“Alone” isn’t the right word, for Lerman was rarely alone. Among his pals were Marlene Dietrich, the Baroness Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen), Irving Penn, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Vera Stravinsky, Virgil Thomson, John Gielgud, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Pavel Tchelitchew, Margot Fonteyn, Carol Channing, Arthur Penn, W.H. Auden, Imogene Coca, Cecil Beaton, George Balanchine, Susan Sontag and—of course—Truman Capote.

To a “Chinese Supper for Maria Callas” on Nov. 18, 1956, Lerman invited, among many others, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Lillian Gish, Lincoln Kirstein, Leontyne Price, William Faulkner, Maggie Smith and Tom Clancy. As at all his entertainments, these glittering guests were sardined into his apartment of the moment. Eight years later, the mix for an “Early Twelfth Night” party would include Rudolf Nureyev, Robert Motherwell, Joan Sutherland, Gloria Steinem and various members of the Newhouse publishing clan. Would you have liked to be a fly on the wall? Say yes, and this is the book for you.

Lerman and Gray Foy, with whom Lerman lived from the 1940’s, rang in 1976 by entertaining many of the notables cited above, plus Woody Allen, Richard and Dorothy Rodgers, Estée Lauder, John Lindsay, Diana Vreeland, Robert Fosse, Martha Graham, Oscar de la Renta, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, André Gregory, Luciano Pavarotti, Candice Bergen, Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, Joseph Heller, Tony Perkins, Lillian Hellman, Mikhail Baryshnikov and the Persian ambassador, to name some but not all.

Leo Lerman knew everybody—except perhaps himself.

“I sit at my desk writing, because this is the only solitude left,” he wrote in 1947. “I am like Nicole in Tender is the Night.” Actually, he was the openly homosexual son of Jewish émigré and—like so many New Yorkers, then and now—very much a self-invention. His formal education ended with high school, at which point he began reading Proust and Virginia Woolf. “I should have had a life of letters,” he mourned in 1975, “not journalism.”

Not really: Leo Lerman was no belletrist, even in his private writing, now made public in The Grand Surprise. In all fairness, the book is not of his own devising, but rather a posthumous compendium cobbled together by Stephen Pascal, whose long career as a Condé Nast editor began when he started out as Lerman’s assistant. Mr. Pascal also became Lerman’s amanuensis: Though in 1982 Random House signed Lerman to write an autobiography, after nine years, he’d written nothing at all—and so he began to tape-record reminiscences with Mr. Pascal as his audience. The memoir was never finished. Only after Lerman’s death were several caches of personal notebooks discovered, ultimately numbering in the hundreds.

To this material, Mr. Pascal adds letters—many from Lerman to his one-time lover and life-long friend Richard Hunter. There are also letters to Gray Foy and others, including Marlene Dietrich. The letters are laced throughout the text in chronological order. There are also, printed in italics, interpolated passages written long after the dated entries. Some of the interpolated passages are from previously published writings; some of them come from the unfinished memoir; and everything is sedulously annotated and footnoted. The overall effect of this collage technique can be a bit strange, with Lerman veering rapidly from one voice to another. All in all, the book feels like a do-it-yourself kit for a Lerman biopic.

Indeed, The Grand Surprise is a kind of literary zoetrope: You select a set of vignettes, spin the cylinder, and see a jumpy movie of parties, weekends in the country, travel abroad, and celebrity after celebrity. Often the effect is the contrary of intimacy, and often Lerman himself seems to be on the outside of events, looking in. All this information, and still you find yourself wondering: What was he like?

“I am writing to be read, one day—I don’t care when—but I am really writing to talk to myself,” Lerman wrote in 1984. “I am talking to my best friend, and I forget anyone else, forget future readers, am only concerned to question myself, interpret myself, re-create myself … narcissistic, of course.” According to Mr. Pascal, the 654 pages of this book include only 10 percent of the available material. “I balloon with words, I grow lardy with words,” Lerman wrote in 1978. “I am fat—hideously fat—with words.”

Well, yes. But they’re interesting words, serving up lost worlds, ancient gossip, nasty anecdotes, accounts of art and of love, and of sex. There are many pages of sharply observed portraits—some sympathetic, some devastating, some both. “I must tell you about last night’s dinner guests,” Lerman wrote to Foy in June 1957, and went on to describe one of them. “Jane Grant, once Mrs. Harold Ross …. It is strange to see this woman, once the center of the Algonquin Round Table set … here in remote Connecticut and wrinkled the way country women are wrinkled, as though each line, each wrinkle held earth—the sort of skin you could grow something in—herbs rather than flowers. I like her …. ” It’s not a kind description, and somehow the nature of the person described is lost in Lerman’s exquisite, airless observation.

Shrouding the entire Lerman carnival is a penumbra of loss, sorrow and regret, increasing with every passing year. Retrospective as written, still more retrospective now, The Grand Surprise leaves the reader feeling that to have known Leo Lerman would have been, if not to love him, to feel rather fond of him, and rather lucky.

To read him is not quite the same thing. Frequently, writers are less desirable as friends than as authors. From the evidence, it was the opposite with Lerman.

At his request, after his death, Lerman was laid out at home, and invitations were sent forth. There, at the Osborne, on West 57th Street, he lay, embalmed, under purple sheets in his mahogany sleigh bed, wearing a Turkish needlepoint cap and a nightshirt, receiving visitors. It was the last party.

Nancy Dalva is senior writer at 2wice.

I say this because at the screening of Corpse Bride I attended, the children in the audience seemed delighted by the ghoulish proceedings much more than I was. But what do you expect? Death is far more remote a prospect for them than it is for an old geezer like me. In any event, Mr. Burton, like many filmmakers, seems to have had a comparatively lonely childhood. The biographical entry from Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia is instructive in this regard:

“Born in 1960 in Burbank, California, the son of a Parks Department employee, he spent many reclusive childhood hours watching cartoons and horror films on TV and began drawing cartoons while still in grade school. He won a Disney fellowship to study animation at California’s Institute of the Arts and at the age of 20 began working at Disney as an apprentice animator. He achieved success with his own first animated film, the six-minute award-winning short, Vincent, modeled after and narrated by his childhood hero, Vincent Price. Turning to live-action shorts, he made a version of Hansel and Gretel featuring an all-Asian cast. He next directed for Disney Frankenweenie, a 30-minute live-action parody of Frankenstein in which the monster is a dog. Deemed too scary for children, the film was never released, but it led to Burton’s hiring by Warner Bros. as the director of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which became a box-office hit. Meant for the kiddie market, the film struck certain critics with its originality, visual inventiveness, and an eye for the absurd, qualities that became Burton’s hallmarks and were strongly evident in his next three films: the box-office sleeper Beetlejuice, the blockbuster hit Batman, and the widely acclaimed adult fairy tale Edward Scissorhands. The sequel Batman Returns extended the movie’s weird symbolism of childhood images and adult obsessions. Following Batman Returns he signed a deal to produce films for Disney.”

