Women's Words

AND I'D Do IT AGAIN--Aimee Crocker (Princess Galitzine) -- Co-war d-McCann ($3).

SHADOWS LIKE MYSELF--Clara Longworth (Countess de Chambrun)--Scribner ($3.75).

LIFE WAS LIKE THAT--Mary Doyle-- Houghton Mifflin ($2.75).

QUEEN OF HEARTS--Isaac Goldberg-- Day ($2.50).

Last season fashions in autobiography inclined toward the long, earnest, semiphilosophic reminiscence of foreign correspondents, with such works as Vincent Sheean's Personal History, Walter Duranty's I Write as I Please and Negley Farson's The Way of a Transgressor reaching a best-selling popularity. Now the trend seems to be toward candid memoirs by international ladies of fashion who, after long and hectic careers, found much unhappiness with many husbands in many different countries. The first and most scandalous of these books was Elizabeth Drexel Lehr's "King Lehr" and the Gilded Age, followed by The Countess from Iowa, Mabel Dodge Luhan's European Experiences and Evalyn Walsh McLean's Father Struck It Rich.

Last week three more feminine autobiographies were published. The silliest of the new crop was a muddled concoction called And I'd Do If Again, written with a lurid, Sunday-supplement archness, by a daughter of the wealthy and picturesque Crocker family of San Francisco, detailing her travels in the Far East, her love affairs with a Japanese baron, a Chinese tyrant, a Borneo chieftain and a four-yard boa constrictor named Kaa. Aimee Crocker first became aware of the lure of the Orient when, at the age of 10, she demanded that her mother buy her an elaborate Chinese bed that she saw in San Francisco. "Very young indeed was I.'' she writes, "when the finger of the East reached out across the Pacific and touched me." No sooner had the East put the finger on her than her mother sent her to Germany to be educated. There she fell in love with a German prince (un-named), and was taken to Madrid, where she fell in love with a bullfighter. The impressionable young lady then returned to San Francisco, married, was almost killed in a train wreck on her honeymoon, got a divorce, hired a 70-ft. schooner and set out for the South Seas, scandalizing the missionaries in Hawaii on the way by taking part in an "orgy," the precise details of which she does not disclose.

Marrying again, Aimee was soon divorced, and after melodramatic experiences with Oriental lovers she landed in India. "India." she writes, "here I am. A country whose individual life covers over 4,000 years, and whose living breath had been blowing upon me across broad seas, whose finger had been beckoning me." The boa constrictor did not enter her life until she had returned to New York. The pet of a Hindu princess, it took a strange liking to Miss Crocker, coiled itself around her, stayed with her all the time. She gave an elaborate dinner for it. The dinner was a great success, except that the newspapers "picked it up and made the story into that of an orgy."

Shadows Like Myself is the long story, overweighed with family history, of a Cincinnati girl, sister of the late House Speaker Nicholas Longworth, who married a young French artillery expert, lived happily with him in Paris, Washington, Morocco, saw the War at close range, the pre-War intrigues of German diplomats in Washington, the campaign of Abd el Krim, and rounded out her career by doing original Shakespearean research that won I her a doctor's degree at the Sorbonne. Packed with discussions of the difficulties of international marriages, it contains three memorable sections: 1) a discussion of the complicated social life of military circles in pre-War France, when officers' wives were hedged in behind countless taboos and when anonymous denunciations were regularly employed to block the advancement of rivals; 2) a description of the early period of the War, during the German advance, when wives visited their husbands at the front and when the thin and scattered battle line was broken with cavalry raids and isolated engagements that gave it the appearance of guerrilla warfare; 3) an account of Countess de Chambrun's examination at the Sorbonne, when, angered by the patronizing air of the examiner who challenged her thesis on the relation of Shakespeare and Montaigne, she forgot her fright as well as the gaps in her knowledge, launched into such a passionate and eloquent defense of the poet that she was awarded her degree with honors.

Life Was Like That is the story of a New York Irish girl who started her career at the age of 13 as a coupon counter in the premium department of American Tobacco Co. She soon graduated to the newsstand at the Waldorf-Astoria and later at the Hotel Plaza, and from these points of vantage she observed the social heroes and heroines of the later Gilded Age--Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, Mrs. Oelrichs, Harry Lehr. Obsessed with the idea that millionaires were out to do poor working girls no good, she was startled to find pathetic, lonely Benjamin N. Duke "about as crafty and insidious as Mr. Webster's Caspar Milquetoast." He forced his attentions on her because she was the only person he knew in New York who could sing hymns. While his wife and daughter were waiting to be presented at the Court of St. James, he haunted the modest Doyle home on West 115th Street, singing hymns with the family.

Mary Doyle made a brief attempt to succeed on the stage in Cecil B. DeMille's first production, failed, got a job on the New York World. In one of its many sensational exposures of swindlers, the World assigned Mary to pose as a dumb but wealthy widow, for the purpose of trapping a crook named Jared Flagg, who had sued the paper for libel. Mary played her part so well she soon had all the evidence that was needed. Describing her snaring of the pleasant scoundrel, of whom she became genuinely fond, she says, ''Now Nature had endowed me with blue eyes, and with a native faculty for keeping them, when needful, unclouded by even the faintest symptom of intelligence." But she adds: "Perhaps that wasn't, in my then stage of development, quite so much a feat of pure histrionism as I complacently considered it." That feat made her a star reporter, and she interviewed Rockefeller, unmasked a feminine gambling den. worked on many of the romantic, sophomoric plots that then distinguished New York journalism, tried to track German spies during the War, was glad to get out of newspaper work, marry happily, bear a son, stay married.

No autobiography, Queen of Hearts is the story of a woman who wrote many autobiographies in her lifetime and contradicted herself in most of them. Telling the racy, inconsequential history of Lola Montez, mistress of Ludwig I, mad King of Bavaria, Queen of Hearts suggests how much fast living is necessary for a girl to win a place in history as a bad character.

Born in Limerick early in the 19th Century, she married, traveled to India, got a divorce, posed as a Spanish dancer until she was unmasked in London, picked up with Liszt in Dresden, had a series of amorous successes and artistic failures in Warsaw, got along better in Paris until her protector was killed in a duel, offered herself to Ludwig and soon became a power in his crazy court. Metternich spied on her, ministers resigned, students rioted and the country was ready for revolution when the doting monarch turned her loose.

Lola Montez was laughed off the stages of New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Sacramento, lost her fortune by a trip to Australia, settled in a California mining town, made her way back to France, returned to the U. S. to lecture on philosophical and moral problems, repented, became a Spiritualist, a Methodist and an Episcopalian. She died at an age generously set at 42 and is buried, her tombstone inaccurately inscribed, in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, N. Y.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.