BEYOND BELIEF! : Need updates on Elvis? Bat Child? Turn to wacky, <i> waaay</i> -out Weekly World News.

Every Monday, Eddie Clontz gets the numbers from 500 supermarkets in 20 cities, and this week the numbers are bad. “MARILYN MONROE WAS A RUSSIAN SPY!” bombed.

“I made a mistake on that one,” moans Clontz as his newsroom staff nods in agreement.

Indeed, sales of Weekly World News’ Marilyn cover story, an exclusive that reveals how the Hollywood sex goddess “romanced JFK and Nikita Khrushchev--at the same time!” totaled only 650,000, down 125,000 from usual.

For Clontz, the hyperkinetic editor of WWN, a sales dive like that translates into a loss of $106,000 in single-copy revenues and causes nightmarish flashbacks to his all-time worst-seller, an April, 1985, cover headlined “MY UNBORN BABY HAS CANCER!”

“No one wanted to read that one,” he says.

But Clontz feeds on pressure like the Human Vacuum Cleaner sucks up forks, nails and dishrags. And at this critical moment in the nation’s tabloid wars, he knows who can save him.

He’s 2 feet tall and very dangerous!

He’s the object of a coast-to-coast manhunt!

Just months after he was captured in a West Virginia cave--and sold 800,000 copies at 85 cents each in supermarket checkout lines everywhere--”BAT CHILD ESCAPES!”

Says Clontz, beaming at the next week’s cover: “I expect 850,000 on Bat Child.”

So it goes here in Tabloidland, a suburban area of palm trees and single-family homes just south of Palm Beach that over the last few years has quietly mutated into a journalistic theme park of excess and hyperbole. Behind a Little League ball field, in a low-rise office building that could easily house sedated insurance agents, live WWN, America’s wackiest newspaper, and its stablemates, the venerable National Enquirer (circulation: 4 million) and the Star (3.1 million).

Here, using perfectly ordinary telephones and computers, the inquiring minds of tabloidian editors and reporters come up with the story ideas and questions that the daily press is afraid to even think of, let alone ask.

Forget the latest tax initiative and Bosnia-Herzegovina. What about the world’s ugliest stripper (“She’s the only hoochie-coochie girl on Earth who gets paid to keep her clothes ON!”), the toothless vampire who robs blood banks (in Los Angeles!), and the grieving parents who ask: “Who Stole Our Dead Boy’s Heart?”

Down the road in nearby Boca Raton, competitors at the Globe, the Sun and the National Examiner are asking equally disturbing questions about UFOs, weird sex, cannibals who feast on themselves and Oprah’s waistline. And getting shocking answers!

“This is Tabloid World, and we’re on the absolute fringe,” said Sal Ivone, WWN’s managing editor. “The regular press is gray, analytical and stays well above the readers’ heads. We go for the gut.”

Example: “We’ve got a Palm Beach shocker working here,” says Ivone, citing the headline, “HEIRESS MARRIES TEENAGE SON! ‘WE DON’T CARE, WE’RE RICH!’ ” He adds: “It’s an outrage story.”

Outrage is just one of the byproducts of this area’s leading industry, founded in 1958 when Generoso Pope Jr. turned a struggling New York crime paper into what would become the granddaddy of supermarket tabloids, the National Enquirer.

The Enquirer prospered on gore for years, eventually giving up the nun-eats-baby stories in favor of softer pieces on the afterlife, Liz Taylor and psychics. In the four years since Pope’s death, the Enquirer has shifted its news focus even more, moving away from extraterrestrial rapes and two-headed milk cows and becoming strong on celebrity gossip, TV trends, fad diets and medical news.

For the truly bizarre, you have to turn to the WWN, the first supermarket tabloid to break two of the biggest stories of the last decade: “ELVIS IS ALIVE!” and “ALIEN BACKS CLINTON!” (not to mention “I HAD BIGFOOT’S BABY!” and “MAN FROZEN IN 1936 REVIVED!”).

“We are extremely sensational, the last of the old-time tabloids, a throwback to the daily journalism of the Hearst papers in the 1900s, the 1920s and 1930s,” says Clontz, 45. From a desk in the middle of WWN’s small newsroom, he doesn’t direct his 18-person staff so much as he conducts it, using a booming baritone, a raucous laugh and a well-honed sense of the absurd to drive reporters and headline writers waaaaaaaaaaaay beyond normal in the pursuit of zaniness.

As showman and ringmaster, Clontz gives vent to the madcap impulses he fought to suppress in his old job as wire editor at the respected St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. Here, he has been known to mount his desk to deliver an impromptu pep talk, to read aloud a particularly hilarious letter or to whip out his battery-powered squirt gun to soak a daydreaming reporter.

Creativity is up, and so are profits, according to the papers’ corporate parent, Enquirer/Star Group Inc., a part of Macfadden Holdings, which paid more than $800 million for the Enquirer, Star and WWN in separate deals in 1989 and 1990. Revenues for this fiscal year totaled $284 million, and cash flow has shot up from $17 million in 1989 to more than $120 million. The company went public in July, 1991, and its stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

In the last few years, WWN has reaped a whirlwind of publicity and picked up something of a cult following. MTV plugs it, disc jockeys regularly read from it, and fan clubs have sprung up on several college campuses. And why not? Who could resist “I VISITED HEAVEN--AND MY DEAD HUSBAND MADE ME PREGNANT!”?

Not Clontz and Ivone. “The perfect story makes the staff laugh out loud,” said Ivone, 43, who toiled at the New York Daily News and the New York Post before becoming Clontz’s deputy and straight man 10 years ago. “A cover for us might be an alien abduction, or it could simply be the world’s biggest cat. We had that recently, a cat that weighed more than 40 pounds. Looked like a miniature cow.”

