A `PERFECT 10` DEPOSED LIFE GIVES LOW MARKS TO NADIA COMANECI`S U.S. EMIGRE ROUTINE
By James Warren.
Published: Thursday, February 22, 1990
Section: TEMPO
Page: 2

If Nadia Comaneci, a famous Romanian emigre with an apparent penchant for any entree, reads the March Life, she`ll feel like a vegetable that`s encountered a Veg-A-Matic. But those are the breaks when a carrot of $20,000 is dangled.

The former dazzling gymnast is sliced, diced, minced, chopped and toppled from the balance beam of public acclaim in ``The Fall From Grace of an Angel Named Nadia,`` a psycho-profile by cuttingly adroit Barbara Grizzuti Harrison that`s one of several enticing offerings.

Harrison tracked down Comaneci and Constantin Panait, the so-tagged ``Adulterous Roofer`` with whom Nadia fled to the United States, in Los Angeles and visited Comaneci`s family in Romania. The conclusions don`t take long to discern.

Nadia is described as a ``a little used-looking`` and, whether speaking in Italian or English, as displaying a ``deficiency of grace`` by not saying ``please`` or ``thank you.`` All the plants in her apartment are dead, the cupboards are bare, the TV is always on, her cooking is confined to instant coffee and, we`re informed, she does not demonstrate a piercing intellect. The Adulterous Roofer ``dyes his hair.``

She loves to eat not only what`s on her plate but what`s on the roofer`s. After each course, she splits to the bathroom and returns, eyes watery, to eat more, then heads to the bathroom. The implication is that she`s a restaurant`s delight and/or bulimic, intentionally barfing and ordering mounds of food. Harrison is too cute by half in not spelling it out, nor telling us whether Life paid for an interview from a woman who ``demanded money to tell her story.`` Life officials reveal that they did pay $20,000.

In Romania, Harrison meets Nadia`s skinhead brother, who not only serves Harrison ``a disgusting mixture of white wine and Pepsi Cola`` but a videotape of Nadia`s last birthday party. She`s seen dancing ``with bloated men and cadaverous men.`` Apparently, ``Soul Train`` and ``American Bandstand`` need not recruit in Bucharest.

Playing shrink, Harrison does find an appealing, mutual longing in the siblings. It`s as if ``they are searching for the mythical lost half of themselves in each other.``

That`s the good news in a piece that chooses not to see Comaneci as, in any way, a victim of prodigious athletic success and a worldwide myth of her as pristine.

The bad is that Nadia, brother Adrian and mother Stefania ``seem perfectly indifferent`` to the rationing, gunfire and peril that has convulsed their nation. ``They think of things in terms of usury; if revolution means anything at all to them, it means chocolate and hatred. They are entirely, tragically, self-absorbed.``

And so, we`re reminded elsewhere, was Manuel Noriega.

Investigative legend Seymour Hersh relies on impressive contacts, notably in the CIA, to reveal the strongest links yet between Noriega and the mysterious 1981 plane crash of his predecessor as Panamanian chief, Omar Torrijos Herrera (Hersh says it apparently was an in-flight bomb).

But the more profound new details may involve American domination of Panamanian life over the past 20 years, at times exercised with colonial casualness, and how one failed takeover resulted from bureaucratic infighting between the U.S. Army and the CIA.

The issue has even more, including a wonderful look at ``Kings in the Wings,`` or toppled monarchs scattered about the globe and hankering to return to power, and a profile of Pop Myles, 80, of East St. Louis, Ill., who won`t leave a dilapidated ghetto gym and the hope he can turn around some kid`s life by teaching him to box.

February Stereo Review has a handy primer in ``Shopper Survival Skills``. . . .Feb. 26 Fortune explains how the pizza boom prompts McDonald`s Corp.`s to expand testing of pizza at Indiana and Kentucky stores to Hartford, Fresno, Calif., and Las Vegas.

February M, for ``the civilized man,`` has a long interview about sex with Norman Mailer, who`s mellowing a bit with age (66). If he were 20 today, he`d be too antsy about intercourse, either since he could catch a ``fatal disease`` or be accused of being ``a sexist, a monster, an abuser, a womanizer`` for ``flaunting`` his ego and sleeping around. Not out to anger Wife No. 6, he refuses to say with whom he`d love to hit the sack with other than his wife but, when the queston is put in the past tense, quickly responds, ``Elizabeth Taylor.``