The Positively <i> Wonderful</i> Life and Times of Barbara Bush : Books: What, you expected the former First Lady to reveal family secrets? That’s just not her style.

Wonderful, wonderful.

To hear Barbara Bush tell it, Rye, N.Y., was a wonderful place to grow up. Her mother was a wonderful gardener. Her family took all their meals together, a wonderful tradition. Until she met George Bush, she had never met anyone quite as wonderful as her own father.

Their courtship was wonderful, especially the visit to Walker’s Point in Maine, where one day she would bring her own wonderful family. Her future mother-in-law was wonderful. Their first dog as newlyweds, a poodle named Turbo, was wonderful. Their adventures as young marrieds in Odessa, Tex., were wonderful. Christmas was wonderful. The teachers who helped her son Neil with his reading problems were wonderful.

The doctors who delivered her children were wonderful. So were the kids’ baby-sitters. The house they settled into when George Bush came to Washington as a congressman was wonderful. The house they moved into when he became President was even more wonderful. In fact, life has been so . . . well . . . wonderful that Lisa Drew, editor of “Barbara Bush: A Memoir” (Scribner’s, 1994), restricted her to one wonderful per page.

Bush managed to work around this constraint by dousing her readers in a 532-page waterfall of pure sugar. Life for Barbara Bush is not only wonderful, it turns out, it is also precious, lovely, charming, delightful, marvelous, extraordinary, heavenly and--if you happen to be among her seemingly infinite circle of friends--dear, darling, precious, delightful, lovely, marvelous, charming and often adorable.

None of which seems faintly hyperbolic, the former First Lady said in an interview here to promote her latest literary undertaking. Writing the book, poring through a lifetime of diaries that devote equal depth to diplomacy and to daily domestic details “made me think,” she said. “It reminded me that I really have been the world’s luckiest woman.”

Lucky, she said, throwing a nod to the fates who sent her--at a Christmas vacation dance in Greenwich, Conn., when she was 16--a “wonderful-looking young boy” with the endearing nickname of “Poppy” Bush. Lucky, definitely--but also privileged. “Privilege of every kind,” she writes, right from Day One, right from the very earliest moments of a childhood that saw her surrounded by chums named Posy and Wease, Prissy and Pen.

But life was not entirely white gloves and debutante balls. The summer between Ashley Hall--the boarding school the young Barbara Pierce attended in Charleston, S.C.--and Smith College, she appalled her mother by taking a job in a nuts-and-bolts factory. At Smith, already besotted with love for Poppy Bush, she rebuffed blind dates and was pegged as a lesbian. As a new bride, her landlady laughed when she shrank all her silk underwear. Tired of playing bridge and hanging out with “some of George’s more frivolous friends” while her husband was at Yale, she signed up to take a course. It was known as Pots & Pans.

Then came genuine adversity. Pauline Robinson Bush was 3 when what her mother thought was spring fever turned out to be leukemia. Numb with grief, Mrs. Bush played golf the day after little Robin’s death--and failed to mention the event to a friend she encountered in the locker room.

Along with her undyed white hair and her triple strand of unmistakably fake pearls--”Can you imagine what real ones would cost?” she asked, aghast--that kind of buttoned-up quality came to be associated with Barbara Bush, fearsomely perfect political wife. She raised children, she bred dogs, she embraced safe causes and--in public, at least--she almost never contradicted her husband.

But this description makes Mrs. Bush bristle.

“I never felt buttoned-up. I never was told what to say,” she said, indignation creeping into her voice. “Sometimes I wish I had been.”

She flared briefly to point out that Americans do expect more of a First Lady than a woman who stands by her man--and keeps her mouth shut.

“I guess you don’t remember Eleanor Roosevelt,” she said, too refined to sound snappish.

Still, the ideal public servant’s spouse, in Mrs. Bush’s view, is Denis Thatcher, who stood by quietly in the shadow of his wife’s position and legendary head-wear.

“If your husband or wife runs for office, you would expect to show them the courtesy that you hope they would show to you if you ran. If I ran for office and George and I disagreed on something”--an unlikely possibility, she conceded--”I would think, ‘What’s he doing, speaking up?’

“It’s just the exact same way you raise your children,” she said. “You might not agree on something, but we always tried to show a united front for the children. We might talk about it in the bedroom, and then come out and be Mom and Pop. Otherwise, you’re just confusing the world. Who cares what the unelected person thinks?”

In any event, she added, “I wouldn’t have any big disagreements with George Bush”--when she refers to her husband, it sounds like one name, Georgebush-- “but boy, do people try to find you sort of disagreeing and all that.”

*

In that context, the notion that Barbara Bush might have opinions that deviated from her husband’s--the suggestion that maybe she had some sort of closet emotional life--sent wags spinning when her “Memoir” came out. Whoops--there it was, proof Mrs. Bush thinks that--in most cases--abortion is a matter of personal choice. (George Bush, it will be remembered, campaigned as a defender of fetal rights.) And for the first time, she revealed that in the mid 1970s, while in the midst of menopause, she battled depression.

