Vile Bodies

By Sidney Urquhart

TITLE: THIS CRAZY THING CALLED LOVE

AUTHOR: SUSAN BRAUDY

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 480 PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: A feckless society couple who deserved each other are the subjects of a disappointing biography.

Hemingway was wrong. The very rich are not different from you and me. They can be just as foolish and venal as the rest of us. Over the years it has been difficult to pity Ann Woodward. Certainly Truman Capote and Dominick Dunne were merciless in their barely disguised fictional portraits of social climbing metastasized into murder. But in Susan Braudy's lackluster account, readers are permitted at least an occasional twinge of compassion as they watch a gawky girl from the Kansas plains emerge from the chrysalis of gritty rural poverty into Manhattan on the eve of World War II.

Little Angeline Luceil Crowell reinvented herself as Ann Eden and snagged a millionaire, a good-looking twit in a naval ensign's uniform named William Woodward Jr. Ann worked hard at domestic life. She mastered French, hunted down pricey antiques at auctions and gamely entertained people with hyphenated names who clearly despised her. Above all, she yearned for Billy's virago mother Elsie to accept her. Billy, for his part, spent his time in bed with other women or at Belair, his beloved racing stable. Finally, on a chilly October night in 1955, after years of not-so-private misery, Ann picked up a custom-made shotgun and blew Billy's tiny brains out. She had mistaken him for a prowler who was, in fact, walking about on the roof at that moment. "There's only one worse thing Ann could have done," joked an acquaintance the day after the shooting. "She could have shot the horse." The horse happened to be Nashua, Belair's greatest winner and one of the few sympathetic characters in the book.

Braudy has stitched more than 1,000 interviews into this dismal tale, and she offers her readers some delicious tidbits: Ann in India, ready to stalk tigers in 120 degrees weather, appearing in a wool hunting outfit lined with chinchilla. At a dinner honoring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, a footman passes potato chips and onion dip with the cocktails. Unfortunately, Braudy's arsenal of adjectives is limited. Families tend to be "wealthy," living in "opulent homes." And there are some unfiltered howlers -- the Duke of "Marlboro," for one. After a while, without the leavening of irony, one begins, intensely, not to care.