Public Life, Private Trouble

By NANCY GIBBS

NOW YOU KNOW by Kitty Dukakis with Jane Scovell

Simon & Schuster; 315 pages; $19.95

Readers eager to forget the dispiriting 1988 Bush-Dukakis race might be put off by the dust jacket of this book. It promises that would-be First Lady Kitty Dukakis will take us "behind the scenes to show us what it was really like on the national campaign trail." But never fear. She does nothing of the kind. The closing weeks of the campaign -- the last rallies, the absence of her preferred hairdresser on election night, the finale, the concession speeches -- occupy two pages, roughly half the space devoted to a subsequent river-rafting trip during which Kitty learned that "there are healthy and unhealthy ways of being alone."

Now You Know is largely about all the unhealthy things Kitty did while she was alone -- first with diet pills, later with alcohol. As she makes clear in a preface, even at the time she was completing these memoirs she was in and out of Edgehill Newport hospital, Four Winds hospital and the emergency room of the Brigham and Women's Hospital, to which she was rushed after ingesting ^ rubbing alcohol. By the time the book was nearly finished, so was Kitty; home for Christmas in 1989, she was drinking nail polish remover, after-shave, hair spray, anything she could get her hands on.

The chronology is important because it helps explain the shallow intimacy of most of the book. Not until the end does she come to grips with her capacity for denial and deception. The earlier parts are filled with foamy self- analysis. "I lived under a Damoclean sword of accusation," she writes of her childhood, "and at any given moment it could drop and cut off, if not my head, my confidence." During the primaries, she says, "I couldn't measure up, so I measured out the booze. My low opinion of myself reached a new high."

The source of her troubles, she suggests, was her imperious mother, who was herself addicted to diet pills. When Kitty was 18, she learned that her mother had been an adopted child. Within months of this revelation, Kitty too was on diet pills; she sought to escape her mother's influence by marrying a high school beau, despite the "total absence of compatibility." They divorced four years later.

Her account of life with Michael is placid by comparison. Even the section on the 1988 campaign is an album of wardrobe decisions, packing tips and notes on sprays that remove wrinkles from clothing. Through it all Michael remains a shadowy figure: always decent, always supportive, often maligned. "He doesn't show his emotions easily, but, dammit," she swears, showing her emotions easily, "he has them. I wouldn't be married to him if he didn't!"

In the third section of the book, devoted to the months after the election, the glibness recedes. Kitty writes of waiting for Michael to leave in the morning, then breaking out the vodka, unplugging the phone, drawing the blinds and passing out. She drank the dregs from the wineglasses after parties and gulped peanut butter to disguise the smell. Her isolation was matched only by her shame: she had often been held up to the public as a model of a recovered addict. In the final pages, as she describes losing everything, Kitty finds her strongest voice. By the end, she'd win every vote for courage and all hopes for a victory.