BOOK REVIEW Helen Douglas: The Dark Side of the ‘40s : CENTER STAGE; A Biography of Helen Gahagan Douglas 1900-1980, <i> by Ingrid Winther Scobie</i> Oxford, $24.95; 368 pages

Although movies like “Mambo Kings” have cast the 1940s in the golden light of myth, “Center Stage” provides a stark and tragic contrast. Focusing on Helen Gahagan Douglas, the actress-turned-politician who was sacrificed on the altar of McCarthyism by an ambitious young climber named Richard Nixon, it reminds us that the era had its dark side.

“More than 40 years later,” writes Ingrid Winther Scobie, “the 1950 Senate campaign in California remains in the collective memory of people who care about American politics.” The race “became a spectral presence in Richard Nixon’s subsequent political career, a hoary ghost.”

Profiling Douglas with sweep and richness, “Center Stage” evokes her childhood in one of the more fashionable neighborhoods of turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, her early experiences as an actor at Barnard and then on the Broadway stage, her flirtation with grand opera, her sometimes troubled marriage to actor Melvyn Douglas, and her fateful self-exile in Hollywood, which ultimately led her from the sound stage to the floor of Congress.

The young Douglas was known for her “high-class sex appeal,” but the real woman was more serious than her early experiences as an ingenue might suggest. “She looked lush and sultry,” recalls one of Douglas’ friends. “She was really a puritan.”

Clearly, Scobie has studied--and successfully evokes--more than one emblematic era in American history. Broadway in the ‘20s, Hollywood in the ‘30s and Washington in the ‘40s are the settings in which Douglas, who died in 1980, acted out her professional ambitions.

We learn that Los Angeles, in particular, “had a most depressing effect on us,” as Melvyn Douglas once wrote about the couple’s first visit to California in 1931. “Everything seemed to be the emanation of a delirious vaudeville actor’s nightmare.”

Douglas’ acting career cooled off even as Melvyn’s turned hot. Her training and experience as a stage actress and an operatic singer were little appreciated, and she was reduced to appearing in a lurid sci-fi thriller called “She.” As a result, Douglas may be the only American politician who once turned down a request to pose for publicity shots “standing naked in a flame.”

But Hollywood in the ‘30s and ‘40s, with its “swirling political ferment,” offered an unexpected opportunity to Helen Gahagan Douglas. She allowed Carey McWilliams to conduct a meeting of what was called the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Migratory Workers on her patio--and “that afternoon I took my first step into politics.”

Encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, she won a seat in Congress and quickly acquired a prominent reputation as a liberal and an activist. (For example, she appeared at a rally on the public control of nuclear energy with her fellow progressive, Ronald Reagan.) And she was known fondly as “Our Helen” by the black community within her congressional district.

Douglas’ progressive politics caught up with her in 1950, when she ran for the United States Senate against Richard Nixon and found herself smeared as the “Pink Lady.” She retaliated with name-calling of her own--it was Douglas who first dubbed her opponent “Tricky Dick”--but fear, politics and gender simply overwhelmed her candidacy.

“What in fact may have hurt her the most,” writes Scobie, “is that for which she is most remembered--her idealism.”

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Fields of Glory” by Jean Rouaud (Arcade) .