What makes a medical journalist whose last book was Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones (1977) spend six years writing a biography of Jacqueline Susann, author of the definitive '60s trash trinity, Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine and Once Is Not Enough? Perhaps it was Susann's unique amalgam of poignancy and chutzpah. Her pores were too big to pass a screen test, she could not sing or dance, she was too short to be a model and, after 25 years of trying, she was nowhere as an actress. She drank heavily and was addicted to pills, and her autistic son had to be institutionalized. When cancer struck, she made a pact with God: "If He would give her twelve more years to prove herself the best-selling authoress in the world, she would settle for that."
Susann was not the settling kind. She indeed got a dozen-year reprieve, and her books rose to the top of the charts. But she threw a drink at Johnny Carson, slapped a critic after he had panned one of her works, slept with an entire Borscht Belt of comedians and had lesbian relationships with a number of celebrities. All this has proved irresistible to Seaman, who takes Susann seriously, complete with index, bibliography and detailed footnotes. Lovely Me ^ contains more than 200 interviews and countless inside stories. All it lacks is the salty humor and gutsy immediacy its subject was famous for.
OUTBREAK
by Robin Cook
Putnam; 366 pages; $17.95
Dr. Marissa Blumenthal, public health officer at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, finds herself caught between micro and macro killers in Robin Cook's newest medical tingler. She must solve two mysteries: how an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever (mortality rate more than 90%) got from Central Africa to the U.S., and why it only strikes staff and patients at clinics with prepaid health-care plans. Physician-Novelist Cook enjoys stretching credulity (in his previous blockbuster Coma, people were murdered to provide organs for the transplant trade). Here a league of conservative doctors plays with the viral equivalent of nuclear weapons in order to preserve its market share. The petit Dr. Blumenthal discovers the Hippocratic hypocrisy only after she is turned into a composite of Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman, crisscrossing the country to study and contain flare-ups of EHF. Cook's best-selling technique is infallible: he lowers his readers' resistance with hard science, then exposes them to the woman-in-jeopardy scenes and chase sequences that spread his infectious tale to the moviegoing population.
MURDER TAKES A PARTNER
by Haughton Murphy
Simon & Schuster; 221 pages; $15.95