CRYSTAL CLEAR

Professional celebrity-watchers Sheppard and Blackwell have pooled their talents for namedropping and little else (""Jackie and the Paleys are coming"" on page 1 and so it goes) to produce an amateurish novel of spectacular dullness. This is the lame, tame tale of the rise and fall of beauty-products empress Crystal Young, whose deep, dark secret is that she's twenty years younger than she has always claimed to be and therefore not the possessor of some miraculous fountain of youth (she used her look-alike mother's passport when she arrived from Europe in the Fifties). Through the years, Crystal makes sure that she's up on the fashions (""Haven't you read about the sack dress?""), one step ahead of partner-lover Adam, and on speaking terms with Grace, Liz, and ""There's Rose Kennedy, in the white dress, talking with Nicole Alphand,"" and ""Wasn't he recently married to Mary Wells?"" Now, however, even though Crystal has this great idea for Mobile Beauty Spas, Adam is forcing her out of the business--after all, she claims to be 65. But canny Crystal gets her own TV talk show and plans to tell all in a book: ""The fact that I was using my mother's passport and that you went along with the hoax will make fascinating reading. The book can't miss being a best seller."" Don't count on it, Crystal. Forget it, Eugenia. Stuff it, Earl.