CALIFORNIA STREET

Jessica Saxe, one of the great ladies of San Francisco, is dying, and at the hospital are waiting the people whose story this is--Anchylus her husband, the editor- publisher of an influential paper; her daughters, Alexandra Baroness Drobny, a sensational ornament of international society since she eloped at her debut, and Sharon, who lived first in the shadow of her sister and then in that of her overbearing husband, a nationally syndicated columnist; Letty Meeker, the gossip columnist of the paper and the object of Alexandra's dying hatred. One person is missing--Anchylus' illegitimate daughter, adopted and always loved by Jessica..who plays Cordelia to her sisters' Regan and Goneril. With Jessica's death, a series of flashbacks fill in the lives of the principal actors played against San Francisco from the beginning of the century to 1949. The novel ends with a proxy fight, a degrading marriage and a long overdue divorce. A family-chronicle novel that is very short on psychology and reasonably long on entertainment, this detailed, eventful book should appeal to the reader who has read its many prototypes,not a few of which have been best sellers.