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If Brenda Frazier was not the richest or the most beautiful girl in '30s America, she came close enough. She was the glittering symbol of privilege and glamour; her picture made the cover of LIFE; women imitated her Kabuki-like look, with a complexion evoking Colette's description of "milk in shadow." Brenda was seen with notables from Errol Flynn to Cardinal Spellman to Irving Berlin. But obscurity overtook her, and in later years she viewed her life as a cosmic joke: she had become one of the most famous people in the nation simply because of a debutante party. She repudiated her promiscuous mother and grandmother, both coarse social climbers who married for money, and retreated into reclusiveness, alcoholism and drug addiction. Alas, the poor little rich girl is now an American cliche, but Gioia Diliberto's carefully researched portrait offers a wealth of revealing social history.
MISERY
by Stephen King
Viking; 310 pages; $18.95
A devoted fan and a merciless editor can each make harsh demands on a writer. For Novelist Paul Sheldon, Stephen King's protagonist, both are lumped together in Annie Wilkes, "a woman full of tornadoes waiting to happen." Trapped in Annie's house, Sheldon finds her a skilled practitioner with ax and carving knife who wants to cut his body as well as his prose. He is forced to write, just for her, another in his series featuring Misery Chastain, darling of supermarket bookracks. At first playing Scheherazade to her, he ends up playing Scheherazade to himself: he will not try to get away until he knows how it all comes out. But then his imagination fires up. The old proverb may have said that revenge is a dish best eaten cold, he reflects, "but Ronson Fast-Lite had yet to be invented." King's fans will relish the book's gore (oozing, splattering, spraying), and his editor will no doubt be ecstatic about its sales (climbing, surging, exploding).