Schlock Mimic

By Stefan Kanfer

DANCE WITH THE DEVIL

by Kirk Douglas

Random House; 306 pages; $19.95

The jutting jaw, the breaking voice, the intense glare have long made Kirk Douglas a favorite of stand-up mimics. At age 73 he has finally decided to join their ranks. In his first novel, Dance with the Devil, Douglas offers impressions of Harold Robbins and Judith Krantz.

There is the calorific opening scene: "He felt like a teenager -- eager to plunge into her, unable to hold back." The cumbrous exposition: "He always imagined that people were making fun of him behind his back, which was sometimes true." The colliding metaphors: "He was in good hands. He had his foot in the door." And below all, the implausible plot.

Danny Dennison is a name-brand film director with a dark secret: he is really Moishe Neumann, survivor of a Nazi death camp. After the war he buried his identity along with his ethnicity. The world now regards him as an all- American maker of movies and starlets. But in the world of the best seller, when a protagonist rises too high, a pair of lustrous eyes are just around the corner. These belong to Luba, a sensuous young actress with her own hidden background of European tragedy. She triggers memories of his murdered family. Dennison holds them back for 18 chapters while he deals with his ex-wife, his anti-Semitic father-in-law, his estranged daughter, and a series of Celluloid City sharks circling the swimming pool until the denouement.

Douglas' 1988 autobiography, The Ragman's Son, features a combination of gusto and raw intelligence. Dance with the Devil is reminiscent of those studio-bound productions with twice-breathed dialogue and a B-movie cast. If Kirk Douglas of Beverly Hills had worked only for directors like Danny Dennison, he could still be Issur Danielovitch of Amsterdam, N.Y.