“Night after night, George held me, weeping in his arms while I tried to explain my feelings,” she writes, noting that she never sought professional help for her problems.

“I almost wonder why he didn’t leave me. I knew it was wrong, but couldn’t seem to pull out of it.”

To her legion of close, dear, darling friends, such vulnerability came as no surprise. Nor did the arch politeness that colors Mrs. Bush’s recollections of many political opponents--and even some confreres. Richard Nixon, for example, may have been a great President, but “he did not make it easy to like him.” And Bill Clinton delivered a perfectly decent inaugural speech. It sounded just like John F. Kennedy’s, “but not quite as eloquent.”

When someone earns her enmity or her annoyance, she takes digs that leave no visible wounds--but afterward, smart sharply. Often, she veils her harsh judgments in an icy kind of whimsy.

“That’s the Barbara Bush humor that occasionally shows through,” said Sheila Tate, a press adviser in the Reagan and Bush White Houses. “She can be a little on the wicked side.”

But she is not above turning that mischievous streak on herself. Her book teems with examples of her well-intentioned--if often misplaced--naivete. Far from being too embarrassed to admit it, she laughs at the fact that during her husband’s ambassadorship to China, her command of the language consisted mainly of persuading the inhabitants of a dogless country that C. Fred, the family pooch, was not a cat.

And since neither she nor her husband could read Chinese characters, they were unconcerned by propaganda posters with messages like “Beware of the Imperialist dogs who invaded Vietnam.”

With their calligraphy, “the signs looked rather pretty to us,” she remembered.

She can also be blunt. Sifting through applications for her White House press secretary, she came upon the name of Anna Perez.

“Hurrah,” cheered Mrs. Bush. “A Hispanic.”

Never mind that Perez is actually African American; she got the job.

“You see,” said Perez, who now works for the Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles, “she’s always so direct.”

*

These days, her straight talk is often directed at her 13 grandchildren. Giant family lunches are a ritual of the Bush clan, both in Houston and at the compound on the coast of Maine. Recently, she recounted with a certain clear delight, “I did shock my children by talking to some of the sub-teen-agers and teen-agers about sex.” When the subject was broached, the 69-year-old, white-haired grandmother jumped right in.

“I heard one of my children say, ‘Mother’ “--and she mimicked the most mortified tone she could muster--” ’they don’t know about that!’ ” Bush looked her offspring straight in the eye. “I said, ‘they do too.’ ”

Now had that same conversation dared to take place in her own childhood, “my mother would have left the room,” she said. “And I would never have talked to my kids like that.”

But when it comes to handing out advice, she observed, grandparents often have a license that lets them skip a generation. The grandkids actually listen.

“Anyway,” Mrs. Bush reflected, “times have changed.”

That quiet understatement might be as much of a reason as any to commit her own experiences to the printed page. In steady succession, the First Ladies of recent decades have penned their autobiographies, offering their own personal views of American public life.

But if Nancy Reagan, Bush’s immediate predecessor, went so far as to title her book “My Turn” and to spout venom like a geyser, Barbara Bush had little interest in venting. There wasn’t much record to set straight, after all, since she and her husband agreed on just about everything.

So why on Earth would she hammer out all those adjectives? Why dwell on her depression, or the sadness of her daughter’s death? Why suffer through promotional interviews in 12 cities--and signings in some of America’s lesser-known shopping malls?

Surely it could not have been the money that motivated her?

Here comes her well-honed candor:

“Yes.”

It seems that days after her husband lost the election, their attorney sat her down for a tough talk about finances. She’d given away all the money from her earlier books, “C. Fred’s Story” and “Millie’s Book.” (Now it can be told: She did not act solely as secretary to her pets. She actually wrote both best-selling books, then donated the proceeds to charity.)

Her lawyer warned that because of her work in the literacy movement, and because of her popularity, she would continue to be besieged with correspondence when the family left Washington. Fine, she shrugged. She’d let her husband’s office handle it. No dice, said the lawyer. The office of the former President cannot touch one piece of paper pertaining to the former First Lady.

“So we got to figuring out how we would pay for all this,” Mrs. Bush said.

She fulfilled every writer’s ongoing fantasy of pulling in a gigantic advance with no sample chapter, no outline and no literary agent.

“The offers were so grand, I just couldn’t say no,” she explained. She smiled broadly, revealing once again that she is much prettier in person than in the pictures that make her look so crinkly.

“And I’m grateful I did.”

Writing the book helped her, she said. It enabled her to process so many of the experiences she has had in nearly 50 years of life with George Bush. It permitted her to sort through her diaries, and to ship some off to the Bush library with instructions that they be opened 50 years from now.

“It kept me busy,” she said, during a time when the transition out of public life might have been bumpy.

And it reminded her anew that for Barbara Bush, life has been--could there be another word-- wonderful .