I have followed Mr. Burton’s emergence as an undeniable auteur even when he did not direct his productions, but at a great distance—so great, in fact, that I can’t remember for the life of me anything I ever wrote about him. I didn’t dislike the Batman duo and was mildly repulsed by Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, though I was moderately impressed by the subtly reticent acting styles of Johnny Depp and Michael Keaton.

Corpse Bride turns out to be a ponderous mixture of puppetry and animation that is far too technologically complex and laborious for this hopelessly Luddite reviewer, who is banging out this review on a Smith-Corona SCM Classic 12 portable typewriter. All I know is that all of the characters, living and dead, have huge eyes and misshapen bodies. The voices are provided by Johnny Depp as Victor Van Dort, the hapless bridegroom who finds himself engaged to two women, only one of them alive, at the same time: Helena Bonham Carter as the Corpse Bride and Emily Watson as Victoria Everglot, the living bride-to-be. Victor’s parents are voiced by Tracy Ullman as Nell Van Dort and Paul Whitehouse as William Van Dort, Victoria’s parents by Joanna Lumley as Maudeline Everglot and Albert Finney as Finnis Everglot. Richard E. Grant is the ever-sneering voice of total villain Barkis Bittern. Christopher Lee sounds off as the grotesquely domineering Pastor Galswells, and composer Danny Elfman (who’s been with Mr. Burton from the beginning of his career) sings the voice of Bonejangles, the leader of the graveyard band.

The plot, such as it is, hinges on Victor’s extreme clumsiness in the wedding rehearsal, forcing him to flee in humiliation to a wooded graveyard, where he mistakenly places Victoria’s wedding ring on a tree branch that suddenly metamorphoses into the Corpse Bride’s hand and finger, with the bride herself emerging in all her spare, skeletal form from the grave in which she’d been languishing ever since she was murdered by her wicked, fortune-hunting bridegroom. There is, at first, a touch of Ichabod Crane in Victor Van Dort, but with much broader strokes of hysterical nervousness. As the story develops, however, the lyrical expansiveness of Mr. Elfman’s music provides a background of sweetness to serve as counterpoint to the attendant grisly details of decaying and disintegrating body parts. Indeed, if Corpse Bride works at all—and I am not sure that it does—it is as a mordant musical not without wit and a measure of emotional engagement.

All three leading characters take turns à deux for stretches of two-hand piano courtship, but the demarcation lines between this world and the next become increasingly blurry. This is especially true when the Bonejangles chorus steals the show (as it were) with their recurring refrain to each increasingly mournful stanza of the Corpse Bride’s tale in “Remains of the Day.”

It goes like this: “Die, die, we all pass away / But don’t wear a frown ’cause it’s really O.K. / You might try and hide and you might try and pray / But we all end up the remains of the day.” Now I know somewhere inside me there’s a little man nodding in agreement with the existential truth of the refrain, but I absolutely forbid this little man to clap in unison with the Bonejangles singers. What follows next in the narrative is as neat and sweet as a nursery rhyme. Normally, I would have considered the resolution of this bizarre triangle so sentimentally contrived that it became an example of having your cake (or corpse) and eating it, too. Still, Mr. Burton does come down, albeit belatedly, on the side of life and love, and I couldn’t have stood it if he hadn’t. So enjoy Corpse Bride if you can. I didn’t, though I had to admit that it was pretty accomplished for what it was.

Daddy’s Girl

Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane, from his own screenplay, is the third distinctively independent and highly regarded first-person narrative film that Mr. Kerrigan has turned out in the past 11 years. He made his debut with Clean, Shaven (1994), a close study of a schizophrenic character named Peter (Peter Greene), who wanders about trying to find some purpose to his existence after being released from a mental institution. Meanwhile, his young daughter has been put up for adoption by her mother, a policewoman who suspects that Peter is the brutal murderer of another little girl and who is hot on his trail.

Mr. Kerrigan’s second feature, Claire Dolan, was a more straightforward and less doubt-ridden narrative than Clean, Shaven as it followed the title character, played by the late Katrin Cartlidge, on her appointed rounds as a high-priced call girl operating in various locales between New Jersey and New York, a region that has become Mr. Kerrigan’s chosen turf. It’s a transient world of motels, cheap bars and one-night stands.

Keane is closer in its rambling indistinctness to Clean, Shaven than to Claire Dolan from the moment it begins, somewhat mysteriously, in the New York Port Authority bus terminal, where William Keane (Damian Lewis) is frantically searching for his 6-year-old daughter, who has been missing for six months after reportedly disappearing in the bus terminal while in Keane’s care. At least that’s what Keane claims as he buttonholes complete strangers with a picture of his daughter and a faded newspaper clipping of her disappearance, neither of which we ever see for ourselves, leading to the suspicion that the unkempt and seemingly demented Keane may have invented the whole story. For one thing, he is shown always muttering or even shouting aloud to himself as he is trailed relentlessly by cinematographer John Foster’s handheld camera, which stays close to Keane, but not close enough to make the audience identify with his point of view. It’s as if a third unseen person is keeping tabs on Keane for some unspecified reason.

Mr. Lewis, a highly talented British actor, displays a flawless American accent in what amounts to a hyper-Wellesian monopolization of screen time and screen space. Just when he has begun to exhaust our patience by inciting a silly brawl around a taxi stand with a man he pointlessly suspects of having kidnapped his daughter, the plot begins to thicken considerably as he meets a down-on-her-luck single mother, Lynn Bedik (Amy Ryan), and her 7-year-old daughter Kira (Abigail Breslin) at his hotel. Keane is clearly fascinated by the little girl, possibly because she reminds him of his own lost daughter, and just possibly because he is a dangerous pedophile who has fantasies about a long-lost daughter.

We have seen Keane indulge in a coke-sniffing bathroom-stall sexual encounter with an otherwise unidentified woman, but his lack of sexual potency in this encounter arouses more suspense-laden suspicions of his sexual perversities. When Lynn asks Keane to baby-sit her daughter while she goes out of town to get some child-support money from her ex-husband, the tension rises perceptibly as Keane and Kira bond together like devoted surrogate father and completely trustful surrogate daughter. As Kira, well played by the completely adorable Ms. Breslin, tries to cheer up the despondent Keane, he never makes the false or suspicious move we anxiously anticipate. I can’t say if Mr. Kerrigan is playing dirty pool with us in the audience or not. Child molestation is still a grave taboo, both on and off the screen, but recent films have crossed the line (particularly in the “independent” sector), and in any event, we can never be sure about a character who seems to belong in a mental institution.

