"Ei-lu-lu .. . Baby"

TOO MUCH, TOO SOON (380 pp.)--Diana Barrymore & Gerold Frank--Holt ($3.95).

If a former glamour girl is down and out, shaken by the DTs, degraded by three nightmare marriages plus numerous vulgar affairs, and reduced to borrowing $100 from Tyrone Power--how can she rehabilitate herself? By turning to Alcoholics Anonymous? To a psychoanalyst? To the Salvation Army? Whatever else she tries, there is a handier way. She simply writes a book about it all.

Sometime Actress Diana Barrymore is the latest to try this therapeutic method, following in the footsteps of Singer Lillian Roth, a former alcoholic who found fame, fortune and reform through the catharsis and the cash she gained by writing the bestselling I'll Cry Tomorrow. Diana Barrymore's lengthy confession is, if anything, more exhibitionist--and written with the help of the same public ghostwriter, onetime Newsman Gerold Frank, who took down Diana's outpourings in 2,000 pages of notes. What partly redeems the book is that it throws some light on one of America's great acting families, and that it documents for the amateur social anthropologist the squalor and sadness that lie behind a world which millions of Americans have come to accept as breathtakingly glamorous.

Traded Tiara. Diana's mother was a legendary beauty, Blanche Oelrichs Thomas, also known as Michael Strange in her spare-time incarnations as poet and author. It was in Carder's, where she was trading her diamond tiara for a rope of matched pearls, that she met Actor John Barrymore--"the most beautiful man that ever lived," said she, "like a young archangel." But their unangelic love affair was like "a tennis match in Hell." More than three years later, Blanche Thomas, defying the warning cries of her friends and the exigencies of the Social Register, divorced her husband, Leonard Thomas, and married her archangel.

They adored each other, aped each other ("twin costumes of silk and velvet . . . identical flowing black ties"). Their quarrels were fiendish. Their cook, looking out of the window at 2 a.m., might descry Mummy, "her pink nightgown streaming behind her, rushing headlong down 97th Street toward Madison, screaming: 'I'll throw myself under the first streetcar!' " One morning, when she appeared with arm in sling, her right eye bruised she explained grandly: "I stumbled over a champagne case in the dark."

Parsifal on the Capehart. When Mummy finally stumbled out of her marriage to John Barrymore, she married Wall Street Attorney Harrison Tweed, returned to the Social Register and determined to make a lady of Diana. The girl was sent to Miss Hewitt's Classes (where "the Astors and Vanderbilts always voted for each other in class elections"), to the Brearley School and to Garrison Forest, where her father wound up in a necking session with one of her schoolmates. ''You look like a clown riding to a circus!" Mummy would scream if Diana hit an off note in her dress. "Sometimes," says Diana, recalling her mother's Grade Square duplex, "I was brought down to be introduced to Miss Gertrude Stein or Mr. Michael Arlen or Miss Tallulah Bankhead or the Duke of Alba." Barrymore relations showed up. too. "Aunt Ethel'' came to dinner, sipped lavishly, slipped and fell upon the floor. "Is Aunt Ethel very sick?" Diana asked. "It's just a Barrymore headache," answered Mummy.

Diana made her debut in the 1938-39 (or Brenda Frazier) season, and by way of guidance "Mother had made it clear that a young lady never slept with a young gentleman unless it was understood that she would marry him." However, the first young gentleman with whom she sought to follow Mummy's advice soon married someone else. From this point on. Author Barrymore carefully chronicles several lovers and three husbands. First in the trio was British Actor Bramwell Fletcher. 17 years her senior, who liked to sit at home painting and reading. Husband No. 2 was Tennis Pro John Howard. Distressing in many ways. Johnny was a refreshing change in others, e.g., asked by Mummy to mow the lawn, he only drawled: "Sorry, Cat. no can do. I'd use the wrong muscles." Husband No. 3 was Actor Robert Wilcox, a "courtly" alcoholic just out of psychiatric treatment. With him. Diana began drinking in earnest. Mummy died, leaving orders that "her body was to lie in state [and] Wagner's Parsifal to be played continuously on her Capehart ... I was not sober when I stood above her open grave."

Daggers from Faye. Next, crabs began to crawl over Diana's bedroom ceiling ("Can you get DTs when you're only thirty?"). A heart attack carried off husband Bob, leaving Diana at the mercy of strong-minded Dan Freeman, her summer-stock leading man. Dan led Diana to a children's playground, murmured: "Come on, baby, sit in the swing . . . You're a sick girl. Diana . . . You are going to get to God." Instead. Diana found Dan massaging her back, crooning gently: "Ei-lu-lu, Bab-en-u. Ei-lu-lu-lu-lu. Baby"--an old lullaby his mother used to sing.

This chronicle is saved from its own shoddiness. and sometimes even becomes compelling reading, because of a kind of innocence and spoiled-childishness amid the trash. After losing a TV job (to Faye Emerson) because she showed up drunk for the first show, Diana muses with a terribly revealing naivete: "For months, everywhere I looked, stories and interviews and photographs of Faye Emerson leaped out at me. Her name was like a dagger. You fool, you idiot! It could have been you on the cover of Look, of Cosmopolitan . . . It could have been you."

Author Barrymore can now take comfort from the fact that her book has already been bought by Hollywood for $150,000 and is a sure bestseller bet.

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