Hollywood and squares: celebrities and presidents don't mix.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: On Political Books

The best way to enjoy Alan Schroeder's Celebrity-in-Chief: How Show Business Took Over the White House is to read it the same way one might tackle a can of Planter's Mixed Nuts: rummage around to grab the cashews and leave the filberts alone. Schroeder has obviously toiled to mine whole libraries of celebrity biography and autobiography for accounts of what may well be every single presidential-celebrity interface since Lincoln met Booth and offers us an exhaustive collection of anecdotes ranging from the hilarious to the downright weird.

What's unfortunate is what Schroeder has done with this material. A glibber and breezier writer could probably have gathered these stories into a fun magazine feature. Instead Schroeder has political scientized them in a dull tome, rocking up such categories as How Entertainers are Good for Presidents, How Entertainers Are Bad for Presidents, How Presidents Are Bad for Entertainers, Presidents As Entertainers, and Presidents as Entertainment, which if only for symmetry's sake, should have been called Entertainers As President.

These are not altogether useless categories, but they are awfully fungible. Take, for example, the chapter on How Entertainers are Bad for Presidents. It's hard to accept that an antiwar outburst by a substitute member of the Ray Coniff Singers at White House dinner could actually have hurt Richard Nixon. It's even harder to believe that Bill Clinton's swipe at Sister Souljah--which broke the alleged rule that presidents shouldn't criticize entertainers!--could really be damaging, or that the anecdote wouldn't be more at home in a chapter on, say, How Presidents Can Manipulate Minor Personages Into Useful Props.

Okay, okay, I'm quibbling--the book had to be organized somehow. A larger problem is the filberts. Separating the sweetest, saltiest stories are pages and pages devoted to recounting everyone who performed at every inaugural ball, fundraiser, and state dinner of the last half century. And while it's a little interesting to note that Woody Allen campaigned and performed for, of all people, Lyndon Johnson, and while it's a little fun to learn that Mitzi Gaynor played the White House (if only to be reminded that once there was actually a person named Mitzi Gaynor high-stepping across our television screens), and while it's a little puzzling to consider how much President and Mrs. Ford must have really dug the music of Tony Orlando and Dawn, the reaction these facts registered on...