BOOKS

By John Skow

CURTAIN by Michael Korda

Summit; 378 pages; $19.95

This oddly lifeless gossip novel by Michael Korda, a publishing exec whose works include the yuppie missals Success! and Power!, is the sort called a roman a clef by the French and "serving up something for the shopgirls" by the English. There is a patronizing quality to the central notion, which is that the reader is a lowbrow who will have naughty fun -- "coo, oi didn't know that about 'er" -- guessing which real-life celebrities are behaving scandalously behind aliases and sketchy disguises.

Celebrity detection is not difficult here. Felicia Lisle, a beautiful British actress who wins an Oscar just before World War II playing a Southern belle in Hollywood's grandest period extravaganza, sounds a lot like Vivien Leigh. And her lover and frequent co-star, the great Shakespearean actor Sir Robert Vane, would need no letter of introduction to Laurence Olivier. Do we recognize bits of the brassy showman Billy Rose? Is that lovable, tormented, red-haired American comedian a scrap of Danny Kaye? Yoo-hoo, Sir Ralph, do we see you?

Of course all novels are gossip novels, and most are rip-offs, generally of the author's friends and relatives. But the ethics of pilferage becomes woozy when too recognizable caricatures of dead grandees wallow in unlikely misbehavior. Ethical questions waft away, though, when the theft works. Then the stolen characters come to life; for instance, the dead King whom Shakespeare slurred as a bottled spider struts in his play as Richard III.

So, yes, both good art and bad art are as sleazy as life itself, and never mind morality. The difference, irritatingly circular, is that good art is good. Korda's shabby novel is a snooze, perhaps because, having purloined his characters, he never felt they were really his to order around. The story does not wake up fully even when Felicia, as Desdemona, runs wildly from the theater because she objects to being strangled. The gossip supplied is that Felicia was a victim of incest, Vane a man of pallid sexuality and, oh dear, some great British Shakespeareans were homosexuals. A wholly unbelievable murder clears the stage for a mushy, mope-happily-ever-after ending. Tomorrow is another book.