TV’S ELLERBEE KEEPS HER COOL ABOUT BEING HOT

Suddenly--finally--Linda Ellerbee is hot.

“I don’t know,” Ellerbee said. “You have to mistrust all of this, don’t you think? It won’t last and that’s OK. It doesn’t have to. I’ve already enjoyed every damn minute of it.”

Ellerbee, the skeptical Texan-turned-New Yorker who spent 11 years at NBC News, was in town last week for meetings with TV and movie people and a guest shot on “The Tonight Show.”

“What else do you come to California for?” she asked.

Don’t write or picket her. She was joking . . . maybe.

Wearing her traditional big shirt, jeans and sneakers, Ellerbee was miscast last weekend pool side under a yellow umbrella at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Everything about her suggested bigness: big hair, big glasses, big earrings, big clothes, big lusty laugh, big fun.

She dug into her bag, produced a green plastic water gun and squeezed off a few shots.

Don’t ask.

When you’re hot, you don’t need reasons. You’re the reason.

How hot is Ellerbee? Very. Her best-selling biography titled “And So It Goes” may become a theatrical movie, and she has a novel in the works. She rejected a whopper CBS deal for less money at ABC, where the coming season she’ll co-anchor and co-write a new prime-time series called “Our World,” appear Fridays on “Good Morning America” and perhaps even host her own late-night show once a week (“We’re negotiating”). And she’s even been approached about writing a syndicated column.

How has Ellerbee done it? “She’s failed her way to the top,” a TV producer said recently.

A connoisseur of irony, Ellerbee laughed when hearing that comment about her. “Yeah, I like that,” she said. “It’s not true, but I like it.”

She’s right. Like many gifted, off-center people in centrist TV, Ellerbee didn’t fail; the system failed her by seldom accommodating her talents. She’s a crusader against arrogance and a delicious writer with a slightly bent point of view and witty way of expressing it.

Not that she hasn’t had a TV news career that most would envy, having been an NBC correspondent and co-writer and co-anchor of three network news programs, including the smart-alecky “Weekend” and the wee-hours “NBC Overnight,” neither a ratings buster, unfortunately.

That was followed in 1984 by her role in NBC News’ summer-long hara-kiri, the high-budget, high-tech, high-horror--Was this disaster really happening on network TV?--”Summer Sunday, USA.” Tipsy technology? Live interviews that died horrible deaths? It was like watching Ellerbee and her co-anchor, Andrea Mitchell, sink each week with the Titanic.

Ellerbee, who turns 42 this month and lives with her 17-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son in New York, seemed on the skids at NBC. Flash forward next to the “Today” program, where Ellerbee’s Friday “TGIF” pieces are giving a refreshingly wry twist to the week’s news and non-news. Her NBC bosses show their appreciation in 1986 by asking her to take a 40% pay cut.

“It was,” she told Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” “an offer I could refuse.”

So Ellerbee’s career seemed on the decline and she was a poor bet for superstardom when big things began happening to her almost simultaneously.

“First, NBC offered me the 40% cut and leaked it to the press,” she explained. “Then the book was published and I went on a book tour. The book hit the best-seller list and people started asking me what I would do next. And the longer the book stayed on the best-seller list, the more people remembered I was good on TV. And about that time, CBS decided it needed two people for its morning news and ABC was looking for someone for its new program.”

Ellerbee said she and CBS News correspondent Charles Osgood got offers to replace the now-departed Maria Shriver and Forrest Sawyer as co-anchors of the network’s 20-year work in progress, otherwise known as “The CBS Morning News.” Ellerbee instead opted for less money and ABC.

“I picked up the New York Times and read, ‘CBS Staffing Plans Upset by Ellerbee Move,’ ” Ellerbee said. “It was the first time I brought down a show without being on it.”

Why did she reject CBS? “In order to do that job correctly, it would involve so many hours that there would be no room for anything else,” she said. “Writing or sleeping--take your choice. And at some point, you have to ask--corny as it sounds--’How much more money do I need?’ ”

What’s more, she was attracted to the concept of the ABC series, a weekly retrospective of a different year in history. “It’s a writers’ show,” she said. “Morning shows are talkers’ shows.”

ABC hasn’t announced a co-anchor for Ellerbee, but Sander Vanocur, Dick Schaap and James Wooten are being mentioned.

Deployed at 8 p.m. Thursdays, “Our World” is opposite NBC’s “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” the top two series in the Nielsen ratings, so no one envisions the ABC show winning its time slot. “In a way, it’s nice going up against Cosby,” Ellerbee said. “No one expects us to have any kind of a performance against him, so we have time.” Ellerbee says that “Our World” has a 36-week commitment from ABC.

Ironically, “The Tonight Show” has asked Ellerbee to come back next month on an evening when Carson will be on vacation. The guest host? Another best-selling author, Bill Cosby.

Would Ellerbee do that? Sure she would. Don’t forget, she carries a water gun.

More immediate matters press, however. Producer Bernie Brillstein and actress Marsha Mason, who have an option on the movie rights to “And So It Goes,” are negotiating for a production deal and Ellerbee has begun writing the screenplay.

Ellerbee’s book is a wonderful, scintillating, funny, fast read. It is also episodic, though, a collection of extended anecdotes--almost as if Ellerbee were in a bar telling you stories--with no central theme or narrative. That makes for tough screen writing, especially for a novice.

“Of course I’m awed,” said Ellerbee, whose deal also includes a share of the profits. “I’ll write a script. They’ll hate it. They’ll hire someone to fix it. And I’ll have had a paid lesson in script writing.”

Ellerbee the author, though, is on firmer turf, her book having been on the New York Times best-seller’s list for two months. “I keep creeping up on Cosby,” she said.