THE WRITING WIFE.(The Talk of the Town)(Cheryl Howard)(Interview)

When Jackie Collins finally got around to updating her early- eighties classic, "Hollywood Wives," in 2001, she took care to insure that "Hollywood Wives: The New Generation" would reflect certain significant shifts in the culture of Los Angeles. To that end, Karen, Elaine, and Sadie, with their modern-dance classes, marabou-trimmed pajamas, and lunches at Ma Maison, were replaced by Taylor, Lissa, and Nicci, who prefer Pilates, low-rider jeans, and the Ivy. But, for all these careful anthropological alterations, Collins overlooked the modern Hollywood wife's latest occupation: novel-writing.

Among the newly minted authors who are married to celebrated filmmakers is Cheryl Howard, wife of Ron, who joins Gigi Levangie Grazer (wife of Brian) and Linda Bruckheimer (wife of Jerry) on the shelves with this month's publication of "In the Face of Jinn," a geopolitical thriller-cum-love story set in Central Asia. Howard--she writes under the pen name Cheryl Howard Crew, the "Crew" having been tacked on in homage to an adventuresome grandmother--met her husband in high school, in Burbank, California, when they were both assigned to Mrs. McBride's English class. Ron invited Cheryl to see "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," and the romance blossomed; eventually, he signalled his intentions with the gift of a woolly monkey named Sugar. "I said, 'I can't accept her from you, but I'll take care of her,' " Howard recalled the other day, in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she and Ron keep a Cape Cod cottage as a sort of mom-and-pop office building. (Home is a farm in Westchester.) "I felt funny that he'd spent five hundred dollars. That's a very serious gift for someone who's not engaged!"

If Grazer, who writes kicky social comedy (her book "The Starter Wife" comes out in June), is the Jane Austen of the group, and Bruckheimer, who favors steel-magnolia family sagas ("The Southern Belles of Honeysuckle Way"), is the Rebecca Wells, then Howard, who has red hair and a warm, can-do nature, could be called the movement's Graham Greene. The daughter of a waitress and a Louisiana roustabout who eventually settled his family in the San Fernando Valley, she learned to shoot when she was five and flew a taildragger at sixteen. For the past twenty years, the Howards--Cheryl, Ron, their four children, five dogs, seventeen cats, and assorted donkeys and minihorses--have lived in East Coast exile. "I'm not someone who's a big party-giver," she said, ...