Bookends: Apr. 28, 1986

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I'LL TAKE MANHATTAN

by Judith Krantz

Crown; 437 pages; $18.95

"Maxi squirmed in her Calvin Klein jockstrap. They'd added a new dimension to her sex life. Was she a pervert?" The question could only be put by Judith Krantz, back again with her patented blend of eavesdropping and name dropping. Her heroine, Maxi Amberville ("her surpassingly green eyes, the precise color of Imperial Jade"), is the customary flaring, rich, tousled, naughty, gorgeous protean number. This time she is a publishing vicereine with a field of ex-husbands, a bewitching mother, a homosexual brother, a heterosexual near-blind brother, and an eleven-year-old daughter by magnificent, "fascinatingly brooding, darkly luminous" Renaissance Rocco. From Maxi's view at the top, Krantz scatters a lot of glitz: hot seawater bubble baths, iced buffalo-grass vodka, tarte Tatin, Pratesi sheets, Don Johnson, Le Cirque and the Bohemian Grove. But she never forgets the essentials: steamy dialogue, unexpurgated sex and the outside chance that some of her fictive creatures may actually exist. I'll Take Manhattan is not literature, but it is lively and, in its own way, moral. In any Krantz work, the good get loved, and that is what makes it romantic. The bad get punished, and that is what makes it fiction.

BARDOT, DENEUVE, FONDA

by Roger Vadim

Simon & Schuster; 328 pages; $17.95

Some men kiss and do not tell; they are called gentlemen. Some men tell but do not kiss; they are called liars. Some men kiss and tell; they are called best- seller writers. The latest is Director Roger Vadim, who modestly subtitles his work "My Life with the Three Most Beautiful Women in the World." No. 1: Brigitte Bardot. She was 15, he was 22. When they parted, he was forgiving: "She always suffered if she had an affair with more than one man at a time." No. 2: Catherine Deneuve. She was 17, he was 32. Not long afterward she announced she was pregnant, he recalls, and "from that day on, she never cried in my arms after making love." No. 3: Jane Fonda. Progress. She was of legal age (24), he was 34, and "at that time she still knew how to relax. A few hours of idleness was not a mortal sin." But today, well, "being a political figure, an exceptional businesswoman, an active supporter of her husband's career, a conscientious mother, a producer, a writer and an international star is a bit much for one person." Alas, the women all had the audacity to change. Only Vadim, 58, author, actor, filmmaker, narcissist, has managed to keep his outlook and ego evergreen. "When I came into the world," he laments, "I must have come to the wrong civilization." Exactement.

BUS 9 TO PARADISE

by Leo Buscaglia

Slack; 276 pages; $16.95