THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN

This tasteless epic--live from Hollywood--opens when Maureen Covillion, an appallingly naive little starlet from West Virginia, rips the buttons off the pants (the '30's) of scriptwriter Tony Lemlich before making the scene with him, 8 (apple) times. But this is not a Fellini film; it's a skin flick and its primary trouble is that it is topheavy. So is Maureen and after her first release, Queen of the Campus, she has some of her enormous endowment in the thoracic region surgically reduced. Quite a bit of snipping would have improved this book which runs to 600 pages without much support from its story or characters. Maureen walks out on Tony pretty quickly but leaves him with a slow burn; she then attaches herself to Josie, a prestige star, and becomes her ""warm, lovely, passionate partner,"" eventually appropriating her acting style and her roles. Tony marries and has six children; but when last seen he is persuaded to work over an old script of his as a musical vehicle for Maureen and he is properly used by her for the last time.... Real names and occasional revelations from Hollywood to Broadway contribute to the proceedings and sometimes one suspects that Mr. Rosner could have written a better book if he hadn't been re-writing some of these annals of Harlow-try.