Sybil

It was an L.A. kind of night, with Nick Edenetti, the town's quintessential saloon singer, serenading Sybil Brand, the town's quintessential social reformer, in an Italian restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. He was singing Sinatra's old favorite, "The Summer Wind," leaning into the mike toward Sybil and moving one hand in a sort of wavy motion, the way saloon singers do.

The trade of tackle Jim Lachey to the Raiders might have marked the darkest moment in the Chargers' decline in recent years and solidified the team's reputation for getting it all wrong. But then along comes tackle Harry Swayne, perhaps a beacon to present-day success. "Harry is the best young left tackle in football today," said Colt offensive line coach Alex Gibbs, who previously worked with the Chargers. "In another year or two you're talking about an Anthony Munoz-type of guy.

Sybil Brand, namesake of the Eastside women's jail, was honored on her 90th birthday this week for 50 years of service to Los Angeles County. The guest list to the buffet at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion included the Board of Supervisors, Sheriff Sherman Block and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony. Brand spearheaded an effort to pass a bond issue that underwrote construction of more jails and juvenile halls, which were needed to help ease crowding in the county system.

The usual theme for the novel of modern manners is adultery--the causes, effects, repercussions of infidelity on marriage. In "A Craving for Women," Sybil Claiborne has, so to speak, stood this premise on its head: What happens when stable, polygamous marriages are threatened by monogamy? She posits a man happily married to seven wives, visiting each in turn according to a conjugal calendar. The marriages are rewarding, the wives are friends and co-workers; their congeniality and cooperation, in fact, is given the reader axiomatically, without exploration or caveat.

"Grazia: How can you be a Dowell and be so free of despair?," Steve writes to his first cousin and fiance Grace Dowell, the novel's narrator. "An optimistic Dowell . . . is not natural." The Dowell clan is indisputably an eccentric lot. Grace's great-aunt Sybil may be certifiably mad, and Grace's older cousin Steve--handsome, possibly brilliant, and definitely impenetrable--is pretentious and unpleasant. Grace, a bright, well-adjusted 19-year-old, has been in love with Steve since age 3. Now her aunt Sybil and a fortuneteller named Fleesha the Futurist are warning her to break loose from a "Disastrous Attachment."

Flora Rheta Schreiber, author of the best-selling study of grande hysterie the world came to know as "Sybil," died of a heart attack Wednesday at a hospital in New York City. Miss Schreiber, 70, also drew the word portrait of a Philadelphia murderer, "Shoemaker." The profits from that book once were ordered to go to a victim. A professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York and a close friend of psychoanalyst Cornelia B.

When Lelia Mrotzek went to her 20-year high school reunion last year, classmates joked that they weren't surprised to find she was spending her time in jail. It was the part about doing it as a chaplain that surprised them. Mrotzek, 38, whose round baby face and upbeat demeanor bely her 10 years of service as the Protestant chaplain at Sybil Brand Institute, was prepared for her classmates' reactions. "I was a rowdy teen-ager," she said, acknowledging that she was heading down the wrong path.

Irish designer Sybil Connolly--she of the hand-pleated linen and garden-inspired custom clothes, the decorative textiles, home furnishings and quietly luxurious interior designs--didn't want to be dogmatic. Nevertheless, she said, referring to Christian Lacroix and his knock-em-dead approach to fashion, "My idea of the well-dressed woman is one who doesn't shock. For me, women who are sure of themselves don't need to do that.

"Don't quibble, Sybil!" is one of the late and much-lamented Charles Ludlam's funniest stolen lines. It is delivered in the course of his outlandish "Bluebeard"--early Ludlam that's something of a cross between "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Young Frankenstein." That, at least is what it was meant to be. With Ludlam's wickedly jerry-rigged pieces, most of them written for himself to star in at his Ridiculous Theatre in New York, a flair for the ridiculous was a given.

Jim McMahon, scheduled to start today for the Chicago Bears, admits he's had his differences with Coach Mike Ditka but says they haven't been serious. "Mike's been Sybilizing a lot lately with a lot of guys, not just me," McMahon told Bob Verdi in The Sporting News. Sybilizing? "You know, going through all different personality stages--like Sybil, the girl in the movie," McMahon said. He said this has contributed to some turmoil, but he also said the Bears thrive on it.