BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION : Corporate Biography Finds More Secrets at Procter & Gamble : SOAP OPERA: The Inside Story of Procter & Gamble <i> by Alecia Swasy</i> , Times Books, $23, 288 pages

In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea for Procter & Gamble to lean on Cincinnati law enforcement which, in turn, subpoenaed Cincinnati Bell Inc. phone records to find out which P&G; employees and ex-employees had been chatting with Wall Street Journal reporter Alecia Swasy.

It wasn’t smart to put the reporter under surveillance, nor did it help to lie to her about facts for which she already had documentation, even teensy items like which cheap sandwiches appeared on the company cafeteria menu.

For a company with secrets, the only thing worse than a determined investigative reporter is an angry determined investigative reporter, and by the time Swasy got done with her research she was one furious journalist.

Procter & Gamble, makers of products that 98% of United States households depend on--everything from Tide to Crest to Ivory soap--has always worked hard to protect the company’s “99 and 44/100% pure” image. P&G;’s success is the stuff entrepreneurial dreams are made of: Procter and Gamble started out making soap and candles in 1837; today, it is a $30-billion international empire that employs 100,000 people and spends $2 billion just on advertising.

The company is like some huge life-support system, pumping currency into everything from the ad agencies that sell its products to the posh suburbs that house its top executives. P&G; would have the world believe that anyone who’s any good wants to work for the company and, once in, the best never leave.

All this emphatic good fortune makes it an almost irresistible target for a reporter. Swasy wondered what was behind the impenetrably happy facade--and found a Pandora’s box of evil spirits, from CEO Ed Artzt, known affectionately as the “Prince of Darkness,” to lower-level executives who enthusiastically terrorize their subordinates in the name of making sure they know their business.

Artzt seems a truly terrifying road warrior--a man who, in the summer of 1954, packed his wife and two baby daughters into the family car for the drive from Los Angeles to the promised land--Cincinnati--and a job on Dash detergent. To make a good impression, he decided to do stock checks on the cross-country drive--so Ruth and two toddlers sweltered in a parked car in 105-degree heat while hubby Ed talked to shopkeepers. The only thing more remarkable than his behavior was his willingness, years later, to repeat the anecdote to Swasy without any shadow of embarrassment.

In Swasy’s “Soap Opera,” Artzt presides over what sounds like a surreal landscape full of men in dark suits, plain shirts and conservative ties, and women in varying states of repressed, frustrated rage. What Swasy found was a maniacal devotion to task that would be laughable if the toll on employees were not so devastating.

I defy you to read the section on “employee underwear tests” without cracking up, but surely there is a more civilized way to determine whether a toilet tissue works than by using your employees as, uh, the equivalent of laboratory rats; certainly the workers who had to march to the restroom carrying sample pouches felt something on the shy side of humiliation. Or maybe they didn’t, and that’s the worst part of this madness.

Most of the people who work at P&G; seem to think that what an outsider might consider intimidation, threats and a passion for conformity is, in fact, just the honorable discipline of doing good business. That is one of the more benign examples of P&G; behavior.

The only problem, even for readers predisposed to believe everything Swasy has to say, is her prosecutorial tone. Granted, she has a skeleton’s worth of bones to pick, and has all the information she needs for a telling corporate biography. But the book has no real pacing; Swasy relies on the blunt force of her material, rather than on the shaping and presentation of it, to make her case.

In the end, the reader is worn down by the effort required to hack through it.

Swasy intended to nail Procter & Gamble, and she has succeeded--but the noise of her incessant hammering is numbing.