I'LL TAKE MANHATTAN

Krantz takes all those glossy, high-schlock staples--a flighty, ""madcap"" gamin (a 1920's hand-me-down); a family executive suite showdown with scandalous flashbacks; and Manhattan glamour digs and appointments--for a bouncy, good-natured romancing spin on (probably) gilded wings (note the success of Scruples, Princess Daisy, Mistral's Daughter, etc). Jet-traveling, cut-up Maxi Amberville and her brothers--nice bravely-blind Toby and absent homosexual Justin--are about to be dealt a nasty surprise. Seems that handsome Uncle Cutter, avaricious brother of their late father, Zachary, founder of the Amberville magazine empire, is about to marry mother Lily, and gain control of the company to destroy all his hated brother had built. Flashbacks detail the roots of Cutter's anti-Zach campaign and also the love affair of Lily and Cutter. Porcelain English Lily, who doffed a ballet career for marriage, found that good Zach's tender wooing wore thing--oh, for some self-realizing wild sex! But one sight of Cutter, and Lily's struck dumb with ""mute primal longing, helpless and quivering."" In phone booths, on bathmats, on office floors--Bang! Quiver! Wow! Justin is conceived thereby, but raised as Zach's. Back in the present, daughter Maxi sets out to salvage just one magazine--a sentimental favorite of her father's, B&B, which she restructures as a magazine that ""doesn't try to change you""--a magazine just for fun. While Maxi toils away erraticallly but effectively, there are more flashbacks to her troubles of the heart. First husband was graphics designer Rocco, father of daughter Angelica. Rocco split because Maxi insisted on living rich. Second was ""needy, lost and lusty"" Bad Dennis, and last a Scottish laird into whose rotting castle Maxi imported two (hilarious) Manhattan interior decorators. During B&B's renaissance, and tripping up Cutter, both Maxi and Lily will straighten out; Justin is in and out of a scrape; an old murder is uncovered; and Maxi moves from Trump Tower (Donald T. makes a cameo) to doff jeans and carry out pizza as well as humble pie. Much gossip, twanging bedsprings and cracking wise--Big City style. A shoo-in.