Perfect stories beget more perfect stories. The cat cover prompted a flood of cat photos from readers, including one that led to the classic “KITTY COUGHS UP FLAMING HAIRBALLS!”

What really put WWN on a roll, however, was its May, 1988, “ELVIS IS ALIVE!” cover, which began with an obscure book self-published by a delirious fan and grew into an American myth with a shelf life of forever. Elvis sightings aren’t just for Kalamazoo anymore; they are part of American culture. Clontz says he would be proud to leave as his journalistic legacy and epitaph: “He wrote the headline, ‘Elvis is Alive!’ ”

Of course, ever since 1977, when the National Enquirer sold 6.6 million copies by running a cover photo of Elvis in his coffin, every tabloid editor subscribes to the same basic doctrine: When in doubt, go with the King. Since resurrecting Elvis 4 1/2 years ago, WWN has run 56 Elvis stories dealing with sightings, weeping icons, love children, comeback plans and cancer cures.

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The paper has also raised the level of the election-year debate with its groundbreaking reporting on the space alien, first seen walking with President Bush at Camp David, then in conference with Ross Perot and, finally, endorsing Bill Clinton. Follow-up stories had photos of all three men holding up copies of WWN that pictured them with the alien.

“Frankly,” says Clontz, “I don’t think there’s another paper or product in America that could have been held up and endorsed by Bush, Perot and Clinton within 40 days. Now, I would love to think our prestigious journal has some influence on politics, but I don’t think so. But it does speak to the sense of humor of the candidates.”

And, of course, the alien--a huge seller--will be back. Between now and the Nov. 3 election, Clontz promises another out-of-this-world exclusive, this one having to do with Washington goings-on so shocking that it could end the political careers of four U.S. senators and three congressmen.

Sounds serious. “No,” insists Clontz, “it will be fun. We don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

So how does WWN do it? How does a newspaper with only six reporters who almost never leave the office regularly break stories such as “GAS-PASSING DINOSAURS BLEW THEMSELVES INTO EXTINCTION!” and “29-YEAR-OLD BEAUTY MARRIES GIRAFFE!”?

For starters, the mainstream press doesn’t chase after a bizarre story as hard as WWN staffers do. They page through more than 1,000 daily newspapers, subscribe to offbeat medical journals, read hundreds of readers’ letters, and happily take phone calls from people with tales just too far-fetched to believe. Or almost too far-fetched.

“Other reporters are trained to dismiss those claims, those people,” says Ivone. “We are actively seeking them.”

And they find them. Through dozens of daily phone calls, through hundreds of letters, through an extensive network of stringers, in stories the straight press underplays. In August, for example, the Los Angeles Times reported: “An alleged thief who crammed his pockets with fried chicken after robbing a fast-food restaurant Monday was nabbed by police, who followed a trail of chicken and used a tracking dog to sniff the man out.”

Here’s the same story when WWN staffer Jack Alexander rewrote it: “The chicken in this story crossed the road because it was cut up, crispy-fried and in the pants pockets of a robber who was running from the cops.”

“We’re not in the same field as straight journalists,” admits veteran staffer Susan Jimison. “We’re telling a yarn here, and if I have to suspend disbelief, that’s part of my job.”

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Thus, if a caller says he’s spent the afternoon on a Martian operating table, the editors’ instincts are to go with it. If someone else insists they just had lunch with Bat Child--and has a photograph to prove it--they could be talking Page 1.

“Our credo is: Don’t question yourself out of a good story,” says Clontz. “Our editorial judgments are marketing judgments. We’re looking for the outrageous, eye-catching, sensational something that will scream in order to compete in a sea of checkout-line publications. We tell it like it is. Or could be. Or might be.

“Let’s put it this way: In these times, people are looking for entertainment. If we truly inform, it’s only by accident.”

But in spite of what you may think, there are some things WWN doesn’t do. Real downers, such as the baby with cancer. No animal abuse. Graphic sex is out, but not all sex. “It’s got to be funny as hell,” says Clontz. “We had this one story about a couple suing a driver because when they were in the car naked, he rear-ended them, and she wound up pregnant because they were forced together.”

Clontz likes to insist WWN is a family paper.

“Yeah, the Addams Family,” says Ivone.

“How about the Manson family?” quips staffer John Hannon.

Although WWN reporters are encouraged to embellish stories, they do not make them up. Nor is the paper often sued. In fact, in its 11 years, Clontz says, WWN has been sued only once--by a convicted rapist described as being on parole rather than on probation. WWN paid him $1,500, and the case never got to court.

Tabloidland always has been known as a place where reporters and editors are well-rewarded. Starting salaries for reporters are in the $50,000- to $80,000-a-year range, and editors such as Clontz and Ivone pull down well over $100,000. But they work hard for the money. Reporters are expected to turn out at least three stories a day, along with a handful of short fillers.

Of course, some stories write themselves. Like Bat Child.

WWN has received more than 600 letters and 150 phone calls reporting sightings since the razor-toothed toddler escaped, Clontz says. “We’re going to map his movements,” he gushes. “We have a good idea of where he’s been and where he’s headed. It’s a great story.”

Is it a true story?

“It’s a great story,” says Clontz, baring his own teeth in a hearty laugh. “Is is real? Probably not. Do I care? No.

“I’ll tell you, in these times, chasing Bat Child is a lot more fun than paying bills or trying to balance the checkbook. And if he pops up in my headlights some night, I wouldn’t be surprised.”