WHO IS CARLA HART?

Who is Carla Hart? Well she's an actress who's in Hollywood where you can ""only live in the present tense"" seemingly well married to Herb, honest Herb, so organized and sensible and ""hooked on symmetry"" -- more than just hers. She's also unaccountable and unsettled. After all there was that abortion Herb insisted on (did he?) and those trips on coke and the strange beds she sometimes wakes up in. Not to mention the time when she fell asleep in the garage with the motor of the car turned on, or when she put her hand in the garbage disposal. Now things seem to be going from bad (""Mornings like grey flannel"") to worse -- she runs away. Who is Carla Hart? She might remind you of Joan Didion's Maria Wyeth -- with that facile, amusing lip in her sick head. In any case she's one of those precarious people with a streak larger than the San Andreas fault and Miss Barnes has told her story with a fashionable allure so that you won't move away. Not for a minute. So just play it as it lays and read it for the temporal entertainment that it is.