Vivien Leigh: A Biography

Vivien Leigh's life was packed with the stuff of compelling biography: beauty, talent, glamour, wit, intelligence, romance, madness. Vickers ( Cecil Beaton ), however, has gone no further in his re-creation than to organize his notes into chapters and let the tidbits speak for themselves. The biography is overstuffed with the most tangential minutiae, a cornucopia of irrelevant details and unrelated anecdotes. Fugitive quotations are dropped into paragraphs with no effort made to relate them to the surrounding information. The material is given equal weight, with nothing to anchor or tie facts together into a cohesive narrative. This is a monumentally disappointing book about one of our era's most exciting actresses. Photos. ( June )