Roman a Kink

THE CANNIBALS by Keefe Brasselle. 510 pages. Bartholomew. $6.95.

Keefe Brasselle does impersonations. He has impersonated a song-and-dance man in the movies (The Eddie Cantor Story), a variety-show M.C. on television (briefly), and a TV producer (also briefly). This last imitation precipitated a ruckus that began at CBS four years ago. Brasselle had sold three programs, sight unseen, to his pal, CBS-TV President James (''The Smiling Cobra") Aubrey. The FCC and Aubrey's CBS bosses thought that this was a little strange, especially since the shows were dogs (The Reporter, The Baileys of Balboa, The Car a Williams Show). In addition, CBS had become increasingly uncomfortable over rumors about Aubrey's private life.

Eventually, Aubrey was bounced, and Brasselle clattered out after him, vowing to fight back. Brasselle has held to his promise, this time impersonating a novelist. The Cannibals, "A Novel About Television's Savage Chieftains," is not much of a novel, but it is savage enough to please any cannibal.

Brasselle's protagonist is Jonathan Bingham, the sadistic and ruthless president of BCA ("Broadcast Corporation of America"). Bingham is "the smartest sonovabitch this business has ever seen," and would "slash his own mother's 'wrists in order to win, and take pleasure doing it." He enjoys a lurid private life: cadres of call girls in New York balanced by orgies on the Coast. He hangs out at Mercurio's restaurant in Manhattan, wears Italian marble cuff links carved with the network initials and terrorizes the television industry. But BCA boasts smarter savages than Bingham. He is booted out, thanks to the connivance of, among others, a homosexual programming chief in Hollywood.

To use Brasselle's own fractured English, The Cannibals is "self-servicing." That is clear enough from the author's portrayal of the first-person narrator, Joey Bertell, the only one in the novel who comes on like the white tornado. He has sung and danced as well as Fred Astaire, is a more cunning producer than David Susskind, more urbane than CBS Board Chairman William Paley, ad nauseam. The rest of the characters are ill-disguised caricatures of CBS executives. They are such a kinky crew that the reader may well wonder how CBS stays in business.

Even kinkier is Brasselle's claim that Hollywood Producers Otto Preminger and Joe Levine are fighting over the screen rights to this book. If they have any taste, Preminger wants Levine to do it, and vice versa.

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