Playing a Little Heidi-and-Go-Seek : Lifestyles: An exhaustive search for the illustrious Ms. Fleiss took us into the chic, the underground, the too-cool (yawn) night spots.

For someone who has been bestowed the hyphenate Alleged Hollywood Madam-Party Girl, Heidi Fleiss is keeping a pretty low profile.

Except for a brief surfacing last week at the paparazzi- heavy American Comedy Awards, where she showed up in her trademark oversize sunglasses, Fleiss hasn’t been quite the party girl of late.

You can’t really blame her. Who wants to wear sunglasses every night? And who can relax with everyone staring and pointing?

Even Fleiss’ close friend, celebrity progeny Victoria Sellers, says she has had trouble getting Fleiss to venture out of her Benedict Canyon house.

Not that Sellers has it much better. “I don’t even like going to clubs anymore, except for the real underground clubs,” she recently confessed. “Everywhere I go people stare at me. They think I’m a prostitute or a party girl.”

It’s no secret that, pre-scandal, 27-year-old Fleiss was a regular at some of the city’s most exclusive restaurants and nightclubs, some of them fronted by burly doormen who decide who stays and who goes. From Ava’s to Roxbury, from Monkey Bar to Tatou, from Bar One to On the Roxx, she and her pack of attractive young friends were no strangers to the circuit.

But police and some veteran clubbies allege that Fleiss mixed a little business with pleasure while out and about, scouting for new recruits and attracting clients.

That begs the question: What’s the draw in this night life? Is it truly fun and glamorous, or just a lot of hard work?

I set off to find out--and maybe to find Heidi.

*

Our first stop on a Saturday night is Maxx, a small, dark, minimalistic nightclub in an infamously bad and smelly part of Hollywood--Yucca and Cahuenga--where Sellers is the hostess.

She used to host regularly at On the Roxx, a Sunset Strip club that she describes as “like someone’s living room. It was really fun.” Hosting a club involves hiring deejays and developing a following--usually friends who then bring their friends who bring their friends, and so on. Keep it up long enough and you earn a kind of hip respect in the club community.

While there’s seldom any big bucks in these ventures, other club hosts--like Babylon’s Brent Bolthouse and Swingers’ Sean MacPherson--have parlayed their connections into other, more lucrative projects, like producing concerts and opening restaurants.

Tonight, Sellers is pretty much starting from scratch.

At 11:30 p.m. she leans her petite frame against the bar and talks with a friend. Her white stretch hot pants, the whites of her eyes and her teeth glow preternaturally under a black light.

She leads me past the small dance floor, occupied by a lone couple moving to an ear-splitting rap number, into a back patio ringed with benches.

“This is my first night doing this club,” she says, revealing a mild anxiety. I handed out flyers myself--human contact is important. But I don’t really know anyone here, except for my deejays.”

She chats amiably about her reluctance to go to mainstream clubs these days, about the good old days of hosting at On the Roxx, where she knew everyone , and about her two pet female pit bulls.

By 12:30 the crowd has grown and Sellers seems less anxious. Girls in bell-bottoms and big Wynonna Judd-style hair and guys in baggy jeans, T-shirts and baseball caps on backward cram the dance floor. Every bar stool is taken, one by a man wearing nothing but a leather G-string and tattoos. His hair is shaved into a mohawk. Sellers says he’s a mailman.

Still, there is no sign of Heidi.

*

Monday night is usually a slow one for restaurants, and at Tryst, on La Cienega Boulevard near the Beverly Center, things are moving at an escargot’s pace.

Chandeliers resembling huge, exotic flowers cast a low red light over the quiet main room, where only a few tables are occupied by well-dressed older couples eating roast chicken, pasta and grilled fish. It’s 9:30, and even the bar is empty. The chef ventures out of the kitchen and saunters over to talk to the bartender and hostess.

Then, a possible sighting: At a table of four is a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and small bones. We can’t see her face, but she looks waif-like. Could this be Heidi with her gal pals?

Nah.

*

The Monkey Bar was and is one of Fleiss’ regular haunts. The cozy, windowless, upscale restaurant and bar on Beverly Boulevard near Fairfax is co-owned by Jack Nicholson and has a reputation for expensive good food and big-time celebs.

“She’s a regular customer, a good friend, a great person and the staff likes her,” assistant manager Ron Hardy tells me over the phone. “She comes in here with no particular frequency, she shows up like everyone else. She was always welcome here and always will be.”

The affable Hardy is taking the publicity overdrive in stride. He tolerates camera crews and looky-loos. The attention, he says, “is good, I guess, as long as they spell the name right.”

And as for Ms. Fleiss?

“What I tell everybody else is that I have no curiosity what anybody does, as long as they pay their check. We’ve all heard a lot of things, and I don’t care one way or another. We’re all here to make sure people have a good time.”

The few customers on a Tuesday at 9 p.m. seem to be having a good time. I’m seated next to the kitchen, but the waiter is jovial and even reminisces with me about the absurdity of Farrell’s ice cream parlors. However, when I throw in an oblique reference to Heidi, he nimbly ignores it and asks if I want coffee.

At about 10, Don Henley and a female friend sit down in a nearby booth. I get a celebrity--it’s just not Heidi.

*

So off I go to another of Heidi’s haunts, Roxbury. This Sunset Strip nightclub, the site of the infamous fight between “Beverly Hills, 90210” star Shannen Doherty and actress Bonita Money, is going full-tilt at 11:30. Does anybody here have a day job?

Limos, Porsches, pickups and Toyota sedans pull up in the driveway, where the valets will gladly take your keys for $5.

Inside, ‘70s disco tunes like “We Are Family” draw a huge crowd to the upstairs dance floor, where it’s very dark, smells of smoke and alcohol, and the volume vetoes all communication but sign language.

Almost every club has a VIP area, usually nothing more than a separate room where everyone wants to be because they think something special goes on there, but it never does. At Roxbury, the VIP room has a row of banquets, a bar and a separate sound system that clashes badly with the dance-floor music. The bartenders are crooning along to “The Commitments” soundtrack, one grabbing the soda dispenser to use as a microphone.

A tall blonde and three friends move through the club in a pack. She wears a black spandex mini-dress, black high heels and nude pantyhose. Peeking out of the top of her chunky handbag is a tall can of hair spray.

Roxbury has no shortage of pretty young things in hot pants, tight bell-bottoms and platform shoes--just the type a big Hollywood producer might like. But are these true party girls or just girls who want to have fun? Heidi might know, but she’s nowhere to be found among the disco babes.

*

A small group gathers outside of the new and very chic nightclub-restaurant-bar Tatou in Beverly Hills on Wednesday night at about 10. A tall, lean doorman holding a clipboard lords over the men and women who want in.

“Look,” the doorman says to a young man, explaining why he can’t let him in. “Your friend’s wearing a T-shirt.”

“Yeah,” the man says, “but it’s an expensive T-shirt.”

Someone else asks for admission, but is denied. “I’m sorry,” the doorman says, “but I’ve got people in there for dinner and there’s a (performance) showcase going on. Are you here for the showcase? Is your name on The List?”

A woman’s pretty operatic voice wafts out when the door is opened for someone whose name is on The List. I ask if I can just go in for a drink, and the doorman ignores me completely.

Oh, well. Heidi’s probably home watching Leno.