Reinventing Tinseltown : Books: In the heyday of New Journalism, David Freeman mixed fact with fiction. In his first novel, ‘A Hollywood Life,’ he’s still mixing.

There’s something quintessentially Hollywood about David Freeman’s home--the least of which is that it’s located in, well, Hollywood.

It goes beyond that naked fact to glossy fiction, Hollywood’s particular area of expertise. This is, of course, the land of the big fake, the alluring lie--like life, only new and improved. So it says something about this town that Freeman’s lovely low-slung Spanish-style home, which peers over Sunset Boulevard, is known as “the Scott Fitzgerald house.”

Fitzgerald never even crossed the threshold.

“I could never understand what that meant, because the whole point about Fitzgerald in Hollywood was that he was broke,” says the reflective Freeman.

Fitzgerald lived more modestly on Havenhurst with Sheilah Graham, whose memoirs were tapped for the movie “Beloved Infidel.” But Hollywood put a fine sheen on Fitzgerald’s past; the movie makers shot the exterior of the home Freeman later bought and let the celluloid Fitzgerald live there.

“Only in Hollywood would that make this the Scott Fitzgerald house, because it was used as a Scott Fitzgerald reference in a movie.”

That makes it the perfect backdrop for author-screenwriter Freeman, whose own work straddles an extremely blurry line between fact and fiction. Freeman is known for “A Hollywood Education,” a lionized collection of short stories about the movie business, his literary milieu.

Indeed, his latest book and first novel, “A Hollywood Life,” follows the fortunes of child star and adult nova Carla Tate, who transforms all around her into an eager audience until her untimely demise in a drowning accident. Not surprisingly, “A Hollywood Life” is based on the life and death of Natalie Wood.

Sort of.

“There are lots of Natalie Wood things in it, and yet this is not a book that is about Natalie Wood,” says Freeman, 50. “It’s about an imagined character who is suggested by Natalie Wood. I can see that’s going to get me in some sort of hot water. People have trouble with that sort of thing.

“They want it to be about somebody or not be about somebody.”

For years Freeman opted for work that wasn’t really about anybody--except that it masqueraded as journalism. At the time, the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, he was living in New York, eking out a living as a somewhat celebrated but ill-paid playwright. He was writing for New York magazine and Esquire in the heyday of New Journalism, whose advocates used fiction-writing techniques to tell true stories.

Freeman had his own spin on it. He simply left out the facts--a journalistic sin.

“It had its own kind of goofy rules about it,” Freeman says. “You wouldn’t claim anything happened to a real person, but it was all fictional, although it was written in the style of New Journalism, the vogue of the day. It was also the time before fact-checking, at least at New York magazine.

“And I got away with murder.”

But just barely. Freeman liked to write about street people. His profile of a pimp had the New York police knocking on his door.

“In the story there were allegations of police corruption, the character the pimp paid off. So they came down to ask me and I gave them some blather and then they left and that was it.” Freeman’s editors were similarly oblivious to his fiction.

“Their claims that they didn’t know always reminded me of the moment in ‘Casablanca’ where Claude Rains says, ‘I’m shocked, shocked to hear there’s gambling here.’ ”

Freeman liked to think of himself as a literary daredevil and his magazine pieces--his faux journalism, as he likes to call it--were eventually collected in a book titled “U.S. Grant in the City.” Yet he’s somewhat self-conscious about his audacious past, mindful that such journalistic insouciance doesn’t play in the ‘90s.

“What at the time seemed raffish and although questionable certainly not malicious and not evil later took an awful turn. This was pre-Watergate, let alone pre-Janet Cooke,” he says, referring to the Washington Post reporter who briefly owned a Pulitzer Prize for journalism until she was busted for having written fiction.

Still, true to script in Hollywood, where everyone who is anyone lives happily ever after, Freeman turned his creative powers to fun and profit. But instead of turning fiction into fact, he took the more socially acceptable route of turning fact into fiction. His brush with imaginary pimps and genuine police inspired the 1987 movie “Street Smart.” The well-received film dissects the vicious web that is woven when a reporter, played by Christopher Reeve, makes up a magazine piece about a Times Square pimp.

Freeman had begun spending more and more time in Hollywood in the late ‘70s, after his award-winning play, “Jessie and the Bandit Queen,” began opening doors on the other coast. His usual mission was to play script doctor, which led him to an interesting assignment in 1979 rewriting the script of “The Short Night” for Alfred Hitchcock.

“The Short Night” would have been Hitchcock’s 54th film, but the director died before the project could be completed. Still, the experience provided Freeman with his own Hollywood education as well as the subject of his first book about the movie business, “The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock.”

Freeman parlayed his years behind the scenes into sketches that nipped around the edges of the movie business, taking on offbeat characters who usually never see the limelight--screenwriters, street hustlers, chimps, politicians and pornographers.

The result was “A Hollywood Education,” another heady brew of fact and fiction, which drew accolades on its publication in 1986. The Los Angeles Times called it “the best book anybody has written about Hollywood, ever. . . .”

A telling sign of the book’s success in Los Angeles, where it was a must-read, was that fact started parading around as fiction. “People are going around claiming that they are the models for various characters and others are angry and miffed that they are left out. The thing that Hollywood responds to is success of any sort.”

For “A Hollywood Life,” Freeman turned from the wings to center stage, choosing for his subject the beast itself--fame and fortune. The story has been optioned for a movie and early reviews are promising. Newsday called it a “magnificent presentation of emptiness” at the top.

“Just what does it mean to be a celebrity? There are frequently books about famous people and Hollywood celebrities, but mostly they look at them from the outside in. I set for myself I think a different goal, which was to try to understand and dramatize what it means to come from very little and to invent yourself. It’s a very American theme.”

In his tale about Carla Tate, told through the eyes of admirer Gabe Burton, Freeman goes into detail about childhood in the film business and the odd Hollywood education provided for child stars on studio lots. The book is about the manufacture of stardom on many levels: by studios, by parents, by novelists. “In the book Carla says it takes talent, drive and luck in Hollywood. I know lots of people who have two of those three things whose careers are not going well.”

On the surface at least, Freeman isn’t necessarily what you’d expect of a Hollywood intimate. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he’s still a Yalie in buttoned-down style and intonation after all these years. He lives with his wife, Judith Gingold, a former Newsweek editor, in their pseudo-Fitzgeraldian house on the hill, a lovely three-bedroom dwelling replete with French doors and greenhouse. That has been their Hollywood home for 11 years.

Says Freeman: “I’ve always expected Hollywood to provide me with a living, and indeed it has. I never expected it to provide me with a subject. That was the surprise. But it continues to do both.”