Behind the Scenes.

POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Behind the Scenes. Michael K. Deaver. William Morrow, $17.95. Last year the movie No Way Out told the story of a secretary of defense who murders his mistress and then, through a variety of sinister strategems, covers it up. As usual, Hollywood depicted Washington as more glamorous and conventionally evil than it really is, especially when it comes to sex. However, the plot took an original twist. The defense secretary's special assistant, an obsessive toady, turned out (it was hinted) to be in love with the boss. At last the film-makers had stumbled onto an insight about Washington's bureaucratic culture: the intimacy between a powerful official and his special assistant is a kind of illicit romance.

Mike Deaver's is the classic Cinderella story. No one paid much attention to this son of a Shell Oil distributor when he was growing up in Bakersfield, California. An early bout with kidney disease meant he could never gain acceptance as an athlete; the only reason his San Jose State fraternity accepted him was that they needed a piano player. After a brief, unhappy stint as an IBM sales rep, Deaver drifted into the world of Republican state politics. There he met a dashing governor named Ronald Reagan.

For the next 20 years, Deaver never departed Reagan's side. When Reagan left Sacramento, Deaver followed him to Los Angeles and set up a public relations firm near Reagan's house. When Reagan left Los Angeles, Deaver followed him to Washington and unpacked his bags beside the Oval Office. When his wife told him his dependence on Ronald Reagan was too great, he would answer: "You don't understand. I'm the only guy who can help this man in this way." And when he finally left the Reagan administration to set up a Washington lobbying firm, he couldn't bring himself to turn in his White House pass. The investigations into Deaver's lobbying and the perjury conviction that followed all resulted from his inability to make a clean break with the Reagan White House. Like Othello, Deaver loved not wisely but too well.

What spawned this romance? Idealism can't be discounted; Deaver seems genuinely to believe in the goodness of Ronald Reagan. But Reagan was also Deaver's Prince Charming, sweeping him off his feet with the promise of a more glamorous life. As Deaver puts it, "My exposure to the Reagans did give me an appreciation for good things, a fine painting, the best piano." Deaver acquired a taste for Heitz Chardonnay. He named his children Amanda and Blair. He went to parties with famous and powerful people like William Styron and Katharine Graham. Jackie Onassis told him he looked like a young Fred Astaire. A photograph in this book of Deaver playing the piano at a state occasion is captioned, "They all laughed...including Prince Philip."

Along with these rarefied pleasures came the indignities of unrequited love. After Deaver repeated to Reagan bons mots exchanged between Lillian Hellman and Joe Alsop, the boss slapped him down by reminding him that Hellman "still thinks Joe Stalin is great." And when Deaver boasted to William F. Buckley that he'd just bought a top-of-the-line Busendorfer piano, Buckley told him, "I have two."

Deaver readily concedes he had little interest in the substance of government. Instead, he kept house. He picked out Reagan's clothes and told him not to use Brylcreem. Before a debate with Jimmy Carter, he allowed Reagan one glass of wine to provide "a little color for his cheeks." Most famously, he told Reagan where to stand for the cameras. Like his best friend and alter ego, Nancy Reagan, Deaver helped get Reagan to back off from hard-right positions. But one wonders whether the evenings with the Buckleys and the Reagans compensated for the damage to Deaver's sense of self. Deaver identified so thoroughly with the boss that when Reagan got mad and threw his keys at him, hitting him in the chest, all Deaver could think was, "The governor had a good arm and I admired him for it."

Respectable Washington has criticized Deaver's trading White House influence for money. Most of these critics are less offended by the morality of peddling influence than by the garish way Deaver cashed in--for example, posing, car phone in hand, for a Time magazine cover headlined, "Who Is This Man Calling?" Deaver does seem more dense about ethics than most Washington influence-peddlers, and he lied to federal investigators about his lobbying. But reading Deaver's memoir, you can't help feeling sorry for him. He looked around and saw a corrupt but socially sanctioned way to cash in on his years of sacrifice. He was just a bit greedier than most. At the end of his long romance with Ronald Reagan, Deaver had only a dim sense of what he believed in and a dimmer sense of who he was. Getting rich was the only way he knew to get it back.