VOTE WITH YOUR BOOKS

By MARGARET CARLSON

More than 3,000 people showed up at a huge ballroom in the Omni Shoreham Hotel for a "Valentine's Book Party" for Hillary Clinton. There was no contribution required; in fact, nothing was asked other than that you wait an hour to park your car and check your coat, and forgo dinner and Thursday night Must-See TV (it was a Friends and Seinfeld kind of crowd: no one seemed much interested in the G.O.P. debate). Clinton gave a short talk and sold a huge stack of books.

Hillary now has her own scandal, big enough to match the guys', and she is taking it like a man. She doesn't get petulant, the way Steve Forbes did last week when the other candidates ganged up on him. It reminds me of my first up-close and personal impression of her during the '92 campaign, when it was possible to share a van and chat. She would blurt out things like "For goodness' sake, you can't be a lawyer if you don't represent banks," which worked in its way for Willie Sutton but is not wife-of-candidate speak. Airbrushed later, that remark contained the seeds of all that would come after, a desire to have things both ways--the need, shared by many of us of a certain age and upbringing, to do well but be seen as doing good.

It turned out we held several beliefs in common, such as the small-deprivations theory of child rearing, which is to hold back on things like ear piercing until age 13 no matter what the other mothers are doing. We also agreed that panty hose are God's punishment for letting women practice law. But that spontaneity had leached from Clinton by the time she wrote It Takes a Village, a programmatic tome. It is nonetheless moving briskly at $20, a fairly inexpensive way to give a vote of confidence. It must be small comfort to Hillary in month seven of the Whitewater hearings that her nemesis, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, is headed for the remainder table rather than the best-seller list with his new book, Power, Pasta and Politics.

Not so Primary Colors, which this week tops the fiction list. In the continuing parlor game of who wrote it, Newsweek's Joe Klein is now so hot that his weekly oeuvre is getting deconstructed a la Jacques Derrida. Klein is a good guy, author (maybe), even though he doesn't bring a camera on trips--only dorks do that--but expects you to take his picture on a camel and get two-for-one prints made.

In the reverse frisson that operates when a star of one galaxy travels to another, Diane Keaton's visit to the Vermeer exhibition created more of a stir than the First Lady does when she ventures out. Later, my daughter Courtney spotted the actress having dinner at Restaurant Nora but, having excellent manners as a result of small deprivations, knew better than to say hello. But then Keaton, proving that occasionally restraint pays off, came to our table. She watches Capital Gang and is pleased that there is a woman willing to battle puffed-up men on television. For our part, we said how much we liked Father of the Bride, Part II (we laughed, we cried, better than Cats), but in the way you can never really have interplanetary conversations, this wounded her. In her Annie Hall shrug you could sense echoes of Hillary Clinton--"For goodness' sake, you can't be an actress if you don't play a Happy Housewife once in a while." She left before we could say we laughed, we cried at Reds.