Jet Set: Memoir of an International Playboy

""To me,"" the author of this glitzy, fitfully amusing memoir confesses, ""there is nothing quite so sexy as deep cleavage filled with enormous diamonds."" That statement epitomizes the values embraced by the gaudy parade of titled Europeans and their hangers-on in whose orbits the author has traveled. Gargia recounts at length his affair with Greta Garbo, the ""hermit-about-town"" whose legendary reclusiveness and sexual reserve he claims to have overcome. He finds Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis a snob, her pretentious conversation unable to engage him or his then-mistress Francoise Sagan. Although the memoirist makes token apologies for the shallowness of his lifestyle, the book mostly chronicles the appetites of a man who finds shopping sexually stimulating and whose central occupation--his law degree or publishing of The Best magazine notwithstanding--is collecting wealthy mistresses. He nearly wed the wealthy widow Lady Deterding, an octogenarian 50 years his senior and ""one of the richest women in the world""--until she bragged of a liaison with Adolf Hitler: ""One can accuse me of oversensitivity, but I found it a turnoff to learn that my girlfriend had fucked the F hrer."" While Gargia believes that the ""jet set"" perpetually attempts to create ""a fleeting aesthetic of sublime social beauty,"" this seems to involve little more than gleeful ostentation, promiscuity and idleness. His attempts to elevate himself, as in the claim that he and coauthor Starkie (Fergie: Her Secret Life) uncovered secret KGB files that characterize the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed as an assassination, only italicizes the venality on display in these lurid pages. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)