Don't Stir

THE CHERRY IN THE MARTINI by Rona Jaffe. 191 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

Once upon a time Rona Jaffe made cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches out of saltines, library paste and red ink. Another greedy little girl ate them and told Mother, and Mother complained to the principal that Rona was a brat. Little Rona was then ten years of age. She has since more or less grown up into her tristful 30s and written a mildly brattish, mildly famous book called The Best of Everything (TIME, Sept. 15, 1958), which bore down rather heavily on a young girl's discovery that men leave much to be desired.

So does this prematurely autobiographical book, which reveals, among other things, that martinis don't come with cherries. Seems that when Rona was 13, she wrote a story in which a lonely lady dining at Schrafft's "stared morosely at the cherry in the martini." The book ends with the intelligence, given a whole page to itself, that "a martini has an olive"; although, to be more precise, it is more frequently encountered nowadays in the company of a twist of dry lemon peel, or probably just the stare of the lonely lady. The book remorselessly follows Rona's career from infancy (she was a whiz at toilet training, never gave trouble about sucking her thumb, and later got A's in practically everything) up to an affair with some undocumented type in nondocumentary films. She was an only child, and Mother and Father kept and treasured every single scrap of paper she ever scribbled on. Probably that was a mistake. In any case, Rona spares no detail of life in grade school and high school, until the reader may well be desperate enough to try that martini, cherry and all.

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