Hickory & the Little Woman

THE PRESIDENT'S LADY (338 pp.)--Irving Stone--Doubleday ($3.50).

Irving Stone is one of the U.S.'s most popular writers of so-called biographical novels (Lust for Life, Immortal Wife). This type of novel, Stone explains, "differs from a historical novel in that it does not introduce fictional characters against a background of history, but instead tells the story through the actual people who lived it and helped to make it happen." In other words, while Tolstoy was able to give his imagination a pretty free rein in War & Peace, Stone, applying the biographical method to Andrew and Rachel Jackson, makes it his business to use his imagination as little as possible.

This omission of what is perhaps the first necessity of a good novel is not absolutely fatal to The President's Lady. "Old Hickory's" life was packed with enough variety to have roused the envy of Anthony Adverse. He knew the frontier and the arts of Indian fighting like the palm of his hand. He loved a wild financial gamble, but he could change overnight into a sober storekeeper and patient farmer. A capable lawyer and a judge, he pored for hours over classic volumes on military strategy, kept a string of race horses, fought pistol duels for Rachel's honor and full-scale battles (New Orleans) for his country's. Small wonder that when, to top it all, he was inaugurated President, a mob of his admirers gate-crashed the White House (and soiled the rugs and chairs with their muddy boots), trying to embrace him.

Author Stone follows this career with painstaking accuracy from log cabin to White House, lipsticking its essentially masculine features by portraying it through the eyes of Rachel, and stressing the sea of troubles they faced together as man & wife. The result is a hybrid with neither the grace of fiction nor the substance of biography, but it ought to make a ripsnorting movie. Darryl Zanuck, foresighted in such matters, has already bought the film rights and is thinking about Gregory Peck as Andrew Jackson, Olivia de Havilland as the President's little woman.

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