JOSH: My Up and Down, In and Out Life

Memoirs by theater factotums are often disappointing, lacking either hard shop talk for the cognoscenti or revealing self-scrutiny; this autobiography by veteran producer-director-writer Logan offers more than most. Logan aims to entertain--and does, in recalls of his wisteria childhood in Louisiana; life at Culver Academy, marked by accomplishments and a splendid uniform (a disadvantage only in a brothel); and Princeton with its lure of the Triangle Club. Dreams came true fast: soon he was a BMOC, visited Moscow to watch Stanislavsky in rehearsal, and joined a university theater group on Cape Cod with Henry Fonda, Margaret Sullavan, Jimmy Stewart and other embryo luminaries. Logan then seemed to clamber up rapidly in Broadway hierarchies with intervals in Hollywood. (There's a hilarious recreation of a stint as dialogue director with the itchy polyglot trio of Dietrich-Boyer-Schildkraut.) Throughout he is fairly generous in sharing stage savvy in last-ditch play and business doctoring. Logan has run hard, and as he was to find out, on a dangerous high--he was hospitalized twice for manic depression. From one who declares he was ""written by a madly irresponsible playwright,"" a reasonably responsible accounting.