Bookends

CALL ME ANNA

by Patty Duke and Kenneth Turan

Bantam; 298 pages; $17.95

Celebrity confessionals replete with stories of loony behavior, backstage debauchery, family trauma and drug and alcohol abuse are all the vogue now -- it might as well be called the Betty Ford Clinic and Famous Writers School. But Patty Duke's contribution to the genre is something special, in part because she speaks with unusual candor, in part because Co-Author Kenneth Turan tells her story with artful artlessness. A child champion on The $64,000 Challenge who confessed at a congressional hearing that the show was rigged, Duke grew to win an Oscar at 16 as Helen Keller in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker and one of her three Emmies as Annie Sullivan in the 1979 TV remake.

The title comes from her childhood name, stripped away -- she was told "Anna Marie is dead" -- by John and Ethel Ross, who took her from her alcoholic father and hapless mother and forged her career. They abused her mentally, physically and sexually, living it up on her earnings while denying her even a mirror because it might make her vain. Yet Duke, 40, forgives them because they also made her an actress -- the craft that sustained her through four marriages, unwed motherhood and repeated suicide attempts triggered by manic-depressive illness that remained undiagnosed until her middle 30s. She looks back not in anger or self-pity but with generosity of spirit.

DIRK GENTLY'S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY

by Douglas Adams

Simon & Schuster; 247 pages; $14.95

At 6 ft. 5 in., Douglas Adams may not be the best 35-year-old British science- fiction writer, but he is surely the tallest. So are his tales, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, his wacko 1979 cult favorite, to this delightfully busy mystery, set in the present but wandering through past and future. Dirk Gently, the holistic detective ("We solve the whole crime; we find the whole person"), is diverted from a career of finding vanished cats by a daunting assignment: assist a former Cambridge classmate who is wanted for murder and -- oh, yes -- save the human race from impending extinction. The yarn embraces time travel, ghostly possession, quantum mechanics, musical theory, computer modeling, cellular communications and, from another galaxy, Electric Monks (they "believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe"). College-level physics is not required, but familiarity with the life and poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), a major villain in the piece, is a must.

THE NET by Ilie Nastase

Translated by Ros Schwartz

St. Martin's; 276 pages; $16.95

In his second novel, the former Bad Boy of Tennis again displays an intimate knowledge of the international tournament scene and an insensitivity to the niceties of plot and narrative. This time out the protagonist, Istvan Horwat, is an East European champion who conquers Wimbledon and women until a little orphan forces him to abandon the Egomania Open. She is Natasha Kotany, the daughter of friends killed in a plane crash. Under Horwat's avuncular gaze, the girl blossoms into a beautiful woman and a court phenom. One night she astonishes him, if no one else, by inquiring, "Haven't you understood that ever since the first day, you have been the only man in my life?" Will she squander her youth on an aging star? Will he choose indulgence or nobility? These and other unsuspenseful questions can be answered at absolutely no cost by bearing in mind that in tennis, and in most novels about it, love is a synonym for zero.

IN MY OWN FASHION

by Oleg Cassini

Simon & Schuster; 379 pages; $19.95

His family tree shook out impoverished European aristocrats. His iron-willed mother told him, "With a tennis racquet and a dinner jacket, you'll be able to go anywhere in life." Oleg Cassini, 74, needed no other guidance. He lived high, and he lasted. Intermittently a dress designer, he played polo on the Army cavalry team during World War II and basked in '40s Hollywood, married Gene Tierney, drank with Errol Flynn and romanced Grace Kelly, even as her rich parents scoured Europe for bluer blood. Cassini is best known for being couturier to Jackie Kennedy ("I want all ((my outfits)) to be original and no fat little women hopping around in the same dress"), and his memoir of Camelot is lively. He also offers good gossip, recounting Aly Khan's sexual techniques or a little joke Zsa Zsa Gabor played on a lover. But the book's main charm is the author's portrait of himself as Playboy, Second Class -- a man who had to hustle his own pleasures and did so with gusto.