EVE'S HOLLYWOOD

A self-indulgent eight pages of dedication, then the real tinsel -- Hollywood, the most/least American city, orange sunsets, jasmine, snoods and silver shoes around the pool, where all the high school girls are gorgeous ingenues and purple eyeshadowed starlets in Jax slacks go off on Palm Springs weekends with the likes of Sinatra. So what if it isn't really like that? It ought to be. A collage of reminiscences about growing up in Hollywood -- Eve's family arrived during the Depression, along with all the other pretty people; brainy ones headed for New York instead -- which falls somewhere between Day of the Locust (which Eve hates) and Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood in cinemascope -- marvelously readable, funny and cynical, innocent and decadent.