Maybe [the fourth Hellman memoir] is a hundred-page remembrance loosely constructed around a woman called Sarah Cameron whom Hellman never knew intimately, a beautiful, indolent Fitzgerald-like playgirl who moved vaguely in all the circles that touched Hellman's life and who showed up periodically over the long decades—at a drunken Hollywood party in the '30s, a restaurant in Paris in the '40s, a hotel in Rome in the '60s. Hellman had some mean encounters with a friend of Sarah's, an affair with her ex-husband, a disturbing exchange with her antisocial son.

The association between Hellman and Sarah herself has no substance whatever; it's all fragments and fancy speculations and peripheral incidents and mysterious allusions that seem only to provide the writer with an excuse to call up once again Hammett and the drinking years, the aunts in New Orleans, making movies for Sam Goldwyn. The...