Indeed, I don’t want to short-circuit the suspense by telling you what happens in the end. Still, I cannot avoid some auteurist speculation about a cryptic biographical note that Mr. Kerrigan included in the production notes for the film: “He lives in New York City with his daughter Serena.” In his first film, Clean, Shaven, the protagonist has lost custody of one daughter and is suspected of the murder of someone else’s daughter. In Claire Dolan, the protagonist wants to abandon prostitution so that she can have a child of her own. And in Keane, a possibly real daughter is almost magically replaced by a surrogate daughter with a strikingly similar backpack in the same bus terminal.

The obsession with daughters is plausible enough, but the mobile solitude of Mr. Kerrigan’s protagonists raises different questions about the auteur’s vision of life and society. It would seem that we are all swimming in a sea of communal indifference, and I suppose this is as apt a description of today’s world as any.

More Wilder

“Some Like It Wilder: The Complete Billy Wilder,” a 26-film retrospective, continues its run at the Museum of the Moving Image (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria) with A Foreign Affair (1948), Wilder’s raucous return to Berlin after the war, with Marlene Dietrich cast against reality as an unrepentant Nazi and Jean Arthur brutalized as an Iowa Republican Congresswoman in an uneven sexual competition with Dietrich for the love of a corrupt American soldier (played by John Lund). Also prominent in the cast is Millard Mitchell, as the comically no-nonsense commanding officer. Dietrich sings “Black Market” and “Ruins of Berlin.” The hilarious screenplay was credited to Wilder, Charles Brackett and Richard Breen, and the on-location footage of bombed-out Berlin made its own wry statement. (Saturday, Sept. 24, 2 p.m.)

Stalag 17 (1953) was reportedly superior to Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski’s Broadway stage hit. In the film adaptation by Wilder and Edwin Blum (which won an Oscar for William Holden), the initially prickly anti-hero turns unexpectedly heroic in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, the aforementioned Stalag 17. The splendid ensemble cast includes the impromptu comedy team of Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck (reprising their stage antics), Don Taylor, Richard Erdman, Peter Graves, Neville Brand, Ross Bagdasarian and Gil Stratton Jr., as well as the brilliantly acted and wittily written villains of Otto Preminger (as the sardonic camp commandant) and Sig Ruman (as the deceptively jovial barracks guard). Despite the later Hogan’s Heroes—the tasteless sitcom “inspired” by the film’s success—Stalag 17 remains one of Wilder’s most resonant blends of comedy and melodrama. (Sunday, Sept. 25, 2 p.m.)

The Front Page (1974) is—alas—Wilder’s tired remake of Howard Hawk’s His Girl Friday (1940), which had deftly heterosexualized (with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell) the original buddy-buddy romance of the Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur 20’s stage comedy, as well as the 1931 Lewis Milestone film version with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brian (after producer Howard Hughes reportedly turned down Clark Gable and James Cagney, in the early stages of their careers, for the lead roles). In the Wilder version, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau restore the venerable buddy-buddy tradition. (Saturday, Oct. 1, 2 p.m.)

The Apartment (1960), being shown in a restored 35-millimeter Dolby Digital print, won well-deserved Oscars for Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond), Best Editing (Daniel Mandell) and Best Art Direction–Set Decoration (Alexandre Trauner and Edward G. Boyle). Undeserved was Shirley MacLaine’s Oscar loss as Best Actress; her winsome bad-girl performance was infinitely superior to Elizabeth Taylor’s ridiculous call girl in Daniel Mann’s Butterfield 8, for which Ms. Taylor won one of her periodic Hollywood awards paying tribute to her cynical acquisitiveness and well-oiled publicity machine. Fred MacMurray is saddled with the thankless role of cheating husband and mean-spirited adulterer, but Jack Lemmon and Ms. MacLaine are nothing short of exquisite in their shared vulnerabilities, which they finally triumph over in a burst of spectacular camera movement. (Saturday, Oct. 1, 4 p.m., and Sunday, Oct. 2, 4:30 p.m.)

When we first see Jody, he is sitting in Yvette's car outside an abortion clinic waiting to take her home. Yvette is understandably depressed after her traumatic ordeal and wants to go to bed to grieve over her aborted child and its irresponsible father. In an almost comical expression of callousness, Jody asks her if he can borrow her car to visit his other family. Yvette says yes with bitter resignation.

With this introduction, Jody could easily serve as the insensitive male poster pig of the year, even in South Central. Yet he evolves as Mr. Singleton's protagonist until he becomes a candidate for eventual redemption. The path to his salvation, however, is a messy one, strewn with many almost unbearable scenes of pain, anger, humiliation and occasional violence.

Jody expects to die at any moment, and yet he seems to lead the charmed life of a romantic hero. Mr. Singleton is committed to Jody more fervently than Jody seems to be to anyone outside himself. Mr. Singleton may have to pay the price with women–black and white–in the audience. Still, I don't think he shortchanges his female characters, though mine may be an unenlightened view–in the sense that I, like Mr. Singleton, can accept the fact that it takes two to tango before the dire problems of illegitimate births, single parenting and teenage mothers can take form.

Curiously, there is no white presence in the film to bear the burden of blame for Jody's immature character. The oppressive "system" is in place, but it is off-screen. Jody solves his financial problems by selling stolen dresses around the neighborhood, and he is never caught or punished for his illegal activities. Jody's problems seem to go deeper–perhaps to a mother who can pass as his sister, and who suddenly decides that she wants a new life with Melvin (Ving Rhames), a reformed ex-con gangster who runs his own home-landscaping business. Jody refuses to accept Melvin as a paternal presence and is outraged when his mother tells him it is time he moved out of the house. Melvin tries to be as tactful as possible, but Jody's taunting finally forces him to exercise a muscular, I've-been-there-and-done-that kind of moral authority. Mr. Rhames is the most experienced performer in the cast, and he gives his character more modulation and nuance than is written into the part.

