Civic Life Rots While Gossip Rides High : Surely we have better things for police to do than chase down madams to the stars; how about rape prevention, for one?

I hate to be a party pooper just when everyone else seems to be having so much fun with the Hollywood madam story, but haven’t the media overdone it?

Surely there is no news in the revelation that some movie-makers traffic in sex. This is an industry that from its inception has turned the commercialization of sex and the exploitation of women into an art form. Indeed, not a few recent movies, most notably “Pretty Woman,” have explicitly celebrated prostitution as an excellent Yuppie career track. Might it not be thought refreshing if the inevitable black book reveals that directors and producers and the like--for a change--actually have some firsthand knowledge of their subject?

Of course we won’t know who did what to whom in the Heidi Fleiss case until sometime after the book and movie deals have been signed. The serious commercial sex only starts when art imitates life. The story has already sold well, without prominent names among the “alleged” guilty, because of the assumption that everyone in the industry is guilty until the captain of the vice squad proves them innocent. Never in the annals of local government has there been a better example of someone who should have something better to do. If we are so short of police officers, why hasn’t it been suggested that the obviously zealous LAPD vice unit could more usefully be turned into a rape-prevention squad?

Just what is the crime that the movie folks allegedly committed? Surely a city whose citizens are randomly murdered around the clock would not want to devote this much effort to the almost always unprovable misdemeanor of solicitation?

I know, without letter writers telling me, that prostitution involves exploitation and that it would not exist in a healthy society. But I must confess to being less offended when they pay these women $1,500 a night then when they pay their housekeepers $150 a week. Violating the law on the minimum wage and workers’ compensation, a routine activity in this town, ought to carry a stiffer sentence and a greater degree of our opprobrium than paying considerable sums for sex.

Yes, it is awful that anyone, male or female, should be so limited in job opportunity or so degraded by materialism to have to sell moments of intimacy. But in this regard, aren’t drugged-out hookers on Normandie Avenue or Sunset Boulevard more numerous as a social phenomenon, more desperately in need and far worthier of journalistic examination than some spoiled, rich young women who probably did this for the quick buck and to have their 15 minutes of fame by rubbing more than shoulders with Hollywood celebrities?

The problem is that it’s only stories about rich and famous hookers that sell. There is nothing titillating about the prostitute in Times Staff Writer Barry Bearak’s brilliant story on the AIDS hotel in New York, which ran in the Times a few weeks ago. No one gossiped about that one in cafes or in barbershops or in the newsroom, but since when is exacerbating gossip the function of journalism?

Gossip is the great social disease of our time, endlessly preoccupying us with that which is trivial while the core of our civic life rots through inattention. Its appeal is to suggest that the celebrities and the powerful, those who seem to have it made, are just like the rest of us with similar problems, sexual peccadilloes and broken marriages included.

This absurdity, suggesting a commonality of experience that does not exist in our increasingly class-divided society, is reinforced by endless television chat shows in which the powerful are made to seem accessible.

The effect is to leave some sad soul sitting in a trailer park, wondering about where the rent is coming from now that her unemployed husband cut out, thinking she’s just like Cher because they both have brittle hair. And after all, Cher’s husband left her. Or was it the other way around? Excuse me if I can’t remember.