Hello! Delights the Rich and Famous : Media: What’s this? A magazine in which never is heard a discouraging word. Celebrities love it and, shockingly enough, so do the scandal-happy British.

Celebrities love Hello! And why shouldn’t they? The British magazine offers them fawning, uncritical coverage of a type generally unknown in the Western world.

Demi Moore and and Bruce Willis understand. So do Donald and Ivana Trump, who appear frequently in the glossy weekly. Rod Stewart; his wife, Rachel Hunter, and their baby, Renee, show up with frightening regularity.

Those featured in Hello!--the chirpy title and exclamation mark speak volumes about the magazine’s unfailingly upbeat tone--know that nothing untoward will ever be said about them within its pages.

Whatever they choose to tell Hello! will be dutifully printed. No pesky facts will emerge later to irritate or embarrass them. To add glamour, photos are sometimes enhanced.

Let’s put it this way: The magazine doesn’t exactly need a crack team of libel lawyers on 24-hour standby.

So it’s no wonder that the rich and famous are lining up to enter the parallel universe of Hello!, where all is wonderful and elegant and even life’s occasional setbacks can be given a cheery spin.

Beyond the assurance of risk-free publicity, there’s even the possibility of picking up a little extra cash. Hello! has been known to write a fair-sized check for the privilege of a chat, a photo tour of a grand estate or a peek at a new baby.

Celebrities “know we’re not going to stitch them up,” says Hello! co-editor Maggie Goodman, sitting in her London office. “And they know we’ve got very good photographs. And they know we have this question-and-answer interview technique so we actually print what people say. We don’t editorialize. We just present the people, present the story, and let readers draw their own conclusions.”

That philosophy has made Hello! the butt of endless lampooning in the British media. Certainly it makes the magazine sound too dull to survive, particularly in Britain, where scandal-chasing tabloids reign supreme.

But, in fact, Hello! is the nation’s fastest-growing title, one of the few to rocket through the last several years as if the recession never happened.

From a slow start in 1988, Hello! has watched its weekly circulation grow to just under half a million. And upscale advertisers love to be seen in it.

“In an ugly and sometimes distressing world, it packages dreams,” says Jerry Judge, chief executive of ad agency Young and Rubicam Ltd. “It’s sanitized gossip.”

“We know it’s not going to offend anyone,” says Martin Avis, media planner at Optimedia.

Not surprisingly, a slew of rival British publishers plan copycat mags, with the first out of the block to be called, imaginatively, OK! Meanwhile, U.S. publishers have been courting the Spanish family that owns Hello! with hopes of bringing the title and its winning formula to the celebrity-crazed States.

But the Sanchez family, which runs Hello! and its Spanish-language sister, Hola!, from its apartment in Madrid, is not ready to tackle the United States quite yet.

“The family is very interested in the American market,” says Goodman. “But they don’t want (an American edition) to be run by some huge organization where they don’t have any control.”

Eduardo Sanchez, the company director, works alongside his mother and daughter, carefully making sure both their magazines adhere to his strict code of optimism and cheeriness.

“People say to me all the time ‘Oh, it’s such a nice magazine; you never say anything nasty about people,’ ” Goodman says. “I mean, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. But it’s a question of choosing the right people not to be nasty about.”

The British royals, and Princess Diana in particular, are the most frequent subjects of Hello! Actually, frequent is the wrong word. They appear in every single issue.

Nowhere else on the planet--short of whatever in-house organ Buckingham Palace churns out--would give them such slavishly devoted and sympathetic treatment.

When the Prince and Princess of Wales made their disastrous journey to Korea in November, the world press dubbed them “The Glums” and correctly predicted that the end of their marriage was near. Hello! managed to put a noble face on the situation and headlined its cover story “Fulfilling Their Duties With Dignity Despite the Pressures They’re Under.” (To find out what those “pressures” were, however, required reading another publication.)

Immediately after Charles and Diana’s split, the cover story was “The Prince and Princess of Wales Affirm Their Strong Commitment to Public Duty.” Then came a cover showing Diana splashing in the ocean under the headline “A Carefree Princess Diana Together With William and Harry for a Sunny Start to the New Year.”

And so it goes with non-royals as well:

* Donald Trump: “The Tycoon Invites Us to His Sumptuous Palm Beach Home.” In a six-page spread of Trump posing in huge rooms filled with gaudy furniture at Mar-a-Lago, the beleaguered businessman reveals that “I almost feel guilty that I can’t spend more time here, because I love this place.”

* Exclusive: “Demi Moore and Bruce Willis Talk to Us About the Break-Up Rumors.” As if taking out an ad in the trades, the pair get two pages to deny that their marriage is in trouble. “Bruce and I both make a great effort to compromise, and our marriage continues to grow stronger and stronger,” confides Demi.

* Exclusive: “Photographed as You’ve Never Seen Her Before--Rachel Hunter Tells Us How She and Baby Renee Have Turned Rod Stewart Into a Family Man.” Posed either holding her baby or wearing skimpy outfits, Hunter says of the baby, “She’s such a brilliant child, so good, so happy, such a bright, fun-loving child.”

Sometimes Hello! can even seem like a parody of itself. The Feb. 27 cover story concerned Dewi Sukarno, who had pleaded guilty to slashing a fellow jet-setter’s face at a party in Aspen, Colo. In the hands of Hello! the story became: “Exclusive: Dewi Sukarno--We Visit the Former First Lady of Indonesia in Jail in Colorado.”

Across 10 bright pages, readers saw a constantly smiling Sukarno in various designer outfits, showing off her low-security digs: curling up on her prison bed with a thick book, sitting at a table “answering letters from friends and supporters” and leaning back in a chair, taking a call on the prison pay phone. A photo of her working out in posh sweats is captioned, “Dewi keeps her figure in shape in the exercise room.”

That is the egalitarian nature of Hello!. The magazine is willing to cover just about anybody with a recognizable--even barely recognizable--name. (“Veteran Star Robert Mitchum’s Grandson Bentley Mitchum: He Has Overcome His Wild Past With a Secure Marriage.”)

And in a curious sort of luminary democracy, everyone--be it actor, politician, arms dealer, bankrupt businessman or jailed jet-setter--is handled pretty much the same (“Has the baby’s arrival altered your lifestyle?” “Tell us about your plans for Christmas”).

But it was surprising to many even for Hello! when, two months after drowned mogul Robert Maxwell was revealed as one of the world’s greatest swindlers, the magazine was touring his widow’s lavish French chateau.

“We were just showing the house,” says editor Goodman, defending the photo spread. “We weren’t saying it’s good or it’s bad that she had that house. OK, it may stir people up and they think, ‘What right has she got to live in that house?’ and they may be right. But, you know, it still makes an interesting feature.”