TABOO

This season's dose of glamour and sin—with powerful results for those who like a double scoop of melodrama with their bedroom scenes. Golden-girl Eve Sinclair, a child star in Depression-era Hollywood, learned early that slavishly servicing middle-aged movie moguls can net a girl a long succession of box-office hits. Still, after a highly successful career in adolescent romances, Eve hasn't been able to establish a style that will promote her to the level of adult superstardom. Frustrated, turned ice-cold by ambition, Eve tries making the brass ring come around faster by betraying her colleagues and staging fascinating marriages for the press—little realizing that the real impediment to her glorious future is unknowingly headed Eve's way. Lanky, beautiful Kate Hamilton—a teenaged victim of parental neglect and sexual abuse—drifts cross- country for a while, briefly marrying a young gangster and then abandoning him when a complicated blackmailing scheme ends in the victim's death. Stunned to a zombie-like state by the crime she's helped commit, Kate drifts on to Hollywood, where in no time she's discovered by the greatest new director—handsome, brilliant Joseph Knight. Perhaps it's the shameful death in Knight's own past, perhaps it's his corresponding lack of humor—whatever the cause, an instant chemistry is established between the two, and Knight awards Kate with the starring movie role he's just taken back from difficult and temperamental Eve. Weeks later, Joseph and Kate are married, thus igniting an increasingly alcoholic fury in Eve that, after time out for WW II, will lead the happy couple to destruction. The psychology is primitive, but Gage (The Master Stroke, etc.) knows her market.