BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Unlikely Romance of a Merry Actress and a Melancholy Writer : OPPOSITE ATTRACTION: The Lives of Erich Maria Remarque and Paulette Goddard, by Julie Gilbert, Pantheon, $32.50, 540 pages

The famous writer Erich Maria Remarque was German; the vibrant actress Paulette Goddard, American. Both were celebrated, gifted, successful, immensely attractive, equally materialistic and had long romantic histories by the time they met in the early 1950s, making them not so opposite after all.

Add modest beginnings and enormous ambition, and you have a match made in heaven, or what passes for heaven in the heady world of international glamour. Remarque was a notorious womanizer whose lovers included Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo; Goddard had been married to Charlie Chaplin and Burgess Meredith, and was known to have had liaisons with assorted other notables. Remarque was fond of gorgeous cars and was a serious collector of post-Impressionist art; Goddard favored Parisian clothes and dazzling jewels. Though his disposition tended toward melancholy and hers toward merry, they seem to have been highly complementary personalities in all other respects.

After a long affair and Remarque’s divorce from the first wife who endured dozens of his well-publicized attachments, Remarque and Goddard married in 1958 when both were well into middle age, living together on and off until Remarque’s death at the age of 72 in 1970. Goddard survived until 1989, succumbing at 79 to emphysema complicated by other problems. Ironically, she died where she had lived only sporadically--in Remarque’s villa in Ascona, Switzerland, the retreat on Lake Maggiore she had always found too isolated for extended stays. Physical suffering had soured her ebullient personality, and after a relatively abstemious life, she slid into alcoholism.

Though the author had unprecedented access to the letters, photographs and journals of both Goddard and Remarque, much of this new material seems curiously thin. Remarque was a diligent diarist, but the man who emerges from these records seemed only mildly concerned with the powerful political and social issues that distinguish his books. The entries are self-involved, wistful and surprisingly frivolous; a hedonistic chronicle of meals eaten, women seduced and drinks consumed, often followed by remorse for work undone. Little of the pacifist passion that led him to become an exile from Nazi Germany emerges from these personal notes.

Amazingly, the man who wrote “All Quiet on the Western Front” was never actually in battle during World War I, though he did serve in the German army for three years until wounds from a long-range shell ended his military career. The power of his concentration camp novel “Spark of Life” emerges from his imagination and the memories of others. Safe in Switzerland, New York or Hollywood, Remarque himself was never threatened or harmed during this period, though his sister Elfriede, who remained in Germany during World War II, was brutally executed for expressing defeatist sentiments. The terse, potent imagery of the novels is conspicuously absent in the mundane letters to Goddard and others, a disappointment partly explained by the fact that he never became completely at ease in English, always writing his books in longhand and in German.

Thoroughly researched and conscientious as it is, this dual biography does not address itself to Remarque’s work to any great extent. We hear of his triumphs and disappointments, but those unfamiliar with the vigorous style of his novels will not find any critical insights or interpretations here. “Opposite Attraction” is concerned essentially with personal matters, and while Remarque’s love life was highly theatrical and extremely diverse, the detailed chronicle of seductions and romances eventually overshadows the real accomplishments of the writer.

Goddard appears as a lucky, beautiful and initially appealing woman profoundly devoted to Remarque in her fashion. Perhaps because we expect less substance from the biography of a movie star, her portrait here seems more satisfactory than his. Readers fascinated by the heyday of Hollywood and curious about the relationship of these two unlikely but well-matched lovers will surely find the book rewarding, provided they don’t embark upon it expecting literary or cinematic history.

“Opposite Attraction” is a collection of celebrity love affairs set in the world’s most alluring locations during a fascinating era, filled with mercurial personalities and crowded with incident. While the relatively tranquil relationship between Goddard and Remarque fills only half the book, the rest teems with the tempestuous array of husbands, wives and lovers each had before they met. By that time, they were more than ready for each other.