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Jackson Pollock An American Saga By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith Clarkson N. Potter, $29.95 ''I'm going to kill myself.'' Tony Smith recognized Jackson Pollock's whiskey voice. The late night call was not unusual for Jackson. Even talk of suicide had the air of ritual about it. Yet there was something in Pollock's voice that Smith hadn't heard before, a harder edge that alarmed him. With his ample Irish charm he tried to calm the distant voice, but Pollock was inconsolable. ''Hold on,'' Smith finally said. ''I'll be out.'' He put down the phone and drove off into the night in the middle of an early spring downpour. It would be hours before he could reach Pollock's house at the eastern end of Long Island-hours in which, knowing Jackson, anything could happen.
The Journalist and the Murderer By Janet Malcolm Knopf, $18.95 Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns-when the article or book appears-his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ''the public's right to know''; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
Me and You By Margaret Diehl Soho Press, $18.95 ''The man I marry,'' I announced at the age of seven, ''will be a gypsy horsethief, secretly a prince.'' ''As long as he's a gentleman,'' said my mother, vaguely. (The concept had grown baggy during her married life.) ''As long as he's a man,'' retorted my father, by which he meant not a Southerner. Not a relative of my mother. Not too smooth, too suave, too courtly. My small-boned and elegant father cherished his rougher edges. ''Oh, really,'' said my mother. ''Do you think she has a choice?''
VANISHED EMPIRE The Three Capital Cities of the Habsburg Empire as Seen Today By Stephen Brook Morrow, $21.95 Close to the centre of Vienna, beneath the bland seventeenth-century Kapuzinerkirche, are coiled the cool interconnecting chambers of the imperial burial vault. Here for hundreds of years the bodies of the Habsburg royal family have been entombed. They are almost all here, the obscure archdukes of the seventeenth century, Maria Theresa in a sarcophagus large enough to accommodate her sixteen children too, the abstemious Joseph II in his suitably plain box, Franz Josef flanked by his assassinated wife Elisabeth and his son Rudolf, Maximilian of Mexico, and even a handful of archdukes and archduchesses who breathed their last in recent decades have been tucked away in the niches. The bodies, however, are incomplete. To find the hearts of the Habsburgs you must walk a hundred yards to the Augustinerkirche, which adjoins the imperial palace. Here, in a small room off the Loretto Chapel, shelves carry the urns that contain the hearts of fifty-four Habsburgs. And in the catacombs of Vienna's cathedral, the Stephansdom, you will find the imperial entrails, which have been tucked into urns that resemble hat boxes.
