Off the King's Road: Lost and Found in London

Raphael's memoir encompasses her personal journey from early 1960s New York wife and actress to divorcée and single mom in swinging 1968 London. Brooklyn-born, Skidmore-educated Raphael married Bob Langs, first a law student, then a talent agent and successful movie producer whose work eventually took the couple and their three children to London. However, Bob's affair with an 18-year-old actress essentially destroyed the marriage, and Raphael, living with her kids, ages eight, five and four, in the aristocratic five-story brick townhouse off the King's Row in Chelsea, resolves to stay in that city and reinvent herself. Friends help her along, such as the servants she inherited from the previous Lady D'Avignor Goldsmid; Vivian, an older L.A. friend of a friend, who urges her to read Colette, de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing; her husband's ex-shrink, David, the "anti-psychiatry psychiatrist," who excoriates marriage and convinces her to drop acid; as well as an intriguing assortment of men to date. There are intermittent love affairs and jobs: she is employed as a book researcher, then later writes letters for Penthouse magazine. By 1971 she returns to New York a novelist, triumphantly a woman on her own. Raphael (They Got What They Wanted ) offers stylish anecdotes for the historical record. (Jan.)