Bookends

GODDESS

by Anthony Summers

Macmillan; 415 pages; $18.95

On Saturday evening, Aug. 4, 1962, a 36-year-old actress took an overdose of barbiturates and died in her sleep. Twenty-three years later, the inquest still goes on. Did Marilyn Monroe kill herself? Was she murdered? British Journalist Anthony Summers provides some sensational theories, but he is obviously chary of conclusions and wary of lawsuits. Readers of Goddess will learn far more about Marilyn's fragmented life than of her sorry demise. Some of the tale is overfamiliar: the battered childhood, the teenage bride, the nude photos, the Hollywood parabola, the famous marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller.

But Summers devotes most of his book to relatively unpublicized griefs, including a dozen abortions, several suicide attempts, and inconclusive liaisons with scores of men, from anonymous pickups to Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and Yves Montand. With the help of some 600 new interviews, Summers proposes but does not prove several dark scenarios, including the destruction of records linking Marilyn with her last lover, Robert Kennedy. Ultimately, Goddess portrays a born victim, an essentially simple soul far out of her depth. Her psychiatrist tells it all in one sentence. The day of her death, Marilyn "expressed considerable dissatisfaction that here she was, the most beautiful woman in the world, and she did not have a date for Saturday night."

THE HUMAN ANIMAL

by Phil Donahue

Simon & Schuster; 412 pages; $19.95

The subjects used to produce a blush. Today they produce a TV show. On it, incest, sadomasochism, homosexuality, rape, frigidity, all can be discussed in the name of frankness, liberty and Donahue. Now the host has gone on beyond morning to bring his audience a look at The Human Animal. The Western variety, reports Donahue, suffers from the Judeo-Christian tradition. When the Talmud refers to God, "the endings are always masculine." In Roman Catholicism, Mary "derives her status from a male relative." Stained with sexism, flooded with hormones, prone to violence, the Animal seems doomed to repeat its self-destructive habits until Armageddon. Perhaps not. One wholesome, prematurely gray talk-show host has the courage to ask, Who are we? Why do we behave the way we do? And, most important, Can we change? Of course we can. All it takes is a little finger pressure and zap! we are on another channel.

THE MICK

by Mickey Mantle with Herb Gluck

Doubleday; 248 pages; $15.95

Installation in the Baseball Hall of Fame guarantees immortality, not maturity. Mickey Mantle could switch-hit with phenomenal power, round the bases in less than 13 seconds and outrun fly balls to deepest Yankee Stadium. He could also injure himself in battles with water coolers and golf clubs, and / get so hung over that his eyes "were like two holes in a snowbank." When Ted Williams tried to explain the science of hitting, says No. 7, "he got me crazy just thinking about it." Yet this incessant candor makes The Mick a winner. Ingenuously, Mantle speaks of growing up in the Oklahoma dust, of Joe DiMaggio's icy remoteness, of Casey Stengel's Old Perfessor act that slipped on and off like a warmup jacket, of Billy Martin's violent insecurities, of the Hodgkin's disease that killed his father and afflicts his son. There is considerably more than towel snapping here. At the age of 54, it seems, Mickey Mantle has finally grown up.

HORSE'S NECK

by Pete Townshend

Houghton Mifflin; 134 pages; $12.95

Pete Townshend of the Who was exceptionally hard on guitars. Now, at 40, he proves to be tough on the autobiographical form as well. Horse's Neck is a sort of album, words without music, consisting of 13 impressionistic pieces drawn from the author's life and times. Each segment sounds a theme: youthful rebellion, sexual obsession, the burden of celebrity, self-realization (once known as growing up).

Townshend, an editor for London publisher Faber & Faber, can be lyric and affecting, but too often he is portentous: "Almost as soon as the window had misted up, a great blast of steam wafted into the street. Pete felt like the witness to some awesome nuclear test of devastating power . . . We were the frayed rubber band inside the enormous balsa-wood airplane of rock and roll."

Readers looking for the continuity and facts of Townshend's life will be disappointed. Yet there is enough evidence of innovative talent in these pages to indicate that if the author would write acoustical rather than amplified prose, he might have another promising career.