IT WAS ALL QUITE DIFFERENT

Now in her 70's, it is the author's first years that get the most attention here. Born in Vienna, her mother went mad just as young Dr. Freud appeared on the scene and her father was a character Dickens might have invented: driving, nagging and continually irritating her. Her career as a harpist put her in touch with Vienna's most splendid as well as its shabby intellectual circles. Her first marriage to poet Max rels was a forerunner of today's ""Let's try it"" school of wedlock that ended in divorce. Her second, to conductor Dr. Hans Lert was her fulfillment, always more important to her than the successful career she found in Germany's publishing empire -- Ullstein House. She wrote Grand Hotel for them and is irritated by the fact that this book identifies her and blots out her many others. Doubleday published it here in the early '80's and, since her trip to see New York and Nelson Doubleday (that's a good story), he and her family remained here permanently. She is direct, acerb and takes advantage of her age to say the outrageous and to ramble. An insight into the way a commercial toryteller works and looks at the world-- for the ladies.