Books: Flower Child

PRINCESS DAISY by Judith Krantz Crown; 464 pages; $12.95

Memo to the Books Editor:

Finished reading Judith Krantz's new novel under a rented hair dryer, as you suggested, got a bad case of the frizzies but not the answer to the big question: Why did Bantam Books shell out a record $3.2 million for the paperback rights? That may not be much by Hollywood standards, but in publishing, it is long, long bread any way you slice it. It is enough to give a dollar bill to every man, woman and child in New Zealand, with change left over to pay a major league utility infielder for a year. Put it another way. If you placed $3.2 million end to end, they would stretch 318 miles, or roughly the distance between Toledo and Louisville. Or, say, you wanted to paper over eight acres in Treasury green . . .

Sure, Krantz's first novel, Scruples, sold millions of paperbacks, but it had lots of fashionable people performing unfashionable sex. This one is different. The daughter of a real White Russian prince, Princess Daisy Valensky is half raped, half seduced by her half brother on page 151. Once she puts a stop to that nonsense, she gets choosy and stays that way until page 297. What goes on in between (and after too) is chiefly . . . the making of TV commercials. Daisy helps produce them. She became a working princess because she absentmindedly forgot to take her $10 million inheritance out of Rolls-Royce stock before the company went under.

She is good at her job though, and helps create "thirty or sixty seconds of the finest commercials ever made." Later, she moves in front of the camera, with a whole line of cosmetics exploiting her title and beauty. Can Daisy find fulfillment as a trademark?

This simply cannot be all there is to it, chief. The folks at Bantam did not pay all that money just to make Judith Krantz happy. They know something, and we should ferret it out. Suggestion: Why not send the reviewer off on an expense-account tour of some of the glamorous locales in the novel? To Venice, for instance, a room at the Gritti Palace, drinks and long languorous meals at Harry's Bar. The secret of this book may rest right there. Look how this magical place affects the heroine: "Venice inspired her to meet its fantasy with her own, to finally wear the Norman Hartnell dress designed during the last years of the twenties . . ." From Venice, perhaps, off to tour the castles of England and then, come spring, to the hunt country of Virginia.

Rubbing elbows with the very rich also seems essential. They are different, especially in this book. They are called things like Topsy and Bootsie and Kiki. Folks around the office just have faces, but Vanessa "wore her long nose as if it were the mark of royal birth." Time must be spent learning to understand their odd way of bantering: "Daisy Valensky, you have the makings of a first-class bitch somewhere inside that glorious exterior." The untrained ear probably misses all kinds of nuances there. What to make of Daisy's typical dialogue: "Pants? What about your good black crepe Holly Harp pants?" Clearly, the only way to see Daisy as something other than a simp is to plunge recklessly, "fast as a leopard . . . passionate as a puma," into her world.