Jody's best friend, Sweet Pea (Omar Gooding), is even more dysfunctional than Jody and, out of his sheer frustration, dangerously violent besides. He has been in and out of prison many times and exists as a character simply to illustrate the road Jody is not willing to take. In the end, Jody is as unwilling to kill as he is to be killed, even when he's provoked by Yvette's former lover, the casually homicidal Rodney (Snoop Doggy Dogg), a marvelously lazy and sleazy piece of parole-board flotsam and jetsam. Sweet Pea and Rodney provide much of the comic tension in Baby Boy , until their final confrontation results in Sweet Pea killing Rodney without any law-and-order consequences. One hears police sirens in the background, but there is no follow-up by the gendarmerie.

Jody pulls away from danger just in time, with Melvin's unostentatiously paternal assistance. Jody moves out and into Yvette's apartment, to which he now has his own keys and does not have to knock to be admitted. Perhaps a set of your own apartment keys is all it takes to be a man in South Central L. A., or anywhere else. Yes, it is a happy ending–almost a fairy-tale ending. Yet I liked the film, because it started so odiously and then drew the audience in with the anguished confessionals of Ms. Henson's Yvette and Ms. Johnson's Juanita. I felt myself drawn into a vortex of raw emotion from which I could not escape. One may quibble with Mr. Singleton's awkward handling of the genre violence and the inflated repetitiousness of some of the dialogue, but he does feel for his characters, and that is a refreshing attitude in these cynical times.

Detectives on Ice

Mathieu Kassovitz's The Crimson Rivers , from a screenplay by Jean-Christophe Grangé and Mr. Kassovitz, based on the novel by Mr. Grangé, is set in the French Alps with a degree of authenticity that makes it ideal hot-weather entertainment. One can believe the reports that the cast and crew of this policier thriller had problems with the snow, ice and subzero temperatures up around Chamonix. Indeed, the extensive location shooting would seem more appropriate for a mountain-climbing adventure than for a gruesome murder mystery.

Lieutenant Pierre Niémans (Jean Reno) and Max Kerkerian (Vincent Cassel) are two detectives who meet, or rather collide, while investigating two separate cases that lead to the same murderer. There is much graphic mutilation of a gratuitously exotic nature involved. There is also a sinister Nazi-like university in the area, a contingent of skinheads bent on desecrating cemeteries, a suspicious woman tour guide (Nadia Farès), a foot chase across the snow and a traffic skirmish with a murderous trucker. In fact, the digressions and diversions eventually overwhelm the narrative, which is driven relentlessly toward a climax more scenic than dramatic.

Mr. Reno holds the film together with a kind of genre charisma that tells us he will never rest until he solves the mystery and apprehends the malefactor. Mr. Cassel's role as Mr. Reno's brash young detective buddy is seriously compromised by a display of martial arts that seems to shift the action to Hong Kong or Taiwan. Yet somehow, the majestically mountainous snow-and-ice spectacle almost makes the frantic scurryings seem worthwhile. The solution to the "mystery" certainly doesn't.

Animation (or Something Like It) Goes to the Dogs

Lawrence Guterman's Cats and Dogs , from a screenplay by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, is not exactly an animated film, but what it is exactly in the realm of categories is beyond me. After all, when one finds oneself at a Saturday-morning screening in a vast auditorium full of little children shepherded by their dutiful parents, one becomes too distracted to be sure of anything. There are three bona fide visible and audible actors in the cast: Jeff Goldblum, Elizabeth Perkins and child actor Alexander Pollock make up a family of human foils in a world of talking and warring cats and dogs. The roster of human voices for the combatants include Tobey Maguire, Alec Baldwin, Sean Hayes, Susan Sarandon, Joe Pantoliano, Michael Clarke Duncan and Jon Lovitz. Forgive me, but I think that is too many voices for too many cats and dogs for me to describe, much less evaluate, the proceedings. The gist of the action is that the evil cats want to take over the world by stealing an anti-dog-allergy formula from Mr. Goldblum's home laboratory, and the dogs mobilize to stop them.

The animals, who seem harmlessly pet-like when humans are around, become high-tech feline and canine beasties on their own. After a while, the film's massive explosions make Swordfish look like a chick flick. I asked the sharp-eyed little girl sitting next to me what she thought of the film. She said she liked it fine, and who am I to argue with her? Still, I think cats and cat-lovers have a legitimate grievance with this one-sided portrayal of the eternal war between cats and dogs, bless them both.

Are You a Dietrich Virgin?

I envy anyone who has never seen the comparatively plump pre-Hollywood Marlene Dietrich straddling a chair with her provocatively stockinged legs while singing "Falling in Love Again," because now is your chance to be enchanted for the very first time (and for the rest of us, once again) by a talent that exploded on the screen more than 70 years ago and still is vibrant on the screen. From July 12 to July 26, Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930) will be shown in a new 35-millimeter print with new and franker English titles at the Film Forum (209 West Houston Street) as part of the Marlene Dietrich Centenary being celebrated at various film institutions around the country. For the record, Dietrich was born on December 27, 1901, in Schöneberg, Germany, on the outskirts of Berlin. She died in 1992, I believe in Paris.

One cannot talk about Dietrich without also talking about her mentor and Svengali, Josef von Sternberg (1894-1969), and one cannot talk about The Blue Angel without also talking of Emil Jannings (1884-1950), whose memorable projection of a crazed cuckold crowing like a rooster is one of the most stirring moments in the history of world cinema. And, as an added attraction, the restored print is being shown with Dietrich's bizarre screen test for The Blue Angel . I'd rather you see it without my presuming to describe this revelation of Dietrich's devastatingly ironic Kraut side.

I don't say Frank Wildhorn is foolish-far from it. He isn't a genius. He is said to be criticproof. (But then, so is Danielle Steel, and so was Andrew Lloyd Webber, before time began to catch up with him.) My esteemed colleague John Simon, musing on popular taste and the anointing of Mr. Wildhorn as "Messiah to the Unwashed," pointed out in New York magazine that the only real test of artistic value "is the slow but true test of time."

Agreed! History will not treat Mr. Wildhorn's Jekyll and Hyde , The Scarlet Pimpernel and now The Civil War too kindly.

But meanwhile, the American musical is hitting rock bottom. Mr. Wildhorn seems to write an awful lot of skating music. His surging romantic ballads are actually very popular with professional skaters. They inspire triple toe-loops in sequins. His talent is for easy listening pop. He says so himself. His work, he told The New York Times , is "comfortable on the ear."

If a bland blur is comfortable (on the ear), then Mr. Wildhorn is a master. But is the traumatic history of America from slavery to Gettysburg comforting ? It's beyond argument, I think, that the Civil War amounts to something more significant than an easy-listening radio station. But let it pass. Mr. Wildhorn is an unapologetically proud populist. Let him explain the secret to his success:

"I always say I never do shows for the people," he told Playbill . "I do them with the people." Of the people, for the people and by the people rings a bell. But with ? What does that mean, exactly? Are "the people" his co-composers? "I've been able to make my passion their passion," he went on. "They hear it and love it."

