Subject: LEISURE & ARTS -- Bookshelf: Steel Magnolias ---- By Andrew Ferguson Date: Published: 12/14/89 (116 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. LEISURE & ARTS -- Bookshelf: Steel Magnolias ---- By Andrew Ferguson "It's my turn to describe what happened," ghostwrites ghostwriter William Novak for Nancy Reagan at the start of her best-selling memoir ("My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan," 384 pages, $21.95), and that faint note of petulance sets the tone for all that follows. After eight long years of rope-a-dope while her enemies delivered body blows to her and Ronald Reagan, the former First Lady is at last free to strike back. But she forgoes the roundhouse, the upper cut, the rabbit punch to the ribs: Mrs. Reagan's weapon of choice is the stiletto. Her list of enemies is long and unsurprising to anyone who followed her career in the White House. Nancy was the Reagan Revolution's Madame Defarge in reverse. While she labored, most often surreptitiously, against the apparatchiks of the conservative movement that carried Reagan into office, she cooed tirelessly for the big feet of the Washington establishment -- Katharine Graham, Meg Greenfield, Robert Strauss -- during languorous lunches at the Jockey Club and long walks on Martha's Vineyard. Thus in her memoir the dagger is out for Ed Meese, William Clark, Bill Casey, Lyn Nofziger, and anyone else who made the mistake of thinking that her husband was obliged to adhere to political principles beyond his immediate popularity. Most famously, of course, there is Donald Regan, chief of staff for the first two years of the second Reagan administration, whose apparently endless feud with Mrs. Reagan is beginning to resemble the Battle of Stalingrad -- any decent observer wants both sides to lose. Close behind Mr. Regan on Nancy's hit list is her daughter, Patti, who can be considered a Reaganite in the biological sense only. Their feud also has been well-publicized, and Mrs. Reagan leaves no doubt as to who started it. Born with inconvenient prematurity, the kid spent her childhood crying for hours at a stretch, demanding constant attention and refusing to eat her vegetables. It is Mrs. Reagan's conviction, apparently, that Sandalistas like Patti are born, not made. What can a mother do? She could look to the stars, that's what. Mrs. Reagan says that concerns about Patti as well as her husband's safety drove her into the arms of astrological quacks. Her chapter on astrology is dopey enough, but there are many other passages equally embarrassing in a book filled with inadvertent revelations. Her amanuensis Mr. Novak is paid to prevent such things, but with his continuing professional success -- he also ghosted Tip O'Neill's and Lee Iacocca's memoirs -- he seems to have devolved from ghostwriter to sleep-scribbler. Take this item about Rex Scouten, the White House's chief usher and perennial factotum whose slavish devotion to first ladies is legendary. Scouten "helped me in countless ways," Mr. Novak lets Mrs. Reagan say. "We became such good friends that I named our dog after him." The book rises to poignancy at times, particularly when Mrs. Reagan writes of her husband's shooting, and their respective cancer operations. Even without these trials Mrs. Reagan's tenure was, after all, no cakewalk. The press was remorselessly unpleasant -- confused reporters pegged her first as a California housewife, then as a hemline-crazed airhead, and finally as a Machiavellian dragon lady. Yet she somehow endured endless sessions with Raisa Gorbachev (who remains the best argument for a continued arms race), and, more improbably, managed to survive doses of Bob Strauss's luncheon chatter. The key to her survival was a steely sense of self. That character, so nakedly exposed in this memoir, will not be to everyone's taste, and for those readers who close "My Turn" thinking they've seen the worst, Ransdell Pierson, a reporter for the New York Post, has someone he'd like you to meet. "The Queen of Mean: The Unauthorized Biography of Leona Helmsley" (Bantam Books, 398 slimy pages, $4.95 paperback), proves that in the steely-sense-of-self sweepstakes, Mrs. Reagan was a piker. Mrs. Helmsley, of course, will need every bit of steel in her body and maybe some nice fluffy towels from one of her ugly New York hotels, now that she faces four years in the dungeon for tax fraud. On Tuesday, the 69-year-old billionairess wife of developer Harry Helmsley -- who was deemed incompetent to stand trial -- was further sentenced to a whopping $7.2 million fine, a small fortune in tax restitution and court costs, and 750 hours of community service -- probably at a Harlem facility for babies born with the AIDS virus and drug addiction. Mr. Pierson probably hoped she'd get more time on aesthetic grounds alone. He interviewed everyone who has something hateful to say about Mrs. Helmsley -- a Herculean task -- and presents their comments with little apparent editing. His method is to introduce by means of topic sentence some aspect of Mrs. Helmsley's character -- say, her venality, mendacity, cruelty or cupidity -- and then type out paragraph upon paragraph of verbatim testimony as to its depth and breadth. The result is sometimes funny, mostly numbing, and never insightful. We never learn what turned Mrs. Helmsley into the monster described at such length in these pages. In his conclusion, Mr. Pierson offers some lame neo-Freudian theorizing, but he passes over in silence what may in fact be the key to Mrs. Helmsley's hideous behavior. During meals, he tells us, the Queen invariably demanded a "mound of rock-hard jalapeno peppers," which she would eat "like popcorn." If you ask me, that explains everything. --- Mr. Ferguson is an editorial writer for Scripps-Howard News Service. [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]