BOOK REVIEW : HYPE AND GLORY<i> by William Goldman</i> Villard Books $18.95, 300 pages : A Screenwriter’s Personal Travails

“For my future,” the dedication here reads, “on the blithe assumption that it exists.”

William Goldman, whose “Adventures in the Screen Trade” presented us with a man who knew all the answers as well as the most outrageous stories about movie-making in the world, turns up in this sweet book as a different kind of storyteller altogether. Instead of the hotshot writer, he’s more like one of the crew now. He is rougher, he’s older, he has a strict set of moral values--he’s querulous, even repetitive. And he’s absolutely lovable, absolutely engaging, absolutely darling. How could the years have been so kind to him? (Or is it he, being kind to the years?)

The events chronicled here span the spring, summer and fall of 1988. Goldman (whose screen-writing credits, remember, include “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”) is asked to be a judge at the Cannes Film Festival. He talks it over with his “good wife.” He has refused, he tells her, but she gently talks him back into it. (Not until Page 40 does Goldman reveal that they’re already in the process of a divorce after a 27-year marriage, and that he’s spinning, reeling, from several reality-hits at once.)

This new William Goldman has terrible trouble at Heathrow Airport. His own tuxedo fights him every inch of the way. His luggage, which used to stick to him like glue, has found ways of getting left behind. His eyes are bothering him. He’s not getting any younger. When he does get to Cannes, he’s bamboozled by the language: He may have written “Butch Cassidy,” but he still can’t speak French. . . .

What do you do when a divorce comes your way? You have to go on living, you must go forward at all costs, but you stagger. You pretty much have to. So, lurching emotionally, but manfully trying to ignore it or overcome it or both, Goldman goes to Cannes.

He reports to us about the staircase in the Grand Palais, where “stars” take their golden moments of applause from adoring fans. He tells us about the rituals, the meetings, the deals, but mostly about the movies up for judgment. (Woe be onto the man who directed the Argentine turkey with all those pieces of paper blowing in the wind.)

When Goldman stands up in the theater and yells for “Pelle, the Conqueror,” you understand where this brave, sardonic, dear-hearted writer is coming from. Because he thinks he’s an old guy too, like Pelle (only richer, of course), and he too is saying goodby to his children. He too, in spite of his judgeship, is looking loneliness right smack in the face.

Getting older, getting divorced, means looking back at life, checking it out, wondering where it might have taken a wrong turn. Was it because he got dull (he, who is never dull), Goldman wonders? Or was it those years he spent on a golden roll, writing hit after hit? Did that kind of “success” ensure another kind of “failure”?

All these musings are sandwiched very thinly into the rough, nourishing bread of Hollywood stories. Memories, anecdotes, gossip, the amazing Canterbury Tales of Hollywood--the kind usually told by the film crew, at lunchtime, or after work. Wonderfully dopey stuff! (But to retell them here would be to give them away.)

After a summer at home in New York, fighting divorce wars and aging wars and dating wars, Goldman sojourns to Atlantic City to be a judge once again, in the Miss America Contest. This has nothing like the depth of the Cannes section but by now the reader doesn’t care. You could read Goldman writing about cattle slaughter or grain management by now, and it would still be wonderful. (And that’s what he’s out to show, of course: He may have misplaced a wonderful wife and even may have misspent a wonderful life; he may have been jerked around in every kind of way, but his writing glows and shimmers. He’s an ace.)

Next: Lee Dembart reviews “Toward the Habit of Truth: A Life in Science” by Mahlon Hoagland.