Do they? The low camp Scarlet Pimpernel has yet to prove a popular success; on the other hand, the high camp Jekyll and Hyde is a hit. Moral: Always aim high. But whether the pious Civil War truly will prove popular is far from a sure thing. Piety doesn't sound like a fun night out on Broadway to me.

But what kind of a musical is Civil War ? It has no plot; it's essentially without any characters. "It's not a traditional show, but it's got what I would call a visual book," the show's co-author, Gregory Boyd, has explained. "Visual books" save on words. They're the equivalent to "comfortable on the ear." "We're trying to tell a story in a visual sort of way," he added, sounding a little tentative.

He means that Civil War is at center a bookless pseudo-docudrama with music and period photographs of soldiers and slaves. There are also the usual stock battle scenes performed in slow motion with lots of noise and smoke. In fact, the "visual book"-and the direction by Jerry Zaks, who did Smokey Joe's Cafe -is somewhat threadbare and dull. But let that pass. Where's the story? "There is no huge back story here," said the show's lyricist, Jack Murphy. Isn't the back story here the history of America? "We don't need one," Mr. Murphy continued. "People bring their own back stories to this thing."

All clear? The people are the co-composers; the book is to be seen; and everyone brings their own back stories to the show. Mr. Murphy explained: "You see a husband singing to his wife about loss. We all know what that is."

We're meant to project our own problems onto the Civil War. The creators of the show can therefore refer to loss-and honor, valor, death, whatever-as if they were creating quick, simplistic musical vignettes for MTV.

We're watching MTV on stage. It's why Civil War has barely a recognizable character-for none are needed. There are only easily identifiable generic types and the unearned emotion of mini-dramas. In an early battle scene, one young soldier kills another. "No!" he cries over the corpse. "He's my brother!" Obviously, we are meant to feel for a tragedy of war (but don't). A song follows: "Tell my father when you can/ I died a man." Fathers, brothers, issues of patriotic manhood, accidental fratricide-mighty themes; trivial outcome.

There are no memorable songs, no emotional connection, only a form of numbness. How could it be otherwise with clumsy, anodyne lyrics such as this from the inevitable love letter moment: "How I long for your touch like a lover will/ 'Cause I'm missing you/ God, I'm missing you, my Bill." Or this, sung by a slave couple who are separated when sold: "If prayin' were horses all of us would ride/ And ever I'd be by your side."

No authentic sense of time or period exists in Civil War . Mr. Wildhorn's folk, country and pop-rock for easy listening belong to the 90's of Michael Bolton, where everything sounds "heartbreakingly" the same. Or to the faux-diva, overwrought emotion of a Mariah Carey, where everything begins and ends in hysteria. Like the man says, bring your own back stories to the show.

With Broadway musicals, there's low and there's low. The new Broadway revue, The Gershwins' Fascinating Rhythm , is seriously, unsavably, unbelievably low . Directed by Mark Lamos and costumed by Paul Tazewell, whose names deserve to go down in infamy, the 90-minute show has been produced like some Las Vegas lounge act from the 1970's. They seem to have set out maniacally to sabotage and vulgarize the very elegance and wit they're supposed to be paying tribute to. They've tried to modernize the Gershwins. Why update the eternal? The Gershwins need no help from this coarse lot. They haven't even the respect to trust the material. Almost every single one of the 27 songs, many of them Gershwin standards-"Embraceable You," "Love Is Here to Stay," "Nice Work if You Can Get It"-has been ruined. Which clown on the production thought it would be a great idea to turn "Isn't It a Pity?" into a dyke duet? Why ask?

Just when things were going so well , we learn with regret that Marlene , the "musical play" about Dietrich starring Sian Phillips, has closed. It only goes to prove that not every British import is made of pure gold. This ghoulish exercise in kitsch and biopic name-dropping was written by Pam Gems, the second-rate British playwright who boldly sets out time and again to prove that sticking with movies is the best way.

Sample Dietrich dialogue: "Oh my God, how this mirror has aged!" "If the camera loves you, you are a star!" And, spoken wistfully to a photograph of Ernest Hemingway: "We had some good times, eh? Strolling down the Champs-Élysées."

I expect they did. The show actually opened with the startling sight of a severely depressed old woman mopping the stage with a bucket of water by her side. (Inspired direction by Sean Mathias.) At first, I thought she must be Marlene Dietrich in disguise for some weird reason, but the mop lady turns out to be a mute named Mutti, who likes to clean. So, we learned, does the meticulous Marlene. The immutably mute Mutti is Marlene's gofer and existential conscience. She hangs around the stage, very quietly. There's also Vivian, Marlene's devoted assistant who also happened to be a lesbian, rather like the girls in the Gershwin show. By gosh and golly, Vivian and Marlene get to kiss. Isn't that daring?

A lot of Act 2 was a Dietrich concert with Ms. Phillips impersonating Marlene in full bodystocking, with the usual off-key songs-e.g. "Honeysuckle Wose," "Falling in Love Again." I haven't a clue what the most distinguished Sian Phillips was doing in this miserable piece of icon exhumation. But someone must know, I guess.

Rest in peace.

993 Park Avenue

Two-bed, two-bath, 1,600-square-foot prewar co-op.

Asking: $625,000. Selling: $615,000.

Maintenance: $2,129; 31 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: five months.

