FICTION

HOLLYWOOD HUSBANDS by Jackie Collins (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 543 pp.). “Was that what attracted him to Clarissa? Her aloofness? . . . Or did he just like being with her because she was an Oscar-winning actress and not some Hollywood bimbette?” Such are the questions pondered by the rogue males in this raunchy prowl through the corridors of Hollywood power. Among the players: talk-show host Jack Python, sort of a cross between Mike Wallace and Warren Beatty; Mannon Cable, rugged movie star married to a beauty queen but still carrying a torch for his actress ex (“He didn’t know what it was about Melanie-Shanna . . . she just aggravated the hell out of him. Maybe it was because she was his wife and Whitney wasn’t”); and Jade Johnson, top commercials model, on the rebound from an English cad (“No more Jade Johnson, mistress. Oh, no, sirree. That trip was over, finito “). Other characters include a producer named Orville Gooseberger (“ ‘You’ve been to one screening at the Gooseberger house, you’ve been to ‘em all’ ”) and low-life hustler Wes Money, whose principal talent is pleasing the ladies (“Sober or drunk, he could still make ‘em sing Streisand”). Collins, not without a certain hasty humor, propels these unattractive cutouts through a high-gloss world where mirrors “abound” and sheets “await” and women think such thoughts as: “He was rough and crude, but, God, he was exciting!” Backward reels the mind.