The Rosy View

Faith Baldwin has turned out novels at the rate of more than two a year for 30 years, plus uncounted shorts. Last week, like Authors Billy Rose and Somerset Maugham, she got her reward: her own television show.

The Faith Baldwin Theater of Romance (alternate Sats. 11 a.m., ABC) hopes to mirror the rosy view of U.S. life & love that has enchanted the Baldwin millions. The first show opened with harp strings, cloud formations and a lyric hymn to Maidenform ("The dream of a bra . . . the largest-selling brassiere in the world!"), illustrated with sexy shots of bra-girls skiing, stretching, or just standing around in half-dressed hauteur.

After an introduction by Herself ("I hope you will enjoy it, for the writer who cannot please an audience might as well stop writing . . ."), Theater of Romance plunged into a disconcertingly morbid little story about an accountant (Walter Abel) who was depressed because he had no material goods to leave his family. But his wife and children clamorously reminded him of all the good times they had had together, and the 30-minute show ended with everyone misty-eyed and agreeing that money can't buy happiness. Sentiments like these, flowering in Faith Baldwin's prose, have earned her a place in Connecticut with a 22-room house and a pool. But she sometimes broods because critics label her Pollyanna. "The reason my stories always end happily is because the magazines prefer happy endings," she explains. Actually, she argues, her plots often have a high tragic content: "I've always jumped the gun on my themes--I did a book on alcoholism, for example, which wasn't popular because the subject wasn't popular yet."

But in her forthcoming novel (due next month) she may be a little on the freight. She feels that it is on an essentially unpopular subject: "It's called The Whole Armor, and my life's blood is in it. It's the story of a man's belief in God, and what happens to him. I worked on it nine hours a day, including Sundays, for two months."

Theater of Romance, however, will only occasionally reflect the deep-thinking side of Faith Baldwin. For the next show she has promised something more in line with commercial reality: the story of a glamorous, beautiful Broadway actress (Nina Foch) who is ardently wooed and eventually won by a wealthy young man from Park Avenue.

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