DARLING, WE BELONG TOGETHER. The fact that this was Marlene Dietrich's New York apartment, which she bought in 1959 and abandoned for Paris in the late 1970's, didn't seem to help it sell. It went on the market back in July for $1 million and to much notice in the press. One deal had already derailed when a second deal, reported in this column in September, fell through. But it would seem, judging by the woman who finally bought the apartment recently, that it was all in the stars. Terri Sanderson, the eventual buyer, has a bit of a Marlene Dietrich memorabilia-collecting rap sheet. At the Sotheby's auction last fall, she bought two paintings–one of a log cabin with smoke curling up out of its chimney and one by Carl Hirshburg of a couple picnicking in Connecticut–and a couple of brass bird-shaped doorknobs that probably went on Dietrich's closet doors. "They weighed one and a half tons because I have the whole lock mechanism," reported Ms. Sanderson, who paid $900 for the pair. "I just thought that it would be so fantastic for these things to come home to roost." That was Nov. 1, and she remembers thinking, "Here I was buying these things, and I haven't even submitted my board package," she said. "What if I ended up buying Joe Schmo's apartment?" Fortunately, things went well and after a long closing, the apartment was hers. "I didn't buy it because I said, 'Oh my God, it was Marlene Dietrich's apartment,'" insisted Ms. Sanderson from her home in Florida (she doesn't have a place to live here until the Dietrich apartment is finished). "I just love the bones. I love the location. But since it is, it just takes on a persona. As I go around the world on my travels, everyone has a story about Marlene." When her broker, Michele Kleier, called her about seeing the Dietrich apartment, she said, "I have an English paper to write." (The buyer of the Dietrich apartment recently went back to school.) Besides, she assumed it was going to cost millions of dollars. But Ms. Kleier got her away from her books long enough to check it out. "I walked in and the place was empty and disgusting and old," said Ms. Sanderson. "I think it has 60 amps of power." Except for visits from Dietrich's daughter and grandchildren, the place had sat moldering. The parquet floors were covered in shag carpeting; there were monogrammed towels still hanging in the bathroom; the floor tiles in the kitchen were yellow. "I said I love it. She knew I liked to buy things in that condition," said Ms. Sanderson. By making the offer quickly and in all cash, the broker convinced the estate to lower the price. Now Ms. Sanderson is busily renovating. "I have seen the apartment for, like, six and a half minutes," she said. "I just got the pictures from my architect, and I'm like, Oh my God, what have I done? It's going to be great, but what have I done?" She said that the estate promised her those bathroom towels as a bonus, but she's still waiting to hear from them on that. "I have these dumb mirrors, too," she said. "Because she had smoked-glass mirrors all over the place, including in the bedroom, which I am taking off." Broker: Gumley Haft Kleier Inc. (Michelle Kleier); Sotheby's International Realty.

200 East 69th Street (Trump Palace)

Three-bed, three-bath, 1,450-square-foot postwar condo.

Asking: $899,000. Selling: $840,000.

Charges: $1,227. Taxes: $518.

Time on the market: 3.5 months.

EVERYTHING GOES BUT THE STUFFED FISH. Trump Palace sticks out: Tall and peach-colored and vaguely Art Deco, the 1990 condo stands in isolation amid brownstones and less ambitious apartment buildings near Third Avenue. According to broker Michael Shuster, you can see the skyline of Central Park South from this apartment, which is only on the 10th floor. The seller was a woman with a first degree black belt in tae kwon do. Mostly her son used the apartment while he was writing his doctoral thesis. She didn't have much attachment to the place when she decided to sell it–it wasn't exactly a repository of family heirlooms. "The owner said you could buy it furnished," said the broker. "There were prices on everything, including an antique map for like 7,000 bucks." The only thing money could not buy was the fishing trophy–one of those lacquered-looking dead fish stuck to a plaque–on the living room wall. Dead fish notwithstanding, "It was impeccably done up," said the broker; he was especially impressed with the extra-fancy kitchen, the nine-foot ceilings and the thick, rich-looking paint job. But the buyer passed on the furniture. Broker: William B. May Real Estate (Michael Shuster); A. Dupont Realty (Robert Sussman).

Upper West Side

308 West 91st Street, near Riverside Drive

4,000-square-foot prewar town house.

Asking: $1.395 million. Selling: $1.3 million.

Time on the market: nine months.

WRECKING BALL OF COURAGE. Four years ago, the sellers of this 100-year-old town house bought it intending to do their kids a favor. The bay-windowed brownstone had been divided into four apartments, and they had the idea of putting a roof over their kids' heads by letting them move in. But while this family-togetherness idea never panned out–the kids left town–the whole thing wasn't a total bust: They made almost $500,000 when they sold the place recently. The buyer is a CBS producer who wants a home big enough for her family. She's going to renovate it back to a single-family home. The house is in good shape: 10-foot ceilings, a fireplace on every floor, an intact stoop. It even has the original shutters in the windows. But don't expect to finish up the renovation in 48 hours: "Ooh, it's going to take nine months to a year," estimated the broker. As Dan Rather put it, "Courage." Broker: William B. May (Midge LaGuardia).

127 West 79th Street (Clifton House)

One-bed, one-bath, 900-square-foot prewar co-op.

Asking: $395,000. Selling: $360,000.

Maintenance: $1,276; 60 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: three months.

IF ELOISE WAS A DOG. "We just got back from Club Med," said tanned and well-rested broker Emma O'Brien, meaning herself and the buyer of this penthouse apartment in a dog-friendly building. The two became friends over the last year while finding the buyer a new apartment. When all this started, the buyer had been renting in a building in the West 60's that was a little uptight: "They made her carry her dog in the service elevator with the recyclables and the Chinese deliveryman," said the broker, exasperated. But the buyer wasn't just doing this for her pooch. She also wanted outdoor space. (Never mind that she's afraid of heights.) This apartment sits atop a 17-floor former hotel that was built in 1926 and converted to a co-op in 1985. It's pet-friendly, and there's a wrap terrace that takes in "beautiful city views." After settling on the apartment, she gutted it and is in the midst of renovating. In the meantime, she and her broker decided to go to Club Med. "I thought it was going to be a bunch of cheeseheads, but it was awesome," reported Ms. O'Brien. So in the end, the sellers are going to move to their country house full-time, and the dog gets to ride in the elevator like a real person. Broker: Halstead Property Company (Emma O'Brien, John Edwards).

Among the most entertaining of non-"auteur" star vehicles-made at a time when stars often were not only good actors but unique personalities as well-is the first pairing of America's innocent James Stewart (as he was always billed in pictures, never Jimmy) and Europe's worldly Marlene Dietrich, out in the Wild West of 1939's Destry Rides Again [Tuesday, Feb. 24, AMC, 54, 11 P.M.]. The picture is a perfect example of what made the old studio star system in its heyday work so well: Both stars' parts are expertly styled for what these actors can do best and, because their innate personas have such appeal and scope, the characters achieve an added dimension of mythic size that could never be attained with only good actors. It was Stewart's first of about two dozen westerns-only John Wayne rivaled him for hit cowboy pictures throughout the early 50's and early 60's (Wayne's first hit western, John Ford's Stagecoach, was also released in 1939)-and set a particular image of him that he and others did variations on for the rest of his career: the book-reading, nonviolent Eastern dude in the West who must learn to use a gun when necessary. Western master Ford cast Stewart in exactly that same role 23 years later for what would turn out to be Stewart's, Ford's and Wayne's last great western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Also released in 1939 was Stewart's most defining nonwestern role, in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. For Dietrich, on the other hand, Destry was a huge change of image-done with that clearly in mind: Marlene, after several successes with director-discoverer-mentor-lover Josef von Sternberg in the early 30's, had toward the end of the decade become "box-office poison" to exhibitors, the somewhat distant pedestal Sternberg had put her on having lost its allure with Depression audiences. Destry ripped her right off any pedestal and, interestingly, it was Sternberg himself who convinced her to take the role of a tough, brawling saloon chanteuse, a woman of easy virtue. The extended cat fight between her and Una Merkel is justly famous, and the novelty song she sings, "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have," became a popular Dietrich standard throughout the rest of her career. I saw her sing it marvelously at a concert in Denver 33 years later. Directed by veteran Hollywood hack George Marshall, the film is unadorned, straightforward, unpretentiously made and surely Marshall's best movie of about 400 he did. Marlene and Jimmy had a blazing affair during the shooting, and the electricity is noticeable. Dietrich told me that during one love scene, Stewart's "interest" became so "apparent" that director Marshall called an early lunch, at the same time wagging his index finger reproachfully at the actor, "Jimmy …"

