Three Belles

Love Is Eternal, by Irving Stone (Doubleday; $3.95), poses a problem: Can a bluegrass belle from Kentucky marry a rude rail splitter from Illinois and find enduring love and happiness in the White House? Author Stone supplies the answers in a 468-page Edgar Guestimate about the love and home life of Abe and Mary

Todd Lincoln. Following six previous biographical novels, e.g., Lust for Life (Painter Van Gogh). The President's Lady (Andrew Jackson's wife, Rachel), his latest has the birthmarks of another big bestseller. As Stone's Lincoln steps onstage, he is a feckless, unkempt rube who wolfs his food and says, "Ain't that a caution!" Mary Todd, on the other hand, is "quality folks," with a vocabulary of Basic French (au revoir, soupcon, carte blanche). In Stone's version, it is not Lincoln who lifts himself to eminence by his bootstraps, but Mary who raises him with her apron strings. This may make Love Is Eternal the ideal woman's home companion, but scarcely good history. In the main, Author Stone rushes about in his chosen role of literary fire warden, stamping out the flame of another great personality.

Rebel Rose, by Ishbel Ross (Harper; $4), tells the fascinating story of Rose O'Neal Greenhow, a Maryland beauty whose charm helped her into highest Washington society, and whose Dixie devotion landed her in jail as a Confederate spy. Her political mentor was Calhoun. "Wild Rose" picked up such valuable information that President Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee expressed their thanks to her. But Allan Pinkerton, head of the Chicago detective agency, finally caught her with some elementary spy work of his own (he peered through a window of her Washington home, saw a Union officer hand her a map). Placed under house arrest. Rebel Rose managed to continue her espionage by such devices as the smuggling out of messages concealed in pink balls of yarn. Properly jailed in January 1862, she was pardoned six months later and left prison wrapped in a Confederate flag. She finally died for her cause: trying to get to Confederate headquarters with desperately needed gold, she was flung from a rowboat in a heavy sea off Wilmington, N.C. as she tried to make shore from a blockade-runner. Weighted down by the gold she had hidden in her clothes, she drowned.

Cecile Sorel: An Autobiography (Roy; $3.50) is a romantic rhapsody of author for subject. Actress Sorel played just about everything from flirtatious Moliere heroines at the Comedie-Franc,aise to a clotheshorse walking down golden stairs amid the nudes at the Casino de Paris.

She knew kings (Edward VII), premiers (Clemenceau). dictators (Mussolini), marshals (Foch) and famed writers (d'An-nunzio). Charlie Chaplin's gambit at the Paris premiere of The Kid was not unlike that of many others: "I loved you in New York. You were France, Versailles. You conquered America."

"You have conquered Europe, Charlie."

"Tell me." he entreated, "if we slipped out, do you think the public would notice?" Cecile claims to possess the "majesty" and "wildness" of a lioness, and finds it natural to describe herself as "the Victory of Woman, of Spring--just Victory." As the applause rained down on her entrances and exits, she wondered: "Was it possible that I was so much loved?" Every reader will know the answer: Yes, by Cecile Sorel.

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