Books: Scant Leads

NAKED TRUTH—Clare Sheridan—Harpers ($5.00). Notorious Clare Sheridan has done some more autobiography, and has given it a title which implies all that a gossip-loving public has long been led to expect of her. But she lets them down. Chapter after chapter denies the gossip about her trip to Russia with Kamenev (Mme. K.’s jealousy counteracting her husband’s hospitality), her visit to Kernel Pasha (another wife’s jealousy interfering), her camping trip with Charlie Chaplin (the press descending on the fifth day to claim him for its own). And it is not as a wanderlusty siren that she presents herself, but as the brave, beautiful woman who rushes in with passionate intellectual curiosity where goody-goodies fear to tread. With the highly respectable necessity of supporting her two children she turns sculptress and newspaper correspondent, following the scantest lead to new quarry. Mussolini’s large feet she found grotesquely absurd, his shuffling step that of a defiant child rather than a decisive man. She made his first sitting the last because his conduct was “bestial,” “unwritable.”