The Hitchcock Watch: Stewart's lifelong best friend, Henry Fonda, did one stark, strange suspense film with the Master, an especially personal work to Hitchcock, yet among his least known and least popular, 1957's true story The Wrong Man [Tuesday, Feb. 24, AMC, 54, 8 P.M.]. When Hitchcock was 5, his father had a police friend put the child in a prison cell for five minutes to teach him "what happens to bad little boys"; this resulted in a thoroughgoing terror of police, and in this picture an innocent man goes to jail, which drives the wife mad. Done in a kind of hypnotic, quasi-documentary fashion, the film is brilliantly played by Fonda and Vera Miles, and reveals the director in one of his darkest moods. From 1938 comes Hitchcock's final English success, relying on a lot of British humor, The Lady Vanishes [Saturday, Feb. 21, CUNY, 75, 9 P.M.]. Although Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood and Dame May Whitty are absolutely splendid, the script dates: As Hitch himself used to say, negating the entire message-in-code plot, "Why didn't they just send a carrier pigeon?" But as an example of the oddball innocence of early Hitchcock, it's charming.

Wednesday, Feb. 18

Olympic Winter Games. Tonight: Ladies' figure skating, short program. NYTV correspondent Nick Paumgarten filed this report from his couch:

Sadly, there are only a few more days left to watch figure skating practices in prime-time. No more Verne Lundquist and Scott Hamilton, the CBS commentators in the brown sweaters, killing time in the skim-milk light of a near-empty rink, while flu-ridden CBS staff members keep repeating the network-mantra that Americans tune into the Olympics for stories, not sports. Now you have to settle for Verne and Scott in tuxedos getting worked up over American medal contenders Michelle Kwan, Tara Lipinski and Nicole Bobek in the real competition.…

In fact, at this point, the Olympics may make for compelling TV. The ice dancers will be swapping partners back at the hotel, the female hockey players will be loading up on the sake and looking for a scrap in the Olympic Village.…

But if the coverage is still pissing you off, or if you have questions (i.e., is Scott Hamilton "best friends" with every skater whose moves he describes?), just put in a call to Leslie Anne Wade, the CBS Sports Olympic spokesman. Ms. Wade is the Mike McCurry of the Nagano Olympics. She calms all the disgruntled sports TV columnists who keep writing about how dull host Jim Nantz is and why they delayed the women's Super G, etc.…

NYTV called her in Nagano to complain about Verne and Scott's brown sweaters, but wound up taking a shine to Ms. Wade's smoky voice. "Did you know the voice was gonna sound like this?" she said. "It's not from smoking or talking too much. I've sounded like this since I was a kid."…

Then Ms. Wade started putting the hurt on me a little bit: "So what are you gonna write about, how beleaguered I am or something?" she said. It was 8:20 A.M., Nagano time. "Well, I'm not beleaguered." But is she having fun? "Truthfully? I'd rather be in New York." But then she'd have to watch the Games on TV. [WCBS, 2, 8 P.M.]

Saturday, Feb. 21

Look, just because ABC avoids airing Nothing Sacred during a rating sweeps period (tonight, you get Harrison Ford in the 1994 semi-blockbuster Clear and Present Danger ) doesn't mean that someone in the executive offices doesn't like the show. Even though the show is not in the top 40 (actually, it usually finishes around 118th place), ABC has renewed the priest drama and will begin showing it at 9 P.M. on Saturdays when it relaunches on March 7 (that is, a week after sweeps is up).…

"It's very baffling to me how these decisions get made," said Kevin Anderson, the 38-year-old star of the show from his trailer on the set in Canoga Park, Calif. "So a couple of months ago, I decided to stop trying to figure it out and just enjoy myself. The feedback we get is 99 percent positive, including priests and nuns and spiritual people. It's very inspiring to feel that people who actually live that life kind of dig it. Bill Kane, who created the show, was saying that it's kind of a cathartic experience for people who are in these religious communities to see their lives revealed in a kind of artistic way, and that they appreciate the show's attempt to be authentic and honest.…

"So far it has stirred up a debate, and I think that's great and that as an actor that's what you want to do-make people talk about a certain idea. It has as much effect on people's lives as watching the mindless crap that you see all over the TV. You know, bathroom humor. I'm not a sociologist, but I would think it would have a dulling effect on someone if they watched it constantly."…

Mr. Anderson has appeared in a few movies ( Hoffa, Sleeping With the Enemy ), but he likes the grind of TV acting: "One of the pros is you never have time to get neurotic about what you're doing, particularly me, because I'm in, like, every scene. There's kind of an un-neurotic thing that's very nice. You have so little time you're just going with your instincts, and that can be kind of fun. One of the negatives is you can't be as thorough. You can't rehearse, and a lot of times you're basically remembering your lines and hitting your mark. It's relentless. I miss not being able to go back to my trailer after lunch and take an hour nap, but actors are such babies. I would say I'm getting more good out of this than bad, because you're just acting 12 to 15 hours a day, just like nonstop."…

What do you watch on TV? "I like to watch David Letterman, and I like that George-is it George?-or Charlie Rose. I shamefully admit that when I'm not working, I get a sort of sadistic pleasure out of watching those cheap shows like Hard Copy ."…

Michael Suman, author of a collection of essays, Religion and Prime-Time Television , thinks Nothing Sacred deals with religion better than any other show, but that basically religion has little place on TV: "TV isn't the best medium for religion because spiritual and transcendental issues aren't that entertaining. Whenever it gets into the public realm, one religion tries to cram its way of looking at religion down each other's throats. A lot of the criticism today is about the lack of religion on TV or when it's on, it's portrayed as negative; but it's all coming from the religious right, who really don't want to see religion in all its different realms but only their own view. They don't want to see an accurate reflection of religion in American life, especially if it's far removed from the Protestant conservative vision of the world. TV is a business. It's about entertainment, it's about removing people from the serious issues of life. It doesn't deal well with the subtleties, complexities and transcendental issues involved. I think Nothing Sacred is a good show, and one of the best examples of religion on television that I've seen because there's a bit of ambiguity-which is why it's doing so poorly in the ratings. It's too good of a show to be successful on network TV." [WABC, 7, 8 P.M.]

