The Stardust Malady

By Paul Gray

CROWNED HEADS

by THOMAS TRYON

399 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

Weaving fiction around such a monstrously self-mythologizing place as Hollywood is like gilding a plastic lily. That is just what Thomas Tryon unabashedly attempts in Crowned Heads. He is not writing for the ages but for the balcony.

Given the success of his three previous novels (The Other, Harvest Home, Lady), Tryon is likely to draw quite a house. Crowned Heads reels off four novellas about imaginary film stars: Fedora, a mysteriously ageless movie queen; Lorna Doone, a onetime "All-American cookie" who has begun to crumble; Bobby Ransome, a former child star with growing pains; and Willie Marsh, an elegant old leading man with some shabby private habits. Though the paths of these four characters have sometimes crossed, their stories are chiefly linked by the book's epigraph, which Tryon has lifted from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II: "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."

The sentiment -in this context a stunning banality -tips Tryon's hand. He is belaboring a tradition that goes back at least as far as Boccaccio and John Lydgate's 15th century monstrosity The Fall of Princes -26,000 lines of bad poetry on the miseries that beset rulers. Something in human nature cannot resist being told that the richest, most powerful and most beautiful are also the most miserable. The plain fact that this is often not true has never weakened the formula's appeal, and Tryon plays it for whatever it is worth. No facet of his characters' exquisite unhappiness remains unbuffed. "There are better ways to amuse oneself than by being a movie star," Fedora pouts. "Movie star," Willie Marsh snarls. "It's a crock."

On the other hand, ex-Actor Tryon is canny enough to know that it is a crock of gold. He has not, after all, chosen to unmask malaise on the assembly line or among welfare mothers. Crowned Heads is crammed with enough props to put MGM back in production. No clef is needed for this roman. Real stars parade by in abundance. Tryon also provides long lists of plausible but fictive movies and imaginary songs that set America humming (Ditto, Really Truly True). Even the four principal characters are amalgams of known personalities. Fedora owes something to Garbo, Dietrich and Gloria Swanson; lest readers think that she is any of these ladies, Tryon puts them all in Fedora's story.

When all this glitter is draped over a strong story line, the effect is impressive. Lorna is a powerful vision of a woman's physical and mental collapse at an out-of-the-way Mexican resort. Nor does Tryon stint on nostalgia. Skillfully he conjures up the well-nigh irresistible grandeur that prewar Hollywood displayed to the world when "people were driven by their liveried chauffeurs in Duesenbergs . . . when polo matches were played at Will Rogers' ranch and Gable danced with Lombard at the Trocadero."

Yet Tryon's narrative and descriptive talent is often hamstrung by annoying mannerisms and cliches (in a scant two lines he tosses off "fresh as a daisy" and "in the wink of an eye"). He can resist neither foreign phrases nor their quick translation ("Entendu. Understood"). He fussily overexplains his English as well: "Her husband was a hatter. Yes, a maker of hats." Some of the language is, alas, inexplicable: "His nose was long and authentic-looking."

None of this will matter much to those helplessly in thrall to the Hollywood mystique. Tryon's gloomy moralizing about crowned heads is window dressing; his loving reconstruction of a fading era is the work of a man still gaga over Stardust. Crowned Heads is not a very trenchant study of the ways of the Dream Factory, but it is certainly a symptom of them.

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