Short Takes

TELEVISION

Putting a Scandal In Perspective

Twenty years later, much about the exhaustively investigated Watergate affair remains a mystery. In a two-hour cbs documentary, WATERGATE: THE SECRET STORY, to be aired this Wednesday, Mike Wallace puts the scandal in perspective and elicits new facts from participants. Howard Hunt says a goal was to uncover illegal foreign funds going to the Democrats. Wallace reveals a memo from Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan urging use of "a sharp stick" to destroy Democrat Edmund Muskie, and Donald Segretti describes the "dirty tricks" used to accomplish that goal. Bob Woodward adds a few tiny details about "Deep Throat," and the show concludes with the parlor game of guessing just who he might be.

CINEMA

Table Talk

It's not that Spalding Gray didn't want to work on his novel, the MONSTER IN A BOX of this well-filmed monologue. It's that he can't resist interruption. So he totes the manuscript with him to Los Angeles (surviving earthquakes and agents), on a fact-finding mission to Nicaragua (seeing one of his party go mad) and to Moscow (enduring an unaccountable vodka shortage). He also deals with aids anxiety and other distractions. Ironic and self-deprecating (his own description), he's neither wildly comic nor deeply dramatic. He's more like a good dinner-table talker, an agreeable anecdotalist with a nice sense of the ridiculous. Oh, yes, somehow he finished the book. It's in the stores now.

MUSIC

Punkish Hunk

The punkish hairdo, nose-tackle musculature and down-home insolence give BILLY RAY CYRUS the look of one of those roadhouse dudes Thelma and Louise ought to blast into the next county. But when this rockabilly baritone swivels out of his shirt while performing his sing-along smash, Achy Breaky Heart, the ladies wilt. In three months Cyrus, 30, has rocketed from nowhere (or the nearest thing: Flatwoods, Ky.) to No. 1 on the pop charts. Is this Elvis? Bruce? Actually, neither. Aside from Achy Breaky, Cyrus has only one memorable song -- the sour-grapes rouser Could've Been Me -- on his Some Gave All debut album. And even now he could use a charisma injection. But, hell, let Billy Ray enjoy his nine-days'-wonder status. It's nine days more than most people get.

THEATER

Embers of Resentment

In seemingly every family, one adult child takes on an undue share of care giving for aged parents while another accepts only token responsibility lest it get in the way of his or her dreams. Although the moral issues involved might seem straightforward, Arthur Miller made them rich and intriguingly complex in THE PRICE, his 1968 tale of two brothers dividing the petty sticks of furniture that constitute their father's estate. The play returned to Broadway last week in an impeccable staging, with film veteran Hector Elizondo (Pretty Woman) giving the performance of his career as the resentful, duty- bound brother and Eli Wallach wringing every imaginable laugh from a tragicomic turn as an 89-year-old immigrant furniture dealer.

BOOKS

Little Lost Me

There ought to be a shelf of books on Frances Lear's lurid life. Adopted by a vindictive mother and molested repeatedly by a stepfather, she later had three marriages (one to TV producer Norman Lear), countless affairs, numerous addictions and bouts of therapy. Yet she managed to climb the garment-industry ladder and found Lear's magazine. So why does THE SECOND SEDUCTION (Knopf; $19) seem so enervating at a mere 190 sparsely printed pages? For one thing, she never describes the horrors of drugs or the excitement of creating a magazine. For all her vaunted feminism, she is too absorbed in self-pity to make her story real or dramatic to others. Or the answer may be simpler and sadder: the eloquence needed to share a complex life was far beyond her capacity to write.