"Ods-Fish, Madame!"

FOREVER AMBER--Kafhleen Winsor-- Macmillan ($3).

Kathleen Winsor had always wanted to write something more impressive than the stuff she was paid to write--football stories ("from the woman's point of view") for the Oakland, Calif. Tribune. Not long after her husband, Robert John Herwig, an All-America footballer, brought home a book on King Charles II, she decided to write a novel about the reign of Britain's gamiest monarch.

She began by reading some 400 books on the period (1660-1685), filled four fat notebooks with data, made scores of watercolor sketches of period houses, furniture, costumes. The actual writing, which ran to six complete drafts for a total of nearly two and a half million words, took in a lot of territory; after her husband joined the Marines, Kathleen followed him from camp to camp, lugging her swelling manuscript. Finally, after five years' labor of love, she sent Forever Amber to Macmillan's. To Author Winsor for her first novel Macmillan's sent a staggering advance royalty of $5,000.

The book will stagger most readers. It is not only bulky but sexy, and both to excess. A 971-page exploitation of the bawdiest phases of the bawdy Restoration, it weighs two pounds even. And every ounce sizzles--with seductions, abortions, childbirths, miscarriages, bedroom raptures. Its characters wallow in pox, perversion, impotence, pregnancy. Historical events like the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London are swept away in its undertow.

For sheer voluptuousness, the book's heroine, honey-haired Courtesan Amber St. Clare makes Scarlett O'Hara look like a schoolmarm--a fact that could scarcely escape Hollywood's attention any more than Macmillan's. On the plausible assumption that Forever Amber might be its biggest smash hit since Gone With the Wind, the shrewd house of Macmillan spent a small fortune ($20,000) on advance publicity, and were set to saturate the nation's bookshops with 225,000 advance copies. It was a good bet that before the month was out Amber would be boiling its way into the war-bored minds and emotions of millions. And with so much bare flesh involved, dazzled readers were not likely to complain of the fact that Author Winsor never gets around to much deep thought.

The Story (such as it is):

Lord Bruce Carlton ("his body was magnificent") found 16-year-old Amber in a country, village, whisked her off to London as his mistress. "Under his stroking fingers . . . she purred like a kitten." But Bruce soon had enough, and went dashing off to the West Indies.

Amber was pregnant. So she married Luke Channell, who "grinned incessantly," showing "a kind of slippery green moss growing along the edges of his gums."

When Luke ran away with all her money, Amber found herself first in debt and then in Newgate Prison. There she met Highwayman Black Jack Mallard ("earrings seemed only to accentuate his almost threatening masculinity"). When he was finally hanged, Amber became an actress.

Her success was terrific. "The new wench. By Jesus, but she's handsome!" cried the gallants. Guards Captain Rex Morgan was bowled over. "I'm fretting my bowels to fiddle-strings over you," he moaned. Amber "felt herself sliding toward surrender and had no inclination to stop." Captain Morgan rented rooms.

Then one fine day Lord Bruce Carlton came back and killed the Captain. Amber suggested marriage to his Lordship, whose reply was to rush off to Virginia, leaving Amber with nothing but "two or three soiled shirts which carried [his] strong male smell."

Amber married three others (in due succession), became a rich, widowed Countess. That was her high estate when she met King Charles II. "His dark lazy eyes stirred the embers of desire, at which [her husbands] had rudely raked but never once brought into flame." Charles made Amber a Duchess and Lady of the Bedchamber, had her painted "on a heap of black cushions, unashamedly naked."

Amber set the Court vogue for mixed nude bathing in the Thames and for low-necked dresses. "Ods-fish, madame," cracked the King, "the greatest display that ever I've seen . . . since I was weaned!" All the best people came to see the Duchess taking her bath in asses' milk, attended by Herman, her Algerian eunuch. "Pray, no ceremony here," Amber would cry, rising from her marble tub: "Herman--fling me a towel!"

It is only after 80 pages of more of the same that Author Winsor herself finally tosses in the towel. Many readers will never finish so poor a book; but many more will doubtless help Macmillan's win its bet.

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