Daily News from New York, New York • 988

I Of CO cc 111 mm iiiiiiiimiiiiMiM ii pw ran ffifpSW 7 fir to- V. Trials of a Century I It's probable that Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux is the first 98-year-old great-great-grandmother ever to be paid $1 million for her memoir. Even more astonishing is that a publisher gave the Manhattan, woman such a huge sum for her story even though she'd neither met nor slept with anyone famous. So what is there, then, for the reader in Any Given Day (Warner Books, Foveaux gives us the inside story of a no-frills life. Her circumstances were certainly plain, though not simple.

Life began happily enough. There were the years in Missouri, where her father worked as a farm laborer, before the family returned to Manhattan so her ailing mother could be near her family. In all, she describes the kind of childhood that can give rise to a question like, "How did we ever play fox and geese in the snow?" weighed down as they were by the heavy clothes the young wore then. During World War she worked in the laundry at the local Army camp, awaiting the return of the young doctor to whom she was engaged. She made herself a white satin wedding dress, then folded it away when word of his death came.

Instead she married Bill Foveaux, a man she didn't love, an alcoholic who fathered her eight children. In the years to come, life went from worse to worse stilL "Every time I had to tell someone I couldn't pay a bill, I died a little," she writes at one point. "The 1930s were hard to live through," she confides at another. Throughout, Foveaux is given to understatement She had a long, hard go before life came right During World War back working in the Army laundry, she divorced. After the war she trained as a nurse's aide, but tragedy wasn't done with her.

In 1949, her oldest daughter died of tuberculosis and one of her sons suffered a head injury that confined him to a hospital until his death in 1982. Today she has survived five of her children. Still living in the wood-frame house she has occupied since 1923, Foveaux has 15 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren. This memoir, the product of a writing class she took in 1979, was set down to inform them of her life and times. Is it compelling reading? Frankly, no.

But it is interesting, and at moments, genuinely evocative. The little girl who loves fishing more than anything else and on one memorable trip sees a man shot dead in a train station sticks in a reader's mind. If the book is also confusing it's impossible to get the many relationships straight it must be taken into account that it was written for family. So perhaps we should settle for what's there on the page, possibly taking to heart the advice Granny Foveaux pens for the kids. "Don't be influenced by what they call the Beautiful People," she admonishes them.

"They're on a toboggan headed for a big crash." Sherryl Connelly 1 ffi yarp PHOTOS FROM THE NEW AMSTERDAM' MARQUEE VALUES Ziegfeld girl Dorothy Knapp embodied the theater's fare before the Depression, while the 1940s brought a wave of B-movies. A molded plaster peacock is among the glories restored to the theater. A Stage Victory How the curtain rose again on the New Amsterdam Theater V) There is no more potent symbol of the renewal of New York than the renovation of the New Amsterdam Theater on W. 42d St. Only a few years ago, it was one of many vacant, waterlogged buildings on a street that had seemed forlorn or worse for decades.With $26 million from the taxpayers of New York (state and city) and $8 million from Disney, the New Amsterdam has been restored magnificently.

One of the interesting things about the theater is the subtle palette of its interior, which may remind viewers of the colors of Disney's "Snow White." Both are based on turn-of-the-century European illustration. The book's color reproduction is superb. Moreover, the story of the theater's history is, at least as Henderson tells it, as dramatic as anything that has been presented there. Howard Kissel When it was built in 1903, it was considered a distinctive piece of architecture. Now that the art of designing theaters is practically dead, The New Amsterdam seems even more remarkable.

Its history has been chronicled in a sumptuous book. The New Amsterdam: The Biography of a Broadway Theater (Hyperion, $75), written by the eminent historian of theater architecture Mary Henderson..