Bookends

LIVING WITH THE KENNEDYS:

THE JOAN KENNEDY STORY

by Marcia Chellis

Simon & Schuster; 240 pages; $17.95

Joan Kennedy was once the nation's leading candidate for Wronged Woman of the Year. Long-suffering, she stood by her husband during the dark hours of Chappaquiddick. Although her marriage was deteriorating, she loyally stumped for Teddy during the 1980 primaries. It was not easy to stop being a Kennedy: the family exerted a powerful gravitational force.

As this sad biography shows, the perks were lavish but the emotional cost prohibitive. Joan, an upper-middle-class girl from the suburb of Bronxville, N.Y., paid for her real and imagined humiliations by becoming an alcoholic. Much of her story, as told by former Administrative Assistant Marcia Chellis, deals with victory over the bottle. There are references to the Senator's compulsive rovings, Joan's search for a more attentive man ("I need a man in my life and I don't just mean 'safe' men"), notes on the contents of her refrigerator ("frozen lobster newburgh, creamed chicken, diet root beer, Tab, and Dr Pepper") and a bit of advice about cosmetic surgery attributed to Sister-in-Law Jackie: "First the eyes, second the face, and third the boobs." But the book's real scandal is one of betrayal, by Chellis. Joan Kennedy apparently believed that her book was to be an inspirational story about recovering from alcoholism, not an airing of family iniquities that were supposed to be held in confidence.

RANSOM

by Jay McInerney

Vintage; 279 pages; $5.95 paperback

Jay McInerney's first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, assumed cult status within months of publication. Its second-person narrative, cast of cocaine- fueled yuppies and New York City nightclub scenes had an odd, ironic charm that made some 138,000 buyers eager for his next tale. This time the protagonist has upward immobility but no interest in drugs. In fact, Christopher Ransom, an American drifter in Kyoto, has only one enthusiasm: karate. He hangs out at Hormone Derange, a cowboy store, and tries to regain his spiritual bearings with martial arts. Ransom also wants to avoid memories of a girlfriend who ODed near the Afghan border, and the presence of his Hollywood producer-director father. McInerney has an unfortunate penchant for Christian metaphors, and his story is heavy with meditations about redemption. A pity; the rest of the way he is as good as the pre-Garp John Irving. All McInerney needs, like his heroes, is to grow up a little.

DANCING IN THE LIGHT

by Shirley MacLaine

Bantam; 421 pages; $17.95

She has won an Academy Award, written a best seller, starred in television and onstage. At 51, the redhead can dance with the vivacity of a teenage chorine. But these achievements are as zircons compared with Shirley MacLaine's new occupation of aphorist: "Every act of reconciliation, rather than retaliation, is a karmic step forward." "Evil is nothing but energy flowing backward rather than forward." Many apercus come from dialogue between MacLaine and her higher self, a being she addresses as H.S. The initials might also stand for high school, where rehashes of Eastern mysticism are usually ventilated. Then again, she may be on to something. In her past lives, MacLaine testifies, she has been a Roman soldier, a Mongolian nomad and a founder of the U.S. in 1776. "What movies could be made out of karmic drama!" she burbles, and at once the mist disappears, and lo! all becomes clear.

ELVIS AND ME

by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley

with Sandra Harmon

Putnam; 320 pages; $16.95

Most teenage girls hide their diaries and, as the years pass, forget them. Priscilla Presley, who met Elvis Presley when she was 14 and married him when she was 21, was different. She cherished her memories and, once Elvis was dead, decided that they had commercial possibilities. So they have, thanks to a collaborator who has turned them into something approaching prose. Most of the entries have the authentic tone of a moonstruck groupie: Gazing at his bed, "I immediately thought of how many women might have slept there . . . whose bodies he had embraced and fondled . . . and even worse, whose lips had passionately pressed his and driven him to ecstasy." But occasionally, she seems a creature from another planet: "He didn't enter me; he didn't have to. He fulfilled my every desire." What she does not say, in 320 pages, is what drove Elvis to his phenomenal performances or his precipitous decline. The sad conclusion is that despite more than six years of marriage, Priscilla was just like all the other girls in the audience: she loved the King but she scarcely knew the man.