Forever Kathleen

STAR MONEY (442 pp.) -- Kathleen Winsor--Appleton-Century-Crofts ($3).

"There are only two ways to make a lot [of money] while you're young," says the heroine of Kathleen Winsor's second novel. "One is to entertain the public; and the other is to cheat it." To make a lot of money while she was young, Kathleen wrote a novel called Forever Amber. It sold more than 1,750,000 copies and entertained or cheated more readers than almost any novel about a predatory female since Gone With the Wind.

Last year, with the memory of Amber's sales still green in her publisher's bank account, Kathleen asked a whopping $50,000 advance for her second novel, Star Money. The publisher (Macmillan) regretfully declined. So did another big publishing house. Kathleen finally talked Ap-pleton-Century-Crofts into forking over the huge advance.

Sex & Sales. Despite the caution of the first two publishers, Novelist Winsor has almost certainly produced another bestseller; not an avalanche like Amber, but a book that is likely to start a right jolly little bookslide. She has done it, as before, by main shrewdness, by the use of a prose so obvious that it can (and almost has to) be read under a hair-dryer, and by a skill in mixing the formula for bestselling pap that should keep her customers cooing for more.

The base of the Winsor formula is still a viscous glob of sex. In Amber, it was diluted in a little English history. In Star Money, it is stirred into the well-publicized life of the author herself. That is not to say that Star Money is autobiographical. Novelist Winsor primly asserts: "This novel is in no sense autobiographical." Yet the book gives a come-on as broad as the devil's front porch to the thousands who may buy the book for its confessional interest: the heroine, Shireen Delaney, is a beautiful doll who at 26 publishes a historical novel that is a tremendous bestseller.

Shireen is unfaithful to her husband, who is on duty in the Pacific, with a succession of his brothers-in-arms. Some of these cozy activities are described with a searing tenderness that may melt the dental braces of gaping adolescents--as when, in her lover's embrace, Shireen is suddenly "aware of a spreading ease, as though inside her a flower had burst open its petals."

Martinis & Wisdom. In the end, Shireen collects the wages of sin. She loses her husband and her peace of mind, and is left with nothing but a shrinking money bag, a swank flat, and what passes for wisdom across dollar Martinis: "Man cannot live by caviar alone."

But a friend has made a saving suggestion: "Why don't you write a book about yourself in the twentieth century--like you wrote one about yourself in the eighteenth?" By page 352, Shireen has slipped some paper into a typewriter and made a start. If Shireen has sense enough to make her central character a beautiful doll named Kathleen Winsor, it should be a bestseller too.

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