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FIRST LADY by Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield as told to Patrick Dennis with photographs by Cris Alexander. 282 pages. William Morrow. $6.95.

It must have been an absolute giggle of an idea. With the elections coming up and all, it would be a hoot to do a sort of Little Me thing, only about the girl who married the President. All the fun people joined in--Peggy Cass, Dody Goodman, Harold Lang, Dagmar, Kaye Ballard, Jacques d'Amboise, Melissa Hayden, Vicki Cummings and lots of others--and everybody got dressed up in the wildest costumes while Cris Alexander took loads of simply outrageous pictures. Pat's manuscript had everybody in stitches. The joke was a good one when Cecil Beaton produced My Royal Past a generation ago; now, under Dennis' heavier hand, ersatz autobiography-with-snapshots is nothing but a drag.

DOUBLE VISION by John Knowles. 210 pages. Macmillan. $4.95.

After writing the 1960 award-winning novel A Separate Peace and the less successful Morning in Antibes, Author John Knowles, at 35, decided he was fed up with the U.S. "I was getting restless in houses so completely furnished and air conditioned and wired for sound and insulated from the outdoors that the people inside seemed in danger of becoming merchandise too." So he sought freedom, and his true self, by traveling to humanity''s cradle, the Middle East. In Beirut, languid young Lebanese reclined amid cushions and asked him to explain their country to them because it was so "baffling." In Jordan, Knowles was lionized by King Hussein, and titillated by the prospect that he might lend a hand in writing the royal autobiography (a Briton got the job). Knowles pushed on to the Aegean islands. Everywhere, simple peasants were eager to welcome the camera-bearing tourist.

Then hurtling home by jet to face up to the ultimate question: "Was America as flat, stale and bleak as I remembered?" Heaven be praised, the answer is at least a qualified no.

BRIGHT DAY, DARK RUNNER by George Cuomo. 421 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

The narrator in this picaresque novel of present-day Cape Cod is an itinerant chef named J. I. (for Judas Iscariot) LeBlanche. A red-haired giant in his 50s, he is engaging in his strength and directness, benevolently tyrannical in his kitchen, reluctantly restrained in his lechery. At first sampling, his involuted tale concerns his summer successes in work and play at a run-down resort, chronicled in a fine and gusty prose. But there is also a grimly pathetic story: the racking hardships of LeBlanche's disaster-struck past and the haunting horror of his wife's death at the hands of his paranoid father, whom LeBlanche himself is forced to kill in turn. With this amalgam of somber tragedy and high humor, Author Cuomo probes an ancient and great theme: the growth of a man in the teeth of fortune's callous blows. Result: a variegated, sometimes unusual, always hearty novel.

BIFFEN'S MILLIONS by P. G. Wodehouse. 222 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

In the manner of ordinary men, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse started growing older at birth, 82 years ago. But unlike most he was able to stop the process in mid-adolescence. Wodehouse still lives in the same cloud-cuckoo land of titled old blighters, muscular viragoes and fluffy-minded bachelors that he first celebrated 67 books ago. In his 68th, he demonstrates that he has lost little of his zany zest for a world that once put Essayist John W. Aldridge in mind of "an incubator of oafdom." The oafs in Biffen's Millions are all after an obscure--ly willed fortune. What happens to them in the absurdly complicated plot is enough to drive confirmed Wodehousians happily crackers and Pelham Grenville to his 69th book.

AN HONORABLE ESTATE by Lane Kauffmann. 424 pages. Lippincoff. $5.95.

Published in May and already in its fourth printing, An Honorable Estate was plainly planned as a Big Novel. But its characters, plot, subplots and messages are all lightweights. In a sort of split-level Manhattan setting, the author contrives to make a number of cherished American goals--including sex, booze, wealth, social position, world travel and Broadway fame--sound dull and unprofitable. Glibly cynical, he views his moral wasteland with no moral outrage. He even takes a determined new crack at that old chestnut that has been knocked about for decades in prep school dormitories and Greenwich Village walk-ups: should an Artist give up his Integrity for Commercial Success? Positively not, Mr. Kauffmann.

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