DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711060624

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   74 lines

AN ECLECTIC COLLECTION OF CAN-DO WOMEN

Drama's Blanche Dubois, who relied upon the kindness of strangers, and fiction's Scarlett O'Hara, who most certainly did not, exemplified complementary tender and tough sides of the Southern female myth.

But both ladies remained simultaneously of the passing show and above it, demonstrably employing at least one emphatic digit of the fabled iron fist in the velvet glove.

And they prevailed with such surpassing aplomb that each found motion picture apotheosis in portrayals by British actress Vivien Leigh, herself alternately brilliant onstage and bats off.

Now comes an appropriately exuberant collection of profiles celebrating real women who exemplified that same daunting gotta-be-me standard, Hell's Belles: A Tribute to the Spitfires, Bad Seeds and Steel Magnolias of the New and Old South, by native Alabamian Seale Ballenger (Conari Press, 274 pp., $14.95).

"The trick," confides the author, "is to get what you want without looking like you are even trying."

Because, as Gone With the Wind scribe Margaret Mitchell noted, "The usual masculine disillusionment is in discovering that a woman has a brain."

So recorded here are the likes of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (F. Scott's wife) of Montgomery, Ala., who became bored one Saturday afternoon and phoned the fire department. Breathlessly she informed them of the predicament of a young girl trapped on a rooftop. Then she climbed up there herself and gleefully awaited rescue.

A more recent example might be vampire chronicler Anne Rice of New Orleans. She showed up for a book-signing in a coffin flanked by jazz musicians in full cry. The woman was not to be ignored - and made absolutely sure she wouldn't be.

My personal favorite remains impenitent temptress Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968) of Tallulah Falls, Ala., who pronounced herself "pure as driven slush." She had a way of effectively out-aggressing the aggressor. Once researcher Alfred Kinsey asked the actress to tell him about her sex life.

"Of course, dahling," she replied, "if you tell me about yours."

That merits an encore. The incomparable Tallulah is also on record as observing to a narcissistic suitor: "I'll come and make love to you at 5 o'clock. If I'm late, start without me."

Hell's Belles is not the only bright book just out on personalities of our story-rich native soil. Engaging too is Southern Writers (University of South Carolina Press, 157 pp., $24.95), photographs by David G. Spielman, text by William W. Starr. Spielman lives in New Orleans and Starr hales from Atlanta; their yarnspinner portraits in pictures and prose convey both a sense of sudden discovery and the familiar savvy of insiders.

Here's brushy-haired and bearded novelist/historian Shelby Foote from Memphis, looking Robert E. Lee-like before a desk as complexly organized as a military campaign. He completed a trilogy on the Civil War that ran to more than 1.2 million words. Wrote Foote to writer pal Walker Percy, "Never thought I'd turn out to be windier than (Edward) Gibbon."

And, let the record show, more readable.

Here also is Eudora Welty of Jackson, Miss., standing at the doorstep in her 88th year, welcoming as anybody's amiable grandma. Arthritis does not impair her fierce creative spirit. "If worse came to worse," she vows, "I'd write with my teeth."

Another included elder of the regional imagination is Mickey Spillane, who has spent more than half of his eight decades in Murrells Inlet, S.C. The close-cropped hair is now white. The once-controversial hard-boiled creator of urban vigilante Mike Hammer has become literarily respectable, having acquired the stature of years and the official title of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America.

Though he is captured on a porch in a rocking chair, Spillane's posture and attitude remain confidingly forward:

"There's nothing wrong with getting older," reports the reassuring Spillane. "You just can't do everything you want. But believe me, there's plenty left." MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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