace . . . She had an affair with my best friend's husband, Ray Milland. And all the time wearing those white gloves!" And when Prince Rainier asked David Niven who his favorite Hollywood conquest was, Niven answered, "Grace."

The big secret that Celebrity Chronicler James Spada has dug up is that Philadelphia-proper, convent-educated Grace Kelly had sex before marriage, apparently a lot. While putting her affairs in order, Spada in this sad, breathless biography writes endlessly about the "duality" of Kelly's personality (fire vs. ice, expression vs. repression), all in a turgid stream of psychobabble. People who want to find out if Grace Kelly was a sensuous woman need only see To Catch a Thief. They will satisfy their curiosity, and Grace will be allowed to rest in peace.

THE CELESTIAL BED

by Irving Wallace

Delacorte; 304 pages; $17.95

It could happen to any best-selling author with 15 topical novels and more than a dozen other books bearing his household name. Irving Wallace has been overtaken by events. Put another way: Will anyone want to warm up to an earnest story about sex surrogates in the age of AIDS? It is not a problem the author can duck: "Let me say frankly, you're in a high-risk job," Chief Surrogate Gayle Miller tells her team at Dr. Arnold Freeberg's sexual dysfunction clinic in Southern California. But comely Gayle loves her work, which is a hands-on approach to the cure of impotence and premature ejaculation. Turning her therapeutic techniques into fiction is akin to transforming back issues of Popular Mechanics into a TV movie. Wallace knocks together a certain amount of social and clinical fact and slaps on a flimsy plot. The climax? Gayle and Colleague Paul Brandon do it for real and give noisy sanction to the institution of the office romance.

BOLT

by Dick Francis

Putnam; 318 pages; $17.95

French Businessman Roland de Brescou and his wife Princess Casilia are threatened with violence because he refuses to grant an unscrupulous partner permission to manufacture an all-plastic handgun that could pass undetected through airport scanners. The stakes are raised when two of the princess's racehorses are found shot between the eyes, "their bodies silent humps, all flashing speed gone." In his 25th novel, best-selling Mystery Writer Dick Francis sets Steeplechase Jockey Kit Fielding on the trail of the killer. As adept on a racecourse as he is in an Eaton Square drawing room, Fielding is a match for any menace. The villainous characters in Bolt are thoroughbred nasties, while the valorous, like the princess, use "civilized manners as . . . a shield against the world's worst onslaughts." In racing circles, a win and a "nice ride" cannot always be achieved together. In mystery circles, Francis again demonstrates that he is both a win and a nice read.