The Twyla Zone : PUSH COMES TO SHOVE; An Autobiography By Twyla Tharp (A Linda Grey/Bantam Book: $24.50; 352 pp.)

It doesn’t matter that the glamorous black-and-white portrait spread across the whole dust-jacket cover of her autobiography, “Push Comes to Shove,” is, clearly, a physical idealization of Twyla Tharp: Its overexposed lighting, combined with chiaroscuro makeup and elegant head position, bespeaks a fashion model’s sculptural perfection.

For in this bravely thoughtful memoir--it shines with Tharp’s flinty intelligence, keen insight and startling candor--there is no attempt to construct a false persona. The raison d’etre of Richard Avedon’s photo, it turns out, is his penchant for making a subject’s romantic dreams come true, even those of a one-time tomboy.

And Tharp, the madcap choreographer who--after 25 years of penetrating pop culture, bringing modern dance into the mainstream and de-sanctifying ballet--takes her place in the pantheon of American originals, has some key dreams that prove exasperatingly, even painfully, elusive.

After all, it wasn’t easy being raised in Rialto, Calif., as the oldest (and smartest) child of Indiana Quakers--zealously overcompensating ones, at that--and then left to fulfill a prophesy: “She’ll grow up to be famous,” wrote mother Tharp on Twyla’s birth announcement. (Yes, that was her given name!)

Love and approval were earned only with achievement: straight A’s, seven school changes to accommodate excellence, chauffeuring (30,000 miles in one year!) to private music, dance and language lessons. “By age eight, leisure, if it ever came, produced only dread,” Tharp recalls. While Tharp’s mother assuaged her grief over the death of a second daughter by intimately involving herself in Twyla’s life, Tharp found their relationship oppressive.

And what of the other bewildering contradictions in a puritanical upbringing? Cap sleeves were too risque. Yet an unmindful mom, the proprietor of a drive-in movie, sent her kid on head-counting missions (to assess the number of non-paying customers). It should have come as no surprise that Twyla would also get to witness an unimaginable array of back-seat sexual gymnastics.

Tharp, with her raised adult consciousness, “experi-enced the drive-in as one large piece of pop art, a three-dimensional enactment of the world’s great erotic traditions,” courtesy of the steamy megascreen images imitated by the sequestered couples. What’s more, she claims to have sensed, even then, “that this perpetually suspended condition could be translated into art.”

Still, this was a girl whose parental prohibitions denied her a prom night or group hayrides and parties, indeed the everyday social conventions that keep people from feeling like loners. Is it any wonder that Tharp’s “Nine Sinatra Songs” would brilliantly capture the longing for and allure of romance, becoming a wish-ful fillment exhilaration studded with verismo gems of body language?

In context, it’s not surprising that she cannot recall any physical affection with her distant father, only “blurry baby photographs proving the contrary.” But she acknowledges that the alienation in her family left her with a void that could be filled only with constant work and ever-damaging relationships (two divorces, failed serial affairs).

If such deficits can spur creativity, and this chronicle suggests as much, then the world has been enriched. Tharp, who stands apart from such paragons of the American dance scene as (the late) Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Mark Morris, brings a witty, deadpan irreverence to her blazingly terse and complex, sometimes dark-toned works.

What’s more, she weaves into her dances the thread of prevailing social forces; “Deuce Coupe,” the first big Establishment venture (for the Joffrey Ballet), mirrored the loneliness of the long-distance ballerina (and Tharp’s own) against the roustabout world of graffiti scribblers, bugalooers and gently alienated Beach Boys, while “Push Comes to Shove,” a cheeky testament to Mikhail Baryshnikov’s womanizing, challenged the Russian heartthrob to pull off a dazzling impersonation of Jimmy Cagney and use his virtuosity in new, jaunty, quicker-than-the-eye feats of bravura.

Tharp’s emergence from the cloistered avant-garde to such high-visibility projects as the above--her transition from a purist who eschewed curtain calls to a celebrity choreographer who elevated pop culture to High Art--came as a consequence of personal maturing: A son, Jesse, led her to appreciate the “other.” Art must not be an exercise in self-absorption, she gradually saw, but a chance to have a love affair with the audience. Joffrey, for instance, hired her “to make successful art.”

No small part of Tharp’s entrepreneurial spirit--which extends to Broadway (“Singin’ in the Rain,” a flop) and numerous movies, and found her oversizing the budget at ABT--harks back to her mother’s raging ambition. But as success beckons, she also sees herself avenging the historical subjugation of American women in dance, already a stepchild of the arts.

By putting the highest price on her head, she reverses the notion that “(dancing) women have been allowed to rise to the top because there is no profit to be made by holding them down.” Indeed, she seems to have the last laugh: Her current national tour with Baryshnikov will net each of them $1 million.

That very aspect of commercial championship may earn her disdain among the critical Establishment, but nothing compared to the attacks from that quarter for her book’s confessional material: bouts with alcoholism and drugs, guilt over leaving her son with caretakers, despair connected to two abortions and the career-vs.-personal-relationship dichotomy many women face.

The self-anointed, deconstructionist tribunes of all that is pure and purely abstract have condemned Tharp not just for indulging what they typically call “psychobabble” but also for staging choreography that draws on her own life.

For readers unencumbered with a negative bias, though, there will likely be no misunderstanding. Tharp’s tough-guy facade, for example, as she encounters such fearsomely celebrated figures as Balanchine and Robbins, is clearly described as a bravado defense against her own terror. It’s what makes her imperfect, thus vulnerable and human.

In writing the book she did, Twyla Tharp has left us a document to treasure, one that culls the anguish often accompanying creativity of this high order.