Beauty and Her Beasts : A historical character so wild and colorful you’ll forget she was real : ALL FOR LOVE: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar,<i> By John Vernon (Simon & Schuster; $23; 235 pp;)</i>

John Vernon’s historical novel “All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar” could more aptly be titled “All for Naught,” but that wouldn’t sell many copies. For nothing were the motivations and maneuvers of the Colorado Cleopatra who went from rags to riches to rags. For nothing would have been her final mad musings if they had not been mined by Vernon.

Author of the acclaimed “Peter Doyle,” Vernon again displays his grasp of history and his talent for fiction. Page by page, his writing is fabulously rich, but this time his story inevitably goes bust like most of the Colorado mines. It plays out in the tailings of the true lives of its subjects, Baby Doe Tabor and her daughter, Silver Dollar.

In “All for Love,” Baby Doe arrives in the mining country in 1879. Newly married but not attached, she promptly leaves her husband for a slew of sexual romps with mining camp types. A Jewish merchant, a pipsqueak paperhanger, a political hack. She keeps up her dalliances even after marrying the rich and immense Horace Tabor, owner of the Matchless Mine.

Baby enjoys Tabor’s money and the two daughters they produce, until the bottom falls out of the silver market. One daughter, christened Silver Dollar, becomes a prostitute and novelist in Al Capone’s Chicago. Baby goes to work underground; she refuses to sell the Matchless and ends up in rags in a shack beside her derelict mine.

Baby is beautiful, resourceful and resolute, but if she ever loves any of the men in her life, it is never evident. Baby Doe thinks of her first husband as an “old dog” and of her other lovers as collectible strays. Even with Tabor she is after what she wants most: the finer things in life and lots of them. Baby Doe’s motto is “Get rich. Then get innocent,” but her character remains infantile through the story.

Of course, the real Baby Doe Tabor may well have been this way, and if so, Vernon has expertly captured her flaws, as well as her Circe-like power over men. Baby Doe shares in the history of the American West with other colorful women, such as Calamity Jane and Molly B’Damm, who got famous partly because they could use men’s weaknesses to their own advantage.

Vernon’s Baby Doe is often disgusted by men, but “disgust made Baby amorously inclined. In his dirty ear she whispered atrocities. She thought of the smell inside his pants . . . and felt comforted and nauseous, ready to buck her hips and die.”

Too late into his story, Vernon incorporates Baby Doe’s actual writings, reminding the reader that this woman was wonderfully real. “A bird came & clung to my screen calling me Oh God save the soul of one who is dying. . . . All at once I grew older & wondered at my own gravity--tried to throw it off.”

It was late in her life when she wrote these sweet scraps, but this illustrates a problem with historical fiction. It must show lives as they were lived. The novelist may wish to make history into art, but finds he is stuck with the script. Things happen for no reason of plot or aesthetics. Characters come and go. They die at the wrong times. They wear unfortunate names. Baby Doe’s lovers, for example, include a Howard, a Harold and a Horace, also called Haw.

History may be inevitability applied to chronology. However, a novel needs more than inescapable circumstances. It needs inexplicable characters who appear set, then surprise. Yet in “All for Love,” when the first Mrs. Tabor shows up at Baby Doe’s door, the two women too quickly and easily reconcile. And when the political hack’s wife catches him and Baby in flagrante, no repercussions echo through these pages.

At another point, no one other than Oscar Wilde arrives in Leadville to give a lecture on culture to the uncultured miners. The famous aesthete dines with Horace Tabor at the bottom of the Matchless Mine, eating on fine linen beneath the rough beams. Vernon does take some small advantage of Wilde, presenting a section from Wilde’s point of view, but he doesn’t let Baby engage Wilde in the narrative. Oh, the lost opportunity.

As Wilde tells his confused Leadville audience, “We spend our days looking for the secret of life. Well! The secret of life . . . is ahhht.” Of course he means art. “All for Love” mixes both life and “ahhht,” in generous portions but in the wrong proportions.