THE FOURSOME

From writer/stockbroker Spooner (Sex and Money, Confessions of a Stockbroker, etc.), a 40-year saga of four suburban Boston men whose mutual interest in golf keeps them in touch: a programmatic trot, only occasionally amusing, through the lives of some high- rollers that's more a series of dramatized notecards than fully rendered fiction. In the 1950's, in a Boston suburb, our four heroes turn bouts as caddies into a lifelong association. Dickie Rosenberg, who, when young, ``thought that anyone who wasn't Jewish was poor,'' becomes, after Harvard, the shallow and wealthy Richard Rose, clothing manufacturer. Duke Hennessey, glitzy and slick, becomes a real- estate developer whose only sense of tradition involves the twice- a-decade game of golf he plays for big stakes with his three buddies. Freddy Temple, who at St. Luke's school ``thought that singing was for fairies,'' becomes a venture capitalist. And Stan ``Red'' Singer, after getting kicked out of school and after a term in the service, finds his calling in Hollywood, where he becomes a big deal. Spooner, writing by outline, touches every clichÇ of the intervening 40 years—from summer camp to senior sex in high school to the Kennedy assassination. On Boxing Day at the Harvard Club, the four cardboard figures, drunk, make their golf-playing pact. The first five-year reunion, in 1973, is The Big Chill; they meet again in 1978, then in Puerto Rico in 1983, and finally, full of aches and pains both financial and emotional, back home in 1988 at Temple's 50th birthday party. Strictly miniseries stuff.