PROFILE : Smile When You Say That, Partner : When million-selling, prizewinning novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry announced that he was taking on a co-writer, the literary world raised its collective brow. But Hollywood hasn’t had a problem with it.

They have the couple’s habit of finishing each other’s sentences, a habit they have now turned into a novel.

“The collaboration, from the point of view of the writing, has always been very easy,” says Larry McMurtry, one of America’s most celebrated authors, slurping a Dr Pepper. “It’s only when we’ve edged out into the public arena, when something gets published and our names show up in the trades, that it wasn’t . . . “

” . . . Easy,” adds Diana Ossana, one of America’s most celebrated, um, former legal secretaries?

McMurtry and Ossana have done considerably more than edge into public view recently, writing the teleplay for the upcoming CBS production of “Streets of Laredo” (McMurtry’s sequel to “Lonesome Dove”), writing the screenplay for the feature film version of the 1950s TV show “Father Knows Best” for Universal, developing a script at Warner Bros. based on the true story of a Wyoming lawman who was tried and acquitted for killing an unarmed suspect he believed was about to kill him and writing a Western, also for Universal, called “The Standoff.”

Meanwhile, Paramount has Shirley MacLaine attached to “Evening Star,” the sequel to “Terms of Endearment” that McMurtry published as a novel two years ago. McMurtry has also adapted yet another of his own best-selling Western novels, “Buffalo Girls,” with co-writers Beth Sullivan and Cynthia Whitