COLUMN ONE : Boycott Sounds a Sour Note : Economic sanctions may have more teeth, but for middle-class South Africans the cultural curbs have more bite.

Sun City preserves its fondest memories in a deserted corridor away from the slot machines’ jingle. Barry Manilow and Frank Sinatra are there on well-lighted posters. So are George Benson and Dolly Parton, Chicago and Queen, Cher and Liza.

All have been “live at Sun City,” playing for the world’s biggest money in the Super Bowl, Africa’s best-equipped music hall. On one memorable evening, Elton John, on his way out of town, sat down to play piano for Rod Stewart, who had just arrived.

“It was like Vegas in the old days,” Jon Gathright, the theater operations manager, said recently, smiling at the five-year-old memories.

But the bright stars have disappeared from the Super Bowl marquee. The other day the stage was being set for a Tupperware convention. After that, the hall, with its $2.5-million sound system and a world-class music stage crew, was booked for a dog show.

The cultural boycott of South Africa, affecting everyone from crooners to authors to movie makers, has been one of the world’s most widely applied sanctions. For privileged whites, generally gregarious people who yearn to be liked by the world, the boycott has taken an immeasurable psychological toll.

While the cultural boycott lacks the teeth of more publicized economic sanctions, its effects are more deeply felt in the day-to-day lives of most whites, who avidly follow American popular culture and despair at being shunned by their favorite singers and actors.

“What you have to understand about white South Africans is that they are part of the world middle class,” said Eric Louw, director of the Contemporary Cultural Studies unit at the University of Natal in Durban. “Living in Los Angeles is not very different from living in the suburbs of Pretoria. Whites consider themselves part of that same culture.”

One recent day, a local disc jockey played the melancholy tune “Rainy Night in Georgia” and told his listeners wistfully: “That was Brook Benton, who came here long ago, back when performers still came to South Africa.”

“I would love to hear these people play in my country or even to see a Woody Allen movie, but the situation doesn’t allow for it,” says an official in the South African Musicians’ Alliance, which supports the boycott. “The boycott is still the only way to bring home to a lot of whites that this isn’t a normal society.”

Anti-apartheid leaders say the combination of the cultural boycott and economic sanctions imposed over the past five years have brought South Africa to where it is today, with black nationalist leader Nelson R. Mandela free and the nation’s 5 million whites and 27 million blacks edging toward negotiations.

Whites already are asking how much longer they will have to be a world pariah. And they don’t much like the answer.

Cultural officers of the African National Congress, the liberation movement largely responsible for the boycott, insist that the pressure must be maintained until there is evidence of concrete change, such as the dissolution of laws that racially segregate neighborhoods, schools and hospitals.

Although Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher lifted Britain’s ban on cultural, scientific and academic links with South Africa a few days ago, no foreign entertainers are rushing to sign contracts.

“It’s way too soon,” said Christopher Dalston, head of international bookings for Triad Artists in Century City, Calif. “Apartheid is still very much alive, and people at this point won’t even consider South Africa until apartheid is gone. We have a lot of black clients, and it would be wrong for them to work down there.”

Hazel Feldman, a South African who travels the world in search of acts for Sun City, says she is encouraged by the first steps of change in South Africa.

“But it would be naive to think it’s going to open doors,” Feldman said the other day. “There’s a long way to go.”

Feldman said she thinks the single biggest restriction on American and European entertainers now “is no longer their own convictions about apartheid; sadly, it’s the potential reaction of their peers.”

Indeed, fears of the apartheid blacklist permeate the entertainment industry. Several noted agents in Los Angeles refused to even come to the phone to discuss the cultural boycott with The Times.

“He doesn’t talk about that subject at all,” one secretary explained.

Dalston conceded: “We could lose a lot of clients if we dealt down there (in South Africa).”

The Commodores, a black American singing group, quietly signed a contract to play Sun City last July, only to pull out under pressure from anti-apartheid groups when the news leaked back home. Instead, the Commodores performed for mostly white South African audiences in Botswana and Lesotho--sparsely populated countries whose capitals are only a 10-minute drive from South Africa.

In another case, singer Laura Branigan played Sun City last year and donated part of her fee to the charity work of Operation Hunger. She later lost a booking in the Philippines because of her appearance in South Africa.

“I think it’s wrong,” Feldman said. “Musicians go to Russia, Turkey and Chile. There’s bloody trouble everywhere. I think music should not be used to shut out people, but to break down barriers between people.”

The cultural boycott reaches far beyond music, however. Many publishing firms have suspended shipments of books and educational materials to South Africa, and some American libraries still refuse to share resources with institutions here.

