Stanwyck

Stanwyck, a Hollywood legend and a distinguished actress who achieved admirable longevity in a fickle profession, receives a debunking in this unauthorized biography. Wayne, author of a biography of the late Robert Taylor, claims to have been ""inspired'' to investigate one of Taylor's famous wives. This ``untold story'' is so gracelessly and crudely presented that any gleam of humanity in the actress is lost. Wayne presents a portrait of a workaholic, incapable of giving love to her child or husbands (Frank Fay was her first); the sad life of Stanwyck's adopted son, Dion, is alluded to but not explicated. Readers are left with a compilation of gossip, innuendo and distasteful stories; facts are related but rarely interpreted. Still, Stanwyck, born Ruby Stevens and orphaned at age four, has survived worse than this pap. January