Making Advances

Sally Beauman's million-dollar novel

The key to Sally Beauman's Destiny is its author's flexibility. She wrote Harlequin romances and a history of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and now, at forty-two, has mastered a genre all her own: literate commercial fiction. Destiny combines the classical grace of the Victorian novelists Beauman has ad.mired since her days at Cambridge with the bravura story3 telling she appreciates in Sidney Sheldon. The mix is a potent one: while still halffinished, the manuscript reaped an unprecedented advance from Bantam Books of $1,015,000.

Spanning three decades, Destiny tells the checkered tales of Alabaman beauty Helene Harte and jewelry emperor Baron Edouard de Chavigny, a man who passes "from opera box to grouse moor with equal aplomb." And though Beauman's jet-setters do frolic (in one scene a pair of fifteencarat diamonds are clipped onto the female genitalia), they are just as apt to quote John Donne or see a Bergman film.

Sally Beauman is as versatile as her characters. As a greenhorn journalist she tracked everyone from Elia Kazan in Hollywood to Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria. She edited Harpers & Queen and won the Catherine Pakenham Award for journalism. Later, Beauman consulted for the feminist publisher Virago, and divorced her merchant-banking husband and moved in with Alan Howard, one of England's most acclaimed stage actors. Still unmarried, they have a twelve-year-old son.

"The central theme of Destiny is of time and its passing," explains the author. Two images haunt her: "the diamond, icelike, but forever" and "the garden, which continues to grow, decay, and regrow." Sally Beauman's own destiny continues to unravel, though her next endeavor is as yet undecided. "I get ideas in my sleep.. . "

Angela Janklow