“Well-intentioned Americans are unwittingly aiding the South African government in its systematic starvation of young black minds,” Lisa Drew, a vice president of William Morrow & Co., and Robert Wedgeworth, dean of the School of Library Services at Columbia University, wrote in an article that appeared in the New York Times in December. They urged publishers and librarians to end the book boycott.

South Africans still have access to many American movies in theaters that are now open to all races. A few filmmakers allow their movies to be shown only at film festivals sponsored by anti-apartheid organizations. And a handful, including Woody Allen and Spike Lee, refuse to allow their films to be screened here at all.

State-run television carries American programs, from “Dallas” to “Murphy Brown,” but other popular shows have been withdrawn. Before “The Cosby Show” was canceled here, it was highly popular among black South Africans.

The boycott of South Africa and South African entertainers, like any broadly applied sanction, has hurt many of the people it is designed to help. Progressive artists inside the country, for example, find their nationality an almost insurmountable obstacle to building an international following.

As a result, anti-apartheid groups agreed at a U.N. meeting in Athens last year to replace the total boycott with a selective boycott that will encourage progressive culture in South Africa.

“We’re saying boycott apartheid institutions in South Africa but support democratic institutions in South Africa,” said Thabo Mbeki, the ANC’s foreign affairs director.

But sometimes it is difficult to tell the good guys from the bad, and most entertainers prefer to stay away entirely.

The starless stages of Sun City and other resorts are the best evidence of the cultural boycott’s effectiveness.

“Sun City is one of the areas where the cultural boycott has worked,” Louw said. “It’s affected a whole cross-section of people.”

Feldman agreed. “We’re treated like a leper with AIDS,” she complained.

Sun City is a sprawling, $80-million desert resort in the nominally independent “homeland” of Bophuthatswana. It was targeted because the ANC saw it as part of the government’s attempt to avoid sanctions and lend credibility to the homeland system, which stripped South African citizenship from about 10 million blacks.

Pretoria created the self-governing homelands in the 1970s, when the black majority was agitating for a vote in national affairs. Most are located on desolate tracts of land, far from major urban centers, and four of them, including Bophuthatswana, were granted independence by South Africa and have black heads of state.

But no other country has recognized their independence, and the South African government recently conceded the failure of its homelands system. One of the major questions South Africa will face in drawing up a new constitution is what to do with the homelands, whose black leaders are not likely to give up their power willingly after 11 years of independence.

The primary sources of revenue in the homelands are gambling resorts, which feature casinos and soft-porn entertainment and cater largely to white vacationers from South Africa, where gambling and X-rated shows are illegal.

The flagship of the resorts is Sun City, about 100 miles northwest of Johannesburg. Frank Sinatra opened the 8,000-seat Super Bowl in 1981 and was followed onto the stage there by some of the best-known entertainers in the world.

But in 1985, Sun City was dealt two severe blows. The first was a protest song and video, “Sun City,” recorded by anti-apartheid musicians and distributed worldwide. The second was a speech made by Pieter W. Botha, then the president of South Africa, who had been angered by increasing threats of sanctions and said his country did not need outsiders meddling in its affairs. He invited them to leave.

Bookings dropped almost immediately, and about the only performers Sun City was able to attract were fading stars who needed the money or the rare artist who did not care about being blacklisted.

“There are a lot of groups out there hurting, and we don’t pay bad money,” said Gathright, an American who oversees Sun City’s three stages. “They see us as a way to get financially back in good standing. We pay, and we pay well.”

Some acts have tried to turn the boycott to their advantage by issuing press statements falsely saying that they have turned down lucrative deals with Sun City, which pays entertainers $3 million to $5 million for two weekends’ work.

A year ago, singer Boy George said he had turned down an offer from Sun City after the resort asked him to leave his black drummer at home. Feldman said Boy George was never invited to Sun City, and she noted that it has had several black artists on its stage.

The Super Bowl is managed by Billy Domingo, who is one of 3,500 blacks employed at Sun City, some of them in executive positions.

“I came here because we did the rock ‘n’ roll shows,” Domingo said recently. “I didn’t come to do dog shows and car shows.” Domingo has been offered jobs in Europe, only to have those offers withdrawn because he has a South African passport.

These days, though, Feldman is getting a slightly warmer reception on her trips to Los Angeles and other entertainment capitals.

“I’ve never really had doors slammed in my face,” she said. “But I’ve sensed that I’ve been an embarrassment to people who’ve had contact with me.”

Now, though, “I have people inviting me in, wanting to hear what I have to say,” she said. “And at least I’m not getting the old nonsense trotted out to me that Sun City is a place where only white people are allowed to go.”