NONFICTION - Dec. 12, 1993

HOLLYWOOD ON THE COUCH by Stephen Farber and Marc Green ( Morrow : $23 ; 352 pp.) . Everything celebrities do is potential material for the media, an arrangement that seems to suit both parties. But there’s a line of good taste that regularly gets crossed--sometimes by about 10 miles, as in publishing the name of William Kennedy’s rape accuser, or sometimes by only a few inches as in “Hollywood on the Couch,” a mean-spirited, but informative, book about famous people and their shrinks.

Some of the material here has real value, for example, the sections dealing with Hollywood therapists on a historical level. David O. Selznick’s analyst, May Romm, comes through as an extremely bossy yet sympathetic woman who, in the words of her daughter, “ . . . didn’t realize how she was being used. They’d (the high-powered patients) call her up at all hours, and she was lonesome, and she’d . . . go to their houses and sit up and hold their hands all night.”

Although many of the psychiatrists from past eras are portrayed as hopelessly unprofessional, the reader can still sense their genuine caring. But that disappears when authors Stephen Farber and Marc Green move to more recent Hollywood therapy stories. There are examples of therapists and patients taking vacations together and collaborating on screenplays. In one therapy group that was “top heavy with stars,” there would be times where, “lucrative movie deals were cemented in between personal confessions.”

Farber and Green seem to derive pleasure in skewering shallow, narcissistic movie people and their equally narcissistic therapists. Easy targets to say the least.

Much of “Hollywood on The Couch” reads like the National Enquirer for intellectuals, and one may hope that for their next project Farber and Green will turn their considerable intelligence toward a topic that appeals to a less prurient interest. UFO babies born into the royal family, perhaps.