by JULIET WATERS

A couple of weeks ago I was on a beach near Kennebunkport, the vacation spot where master vacationer George W. Bush first learned his craft. This is not the kind of beach where you bring any old beach book, so I gambled on veteran Vanity Fair correspondent Maureen Orth's The Importance of Being Famous: Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex. Orth is married to Tim Russert, the legendary and intimidating moderator of Meet the Press. Rigorous celebrity journalism, I rationalized. Just what the discriminating beach reader needs these days.

Maybe I should have followed the lead of other beach readers who've been betting instead on Russert's memoir, Big Russ & Me: Father and Son Lessons of Life, the summer's massive bestseller. By all accounts it's a heartwarming tribute to his father, a hardworking Boston garbage man. If nothing else, I can at least enjoy the irony that Russert, in choosing a wife, has chosen such a hardworking New York recycler.

The Importance of Being Famous, in the end, isn't much more than a resourceful way for Orth to repackage the more interesting profiles she wrote for Vanity Fair during the '90s. Features on Tina Turner, Karl Lagerfield and other figures worthy, and not so worthy, of celebrity, are framed with short chapters on how much celebrity journalism has changed since the old days.

Those days go back as far as the time when Orth had to convince her editor at Newsweek that Elvis's funeral was worth sending a reporter to. There's no question she has the experience, intelligence and insider dirt to do a thorough and scathing analysis of the increasingly icky relationship between celebrity and media. In just the last decade the boundaries between news and entertainment have become so trampled that CBS could score the first interview with Private Jessica Lynch only because it was part of a conglomerate that could offer her both a book and movie deal.

But these chapters of analysis are slight, few and far between. They have to be, given that Orth works for Conde Naste, a media conglomerate that she clearly has no intention of writing about. As a result this book too often feels like a stash of old VFs without the pictures. There are articles about people I vaguely remember by name, though I can't put a face to them: Dana Giacchetto, the bad seed accountant to the stars; Andrew Cunanan, the Versace killer, and Mohamed Al Fayed, father of penultimate bad date, Dodi. Articles about people I'd rather forget: Margaret Thatcher, Denise Rich and what's-her-new-name, Madonna. And only occasionally articles about people who are still interesting or notorious: Dame Margot Fonteyn, Gerry Adams and, if only as a record of her sleazy opportunism, Ariana Huffington.

Back in Montreal, more willing to put on my thinking cap, I did eventually get to one article that almost justified the garbage pick. Orth's investigation of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow's custody battle, and the update she does on a story that has long since been abandoned could stand on its own as a metaphor for bad boundaries and their consequences. Back in the early '90s, the normally media shy Allen managed to use press conferences and interviews to bolster his image after he became involved with his adopted adult daughter Soon-Yi.

But there's clearly no question in Orth's mind from her investigation during the controversy and her follow up in later years that Allen molested his youngest adopted daughter, Dylan. A judge who refused Allen custody and visitation would probably concur, as would an appellate court that overturned Allen's appeal with a scathing decision. A decade later, according to Orth, Dylan deeply regrets the decision that was made not to have her testify against her father in a criminal trial. Perhaps the media circus would have traumatized her, but perhaps it would also have prevented him from adopting two more children with her older sister.

The Importance of Being Famous by Maureen Orth, Henry Holt, hc, 372pp, $34.99