PRINCESS LEIA TRIES HER HAND AT BOOK WARS

Carrie Fisher lives high on a hill with a life-size plastic cow parked beside her swimming pool, a two-seat swing in her bedroom, enough gee-gaws in the house to open a small boutique--and a lot of pages of her book “Money Dearest” piled beside her typewriter.

So if you don’t see her around town--and you don’t--that’s what she’s doing. Writing.

“I belong to a very unstable profession and I don’t want what’s happened to others to happen to me,” she said earlier this week. “So, I started writing. I did a piece for Esquire last year and people seemed to like that, so now I’m doing this book for Simon & Schuster.”

It is, of course, autobiographical?

“It is not at all autobiographical,” said the actress who claimed she is so small at 5 feet, 1 inch that she has spent her entire film career staring at actors’ chests. “It’s just a collection of stories about Los Angeles. I was determined not to write one of those books where people say: ‘Ah, I know who that is.’

“Most memoirs are rather sad, I think. Unless they’re like Shelley Winters’--which was great--a long list of old lovers. My mother (Debbie Reynolds) is writing her autobiography you know. I don’t expect it’ll be much like Shelley Winters’ somehow.”

Now 29, Fisher, daughter of Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, returned to Los Angeles from New York when her marriage to Paul Simon broke up two years ago.

Since then she has been back East a couple of times to make the movies “Garbo Talks” and “Hannah and Her Sisters.” And in May she will be seen in the new NBC epic “Liberty”--the story of how the Statue of Liberty came into being. In this she plays Emma Lazarus, who wrote the famous lines at the foot of the statue: “Give me your tired, your poor. . . .” Frank Langella, George Kennedy and Claire Bloom also star. Although Langella stands 6 feet, 4 inches and the statue itself is 152 feet high, Fisher insists she was not upstaged.

Surprisingly, she was offered more acting roles after her debut in “Shampoo” (in which she played a nymphet) than she has been since playing Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” trilogy.

“I suppose that’s understandable,” she said. “I can’t see anyone looking at me in ‘Star Wars’ and saying: ‘Wouldn’t she be just perfect for ‘Three Sisters?’ ”

SECOND CHANCE: Robert Westbrook’s new novel “The Left-handed Policeman” has just been bought by Warner Bros. and this time, he thinks, he may hang around long enough to see the movie made.

The last time he wrote a book (“The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart”), he was so disillusioned by the film that he fled to Europe.

“I was really burned by that experience,” said Westbrook, who is the son of former gossip queen Sheila Graham. “I’d worked on a number of movies as an assistant director before that, including one for Martin Poll, who bought my book.

“He cast two people who did not work well together, Don Johnson (then 19) and Katie Heflin, Van’s daughter, and after two weeks Katie was fired. I’d fallen in love with her by that time and I was so discouraged at what was happening to my novel that I quit my position as associate producer on the film and left with her.”

They lived in Europe for a while, married, then returned to Northern California where Westbrook began writing again. He also did some research for his mother’s book, “My Hollywood.” Then he began work on “The Left-handed Policeman,” the story of a psychopathic killer obsessed by a voluptuous television star. It is set in Beverly Hills.

“I wanted to deglamorize Beverly Hills,” he said. “I hope I succeeded. I grew up in this town and I never thought it very glamorous, not the way the South of France is glamorous, certainly. Really, you know Beverly Hills is a media invention.”

Westbrook is now at work on a sequel.

“I just can’t let this character go,” he said.

QUOTE: From Marcello Mastroianni on learning that Ginger Rogers had taken out a lawsuit over the use of her name in Fellini’s new movie “Ginger and Fred”: “Why?”