Steel married Toth in 1978, the day after her divorce from Zugelder was finalized, when she was eight and a half months pregnant with Toth's son, Nicky, now 18. ''I had two indiscretions in my youth and they came back to haunt me,'' says Steel bitterly. ''I'm probably the most uptight, conservative person you'll meet. I'm very religious. I've been this way my whole life, which is why I married those two morons instead of just sleeping with them.''
Both men cooperated with the tabloids and later with Lorenzo Benet and Vickie L. Bane, PEOPLE magazine correspondents who wrote the bio. Steel says she was devastated to learn that her ex-husbands had ratted on her. Zugelder, for instance, detailed many of the couple's alleged sexual exploits, like making love in a prison bathroom. Steel denies that incident — and most others depicted in the book and the tabloids. ''The book absolutely destroyed my life,'' says Steel. ''I didn't do anything wrong. I made some youthful mistakes, but I wasn't out robbing banks.... These people [the authors] thought I had the perfect life, and they trampled on it, and in the process actually destroyed the perfect life.''
In his defense, Benet contends that lawyers spent a month vetting the book. ''I'm surprised she's saying that,'' says Benet, who believes Steel's marriage to Traina already had problems. ''She's accomplished an extraordinary amount and she did it on her own and we chronicled that as much as her personal life.''
What Steel calls her ''perfect life'' began after she married Traina in 1981 and they merged their families. She had a daughter, Beatrix, now 28, by Lazard, in addition to her son by Toth, and Traina had two sons. She and Traina then had five children together: Samantha, now 14; Victoria, 13; Vanessa, 12; Maxx, 10; and Zara, 9. Steel calls her children, whom she assiduously shields from the press, ''the most important part of my life'' and says she wanted a big family because she felt unloved as a child. Her own parents divorced when she was 7, and she was raised mostly by her father, a German-born, socially ambitious businessman. ''This is an awful thing to say, but my parents were never there for me.''
She says she also wanted to keep her husband happy. To that end, Steel — who began writing in the early '70s after a brief career in PR — devised a killer writing schedule, sitting down at her typewriter at night after everyone was in bed. Frequently, she would write until 3 or 4 a.m. and get up by 7 to see her kids off to school. (She admits that she now has plenty of household help; she has three nannies, for example, for her five kids.) ''I wanted my children to feel they had a nonworking mother and my husband to feel he had a normal wife,'' she says. ''My husband pretended I didn't do anything. My kids saw me pick them up at school and I was just Mom. It worked until the tabloids discovered me.'' Says her once-close friend, the former society columnist Pat Montandon: ''She's an excellent mother, but she's not a great friend. As soon as she got successful, she dropped a lot of us.''
