Bookends

JOHNSON V. JOHNSON

by Barbara Goldsmith Knopf; 285 pages; $18.95

In drugstores, the familiar white boxes say Johnson & Johnson. But in court the ampersand was changed to versus, and the aim was not to relieve pain but to exacerbate it. One Johnson was Barbara ("Basia"), nee Piasecka, the Polish-born cook-chambermaid who became the third wife of J. Seward Johnson, heir to the pharmaceutical fortune. At the time of their marriage in 1971, he was 76, she was 34. The other Johnson signified J. Seward's six litigious children from his two previous marriages, excised from the old man's will shortly before his death in 1983 at the age of 87. Was Basia a sorceress who abused and then fleeced a victim of senile dementia? Or were the children, all of them financially independent, avid for the $500 million at stake? Barbara Goldsmith, a journalist who specializes in histories of family distress (Little Gloria . . . Happy At Last), unearths a scandalous past of suicide attempts, drug addiction, incest and accusations of attempted murder. What the plaintiffs wanted, she shows, was emotional restitution, and they were willing to spend millions in lawyers' fees to receive a portion of it. There are enough miseries, furies and counterplots to satisfy the most demanding court buffs and gossip freaks, but the book's essential message is a reliable old crowd pleaser: unlimited funds are no guarantor of happiness; if the wound is deep enough, mere money is only a Band-Aid.

ANYWHERE BUT HERE

by Mona Simpson Knopf; 406 pages; $18.95

"No one seeing us would know anything true," notes twelve-year-old Ann August. She and her mother Adele represent a history of shoplifted dresses, bad checks and unfurnished apartments. One epochal day, Adele flashily abandons small-town Wisconsin and whirls to Hollywood, aiming to snag a rich husband and make her child a star. At the Pacific's edge, Ann gently nourishes another dream: to outgrow people like her mother, "who start the noise and bang things, who make you feel the worst; they are the ones who get your love." Finally, Adele taunts once too often: "It's me or nothing, kid." Ann's choice stuns them both.

Left to herself, Adele is rewarded with the life she always wanted -- based solely on appearance. She goes "from one perfect outfit to the next . . . Someone could always be watching." This obsession with surfaces is contagious: First Novelist Simpson also suffers from it. She uses brand names and meticulous descriptions of the ordinary to build an appearance of reality, but beneath the book's carefully crafted details there is not quite enough of the breath or pulse of life.

NURSERY CRIMES

by B.M. Gill Scribners; 194 pages; $15.95

In 1954, Broadway audiences were chilled by The Bad Seed. The title character of that melodrama was a homicidal moppet whose appearance was so angelic that no one but her mother suspected the hidden crimes. British Novelist B.M. Gill has given the premise a sardonic twist: in Nursery Crimes, wicked little Zanny repeatedly confesses to several murders but is so widely disbelieved that she concludes her sins are minor, subject to a penance of three Hail Marys. At home, at school, in church and even among the police, grownups fail her. The story's most compelling relationship unfolds between Zanny and her adopted sister Dolly, who witnesses the first killing, of their younger brother. Dolly keeps her guard up but never raises a fuss: she wants Zanny's parents to continue paying for her education and shrewdly assesses them as candidates for tacit blackmail. Gill, a former elementary school teacher, has a keen understanding of how children's minds work and of the egocentric way they view the world.

YVONNE by Yvonne De Carlo with Doug Warren

St. Martin's; 264 pages; $17.95

What ever happened to Yvonne De Carlo? You remember her: the torrid brunet who started as a harem handmaiden and by dint of hard work, moxie and what her lover Howard Hughes called a "nice set of lavalieres" became queen of costume dramas in the '40s and '50s. For one thing, she became an autobiographer who, in the great tradition, bares just enough to keep it interesting but not enough to worry the censors. Her offscreen memoirs offer a short course in studio politics and a long list of amours, including Hughes, Robert Taylor, Robert Stack, the Shah of Iran's brother, Billy Wilder, Burt Lancaster and, most notably, Aly Kahn ("He didn't take a woman, he tasted and taunted"). In his musical Follies, Stephen Sondheim wrote a song for the actress, I'm Still Here, about a survivor. After nearly half a century in the business, De Carlo, 64, is not afraid to name names or do denture-cleaner commercials. As her saline book vigorously demonstrates, she's still here.