Moure the Merrier

To those who knew her in the 1970s as the Hollywood wife of production designer Richard Sylbert, Susanna Moore the novelist is still a surprise.

"She was the quintessential homemaker and mother-—and the first person I knew who made arugula salad," recalls Michelle Phillips of the Malibu days with Warren, Jack, and Roman. "Susanna was a Hollywood wife who wanted to do something," says writer John Gregory Dunne, a confidant then and now. But it wasn't until she divorced Sylbert and moved to London that she pulled out her pen and stunned her pals. Peppered with characters reminiscent of the debs, celebs, lost parents, and self-serving mentors she has known, all three of Moore's novels—the third, Sleeping Beauties, will be published by Knopf this month—center on vulnerable young women like herself bom in Hawaii and forever in its thrall.

Just as her friends are in hers. "I'm devoted to her," says Bill Blass, with whom she shares dishy dinners and Connecticut weekends. "Listen," says a friend. "If you had a choice between Susanna and Carolyne Roehm,

who would you talk to?" "There's a mystique about Susanna, ' ' observes art dealer Lock Whitney. "I see her as this exquisite creature emerging from the Pacific Ocean at Malibu, draped in seaweed, who's been here ever since." And here, in a genteel Upper East Side apartment she shares with daughter Lulu, she will remain. Despite an abiding nostalgia for Hawaii, Moore, 40-ish, insists she'll never return for good. "It's too small," she says in a baby-doll voice that belies her fierce independence. "Too provincial, too haunted. In a funny way, it's too beautiful."

Moore achieved her independence at the age of 12, when her mother committed suicide. Estranged from her father

and stepmother, she survived by pulling mangoes from the trees and snatching food offerings from a Chinese graveyard. In the years since, she has surfed in sharky waters, inspired the Andie MacDowell character in Michael Lindsay-Hogg's The Object of Beauty, taught writing at Yale and reading in Harlem, pitched tents, broken hearts, and climbed a 37,000-foot cliff (despite asthma). As her friend Alice Arlen observes, "She's just awfully good at... stuff. ' ' • Which includes fiction, however thinly veiled.

ELLEN STERN