WHEN DO I START?

WHEN DO I START? Karl Malden, with Carla Malden (Simon & Schuster, $25) This plainspoken memoir takes the bulb-nosed star of The Streets of San Francisco from his childhood in Gary, Ind., to Broadway and A Streetcar Named Desire and on to the movies. Malden, writing with his daughter, manages to be personable without baring his soul. He talks about his daunting leap from steel-mill town to Hollywood and proves a competent, clear-eyed witness to a fair chunk of film history -- the rise of Marlon Brando, the fall of Montgomery Clift, the blacklist. If you instinctively trusted the man behind those American Express commercials (''Don't leave home without it''), you were right: Malden's decency shines through on every page. B