Brilliant Divorces

Singer's tawdry tale about a poor girl's rise to wealth through a series of doomed marriages makes for tiresome reading. In Beverly Hills, Nora Grant's perpetually angry stepdaughter Sam hosts a party for her best friend Honey Rose in anticipation of Honey's enormous divorce settlement. All of the party-goers are ex-wives with bitter stories, and Singer casually mingles their tales with a smattering of real-life Hollywood divorces like those of Norman Lear and Steven Spielberg. But it is Nora's matrimonial track record that makes up the bulk of the book. After a post-WW II marriage of convenience to a gay aristocrat, she weds an actor and a former American ambassador in quick succession before finally settling down with powerful studio magnate T. S. Grant (and Sam). The blatant admiration for rich ex-wives and the sordid, greedy atmosphere tarnishes Singer's ( The Debutantes ) efforts to construct a credible true love for Nora. While she documents incest, sleazy affairs, family greed, wife-beating and all manner of sexual couplings in competent prose, she fails to interest the reader in her heroine. The journey through Nora's life is very dull. (Sept.)