HONOR THY WIFE

A highly involved soaper whose title’s irony is clear when criminal lawyer Terry Brett shows himself willing to honor both of his wives. Back in the middle ’60s in Port River, Oregon, Terry loves smart-talking little hippie Allison Desmond. But Allison leaves him mid-novel to chase after her soul in India. Terry abandons his practice, leaves town, and suffers anxiety attacks but is brought back to health by the love of millionaire pediatrician and widow Valerie Holland, whom he marries. But then Allison reappears, bearing Scan, Terry’s surprise son. Before her return, however, there’s been a great web of plotting, largely around a famous but vicious pro basketball player, Earl Raymond, who has ruined a knee, can no longer play, and has been denied his insurance by his franchise owner, Jonah Wolfe. Earl induces Terry, his old college roommate, to handle a suit against Wolfe. Terry wins a half million from Wolfe, another hundred pages pass, Val and Terry are about to be married, and when Val introduces him to her father’surprise!—it’s Jonah Wolfe, world-class hedonist. Conveniently, when baby Scan comes down with typhoid, pediatrician Val is on hand to save his life, but even so, married now to Val, Terry realizes that his heart, at its wildest center, belongs to Allison—and so he marries her too. But after Val saves Scan, Allison is so gratified that she tells Terry he’s not actually Scan’s father, that the whole business of the suit against Wolfe was cooked up, and that Earl led busty little Allison back into Terry’s path for his own ends. Even telling all this hardly gives the plot away, nor does it suggest Bogner’s talent as a dialogue writer, whatever the prolixities of the tale. Good storytelling, and without the ghoulish moments of To Die in Provence (1977). ($100,000 ad/promo)