Razzle Dazzle

This collaborative effort by actress and onetime Playboy model Stevens and former PR agent Hegner is most notable for the story behind the roman clef. Stevens shared studio and screen with Elvis Presley, costarring in the King's Girls! Girls! Girls!; journalists guessed that they were romantically linked. Sidney Bastion is a Memphis reporter when he first meets Johnny Gault (the Elvis character) and recognizes Gault's potent and marketable combination of voice and pelvic gyrations. Inventing Gault's past so that it reads like something ""even Gault's mother wouldn't recognize,"" Sidney rides the na ve singer's rocket to the top as he becomes the center of Sidney's PR empire for most of the 1960s and '70s. Johnny's womanizing, drug habit and violence don't fit his public image, of course, and eventually a tell-all biographer threatens to bust the myth to pieces. Even when Johnny dies of an overdose, however, the PR machine keeps grinding along. This behind-the-scenes look at the making of a legend shows more about the mythmakers and the careful construction of celebrity than it does about the presumably more interesting legend himself. The story tries to portray Johnny's paradoxical makeup: ""In reality Johnny Gault was more simple than he was complex."" But the Johnny we see is little more than a pathetic wraith, obsessed with his dead mother and overshadowed by his manipulators. Unintentionally funny sex scenes pepper the novel, efforts to make dialogue snappily au courant backfire and the narration varies from stiff to limp. None of the characters inspire empathy, and by the time Sidney's jaded conscience pushes him to an act of redemption, it's too late to make him a sympathetic hero. (July)