"'Beauty' is a word that's gotten a bum deal. People think beautiful is boring, but that's not true. To be beautiful is to be godlike," Mr. Scavullo said softly, his posture perfect.

Looking not a night older than he did in the early 1980's, when the paparazzi regularly chronicled his reign as one of the dukes of the Studio 54 disco scene, Mr. Scavullo wore a white long-sleeve shirt over slim black jeans, black leather boots that looked buttered and tinted eyeglasses.

"Beautiful" is an obvious word to describe the magic Mr. Scavullo has worked over the years as the court photographer to the kingdom of celebrity. Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, Brooke Shields, Candice Bergen, Sting and Janis Joplin (one of Mr. Scavullo's favorites) did not give themselves up to his camera to expose any physical failings. And, this month, these stars, among many others, appear in Scavullo: Photographs, 50 Years , a glossy new book ($60) published by Abrams. With its emboldened images of pop culture, the book boils with celebrity so palatable you practically could spread it on a breakfast muffin. Enid Nemy, a feature writer for The New York Times , has written the introduction to the book, which also includes comments from the photographer and an illustrated chronology of his career. Songwriter Denise Rich and Helen Gurley Brown hosted a publication party for the photographer on Oct. 6. An exhibition of Mr. Scavullo's pictures opened Oct. 9 at the Staley-Wise Gallery, 560 Broadway.

"Like everything we've ever done, we've worked hard," Mr. Scavullo said, referring to his friend Sean Byrnes, a stylist and editor, who has worked with the photographer for more than 20 years. "We had to edit 50 years of work! When I saw the book for the first time, I got really excited. I started to cry. Then I thought, Damn-enough. Time to work on something new."

Mr. Scavullo was born into a comfortable Staten Island family in 1929. In 1937, the family moved into a grand house on East 52nd Street. Before her marriage, his mother had been a sales clerk in the fashion department at B. Altman and wanted to become a fashion designer. His father made his fortune in a banqueting and cooking utensils business. Eventually, the elder Mr. Scavullo bought the Central Park Casino, a fashionable supper club. "Being raised a Roman Catholic and yet thinking everyone should be free to do what they want created problems," Mr. Scavullo recalled. "Being the only one of five children who didn't want to go into the family business created problems. When I told my father I was going to be a photographer, he didn't trust it." Growing up, Mr. Scavullo was enchanted by his mother's fashion magazines. Seeing photographs of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo before Hollywood made them over inspired him to become a photographer. "I became aware that they hadn't been born that way, that to some extent they were made into beauties. I was fascinated by the thought that you could make people attractive," he said.

The country came to share Mr. Scavullo's fascination with making people attractive when, in 1974, New York magazine asked him, and his team-Way Bandy for makeup, Maury Hobson for hair, Sean Byrnes as editor-to photograph Martha Mitchell, the cantankerous wife of U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell. Mrs. Mitchell and her blond beehive were famously photographed by paparazzi. With her mouth always opened wide, she was regularly mouthing off about something with her rat-a-tat-tat Southern accent. Mr. Scavullo's photograph originally was intended for a story about "the perfect Christmas present, a Francesco Scavullo portrait," he said. "But when they saw the portrait, the editors decided to change the story. It was now a cover: 'The Martha Mitchell Makeover.'"

That cover, in which Mrs. Mitchell suddenly looked like Lana Turner's even more glamorous twin sister, rather than Minnie Pearl's poor relation, was considered a national revelation, not just of the talents of Mr. Scavullo, Way Bandy, Sean Byrnes and Maury Hobson, but of the entire transforming promises of fashion and beauty. The national obsession with style-some might say style over substance-began there. Mr. Scavullo showed there was no surface in the public arena that couldn't be polished.

"The phone rang from all over the world," Mr. Scavullo said. "Martha did look marvelous. You know, we fell in love with her when we did the photograph. She was charming. But she also had a mouth on her. She called me the day the magazine hit the stands and said she was very insulted; 'I've always been considered a very attractive Southern woman,' she told me."

As a result of the Martha Mitchell cover on New York magazine, Mr. Scavullo was commissioned to do the first of four books. Scavullo on Beauty , published in 1976 by Random House, was the first of the big beauty books that are now a constant in publishing. This was followed in 1977 by Scavullo on Men . "I wanted to show that if men showed their vulnerability, they'd be much more exciting," Mr. Scavullo said.

Meanwhile, lines formed with people who could, and would, pay-this was over 20 years ago-upward of $10,000 to be made over and photographed by Mr. Scavullo. "There wasn't any retouching. Honestly, there wasn't," he promised of the Mitchell portrait. "I don't do much retouching, actually. I like good makeup, hair, lighting and a creative stylist. With that team, I can go."

Mr. Scavullo began taking photographs when he was a teenager. His mother bought him a camera. His first pictures didn't look glamorous like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. So Mr. Scavullo set about to teach himself everything he could about technique. "Four-eighty Lexington was full of photography studios," he remembered. "The Vogue magazine studio was there. I'd get jobs cleaning. You could. It was easy. There weren't a lot of young men who wanted to be photographers in those days. You jumped from studio to studio. I became Horst's assistant at Vogue, and by the time I was 19, I was photographing for Seventeen ." When Mr. Scavullo's father saw his son's credit in the magazine, he was more confident that photography could make a decent career. "He bought me this building," Mr. Scavullo said.

Assignments followed fast and furiously for Seventeen, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Interview, Time, Newsweek and Cosmopolitan -all those many luscious Cosmo cover girls and the infamous, nearly nude centerfold of Burt Reynolds in the 1970's. "I have so many nudes, including Arnold Schwarzenegger. Maybe I could do a book," he said. Throughout it all, Mr. Scavullo has fought valiantly to combat manic-depression and arthritis.

"Optimism" is a favorite word. "Well, I imagine the worst and hope for the best," he laughed. "And I don't look back. I don't look ahead. I kind of just look around."