As Tough as the Next Guy : Who cares if Dawn Steel can or can’t lunch in Hollywood? She’s welcome at the working girls’ table any time : THEY CAN KILL YOU BUT THEY CAN’T EAT YOU: Lessons From the Front, <i> By Dawn Steel (Pocket Books: $22; 281 pp.)</i>

Like Hillary Clinton, Dawn Steel is not a whiner. They come from entirely different worlds, and perhaps yoking them this way is unfair to both of them. Yet together they represent a new direction and a new maturity in working women, whatever sophistries the feminist movement may be consumed with at this time. Both women put up or shut up and let their performance speak for who they are and what they stand for. This is an altogether heartening development, not just for women, but for people.

Dawn Steel, of Paramount and Columbia fame, the first woman head of a film studio and producer of the current film “Cool Running,” has written a book on how she achieved her eminence in the movie world. She offers her own mistakes and triumphs as cautionary tales to women coming after her and, in effect, to all ambitious working women.

Not everyone will like this book. Some will be put off by her blunt, straight-from-the-shoulder style. She apparently has no pretensions as a prose stylist. Some will find her lack of participation in--even awareness of--the women’s movement shameful. Some will find her early involvement in various crass commercial enterprises distasteful: holding an editorial position at Penthouse magazine, merchandising amaryllis “Penis Plants” (“Grow your own penis. All it takes is $6.98 and a lot of love”) and knockoff Gucci toilet paper.

But no one who takes the time to read this book front to back can fault her for lack of nerve, introspection or candor. And any woman who has been in the working world will find a number of immediately recognizable tight spots and tough situations.

It’s been hard for many women to learn the rules of the game, hard for them to become team players, hard for them to separate sexual exploitation (and, conversely, the rendering of sexual favors) from the acquisition and exercise of power. Much bitterness and disillusionment have derived from women’s lack of preparation for the rough-and-tumble of business. The fact that much of business is about power and the sometimes awful things people do to attain and maintain it comes as a rude awakening to many; there is the temptation to imagine oneself a victim.

The reality is--as Dawn Steel makes abundantly clear--women are no more victims, unless they let themselves be, than the next guy. It’s only about the work, she says, after coming to this realization herself midway through her book. Don’t take it personally.

Steel’s book is a guided tour of her life to date. Born in 1946 in the Bronx, she set her sights high from early on. Her origins were humble. Neither of her parents had the benefit of college, both were second-generation Russian Jewish immigrants. Her father’s claim to fame was winning the Mr. New York City title in a bodybuilding competition. For a while he made his living delivering false teeth for a dentist. After a brief glimpse of financial security, her family fell from middle-class grace. Her mother was “forced” to go to work to provide for the family when the father was disabled by depression as a result of business reversals.

Though traumatized by her adored father’s emotional withdrawal during his depression, Dawn was nevertheless a popular girl in school. Fired by her ambition to get away from the darkness at home, she managed to get into Boston University, but had to drop out of BU Business School to work full-time. In fact, she worked and paid her own way, without interruption, from her high school days until the birth of her daughter Rebecca and her departure as production head at Paramount in 1986 when she was 40 years old.

The road to the top was not easy for her (it rarely is) and Steel recounts movingly her misjudgments and the inevitable betrayals that attend the transit of a meteoric career. With broad brush strokes she covers the highlights of her rapid rise as one of the “Killer Dillers” at Paramount, from the smash success of her merchandising campaign for “Star Wars: The Motion Picture” and her back-to-back hits, after she glided into feature production, with “Flashdance” and “Footloose.” From here, with many a bump along the way, she rose up through the executive ranks, finally landing the top post at Columbia.

Rather baldly, lest we miss the point, she italicizes, at each stage of her progression, the many painful lessons she learned along the way. Few of these insights will strike the experienced working woman as original, though most qualify as profundities. The electricity she brings to these old chestnuts, though, comes from the fact that this wisdom was acquired at great personal cost on star-studded Hollywood lots and around mogul-heavy boardroom tables.

Steel is careful to name and credit seemingly everyone who ever gave her a boost or helping hand, and she refrains from skewering in print those who did her dirt. Among the greatest hazards the woman executive, or any motivated working woman for that matter, faces is not being taken seriously because she confuses sex with power. Steel made her faux pax in this regard too, and has had many a wound to lick as a result. Out of all the disappointment and turmoil that attended her liaisons with “inappropriate” men, though, she was able to distill the useful wisdom and good line, “You can sleep your way to the middle, but never to the top.”

That acquired, she picked herself up and moved on relentlessly to the top. She learned the importance of networking, another valuable--and traditionally male--skill, and over a few short years came to number among her buddies (and bosses) the likes of Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenbach, David Geffen and Michael Ovitz--not to mention Richard Gere, Martin Scorsese, Richard Pryor, Tom Cruise and Michael Douglas.

Steel learned only toward 30--relatively late in life, as these things go--how to make good and true friends among women. She now counts as her pals women high and low, from Barbra Streisand, Nora Ephron, Debra Winger, Jody Foster, Madonna and Lynda Obst to many others less well-known and less influential.

Despite the heavy-handed pedagogy and the somewhat distracting name-dropping packed into this brief and breathless book, two important elements speak out clearly from between the lines. These are the regrettable lack of role models for career-hungry women; and, perhaps more important, the subtle, inevitable transformation of Steel’s notion of success as she moved up the ladder.

It is fascinating to see this determined woman’s measurement of her worth evolve from the pursuit of the crude trappings of success (mink coats, Armani jackets, powerful friends) to the far-reaching transcendental Emersonian notion she ends the book with, and which apparently gives her peace. The growth might have come faster had she had a different background or not been so star-struck when she hit Hollywood. But then we wouldn’t have this energizing, interesting and generous-spirited book, whose very existence confirms what Steel herself observes in its closing pages:

“We didn’t have a year of the woman for nothing. Women are winning at the voting booth, and more and more, in the home and office. They are creating a new leadership style. And I don’t mean by bypassing men. I mean that women have begun to forge a style that combines the best of men and women--tough and compassionate, aggressive and morally and emotionally responsible, decisive and creative.”

You can say that again, sister. And how sweet it is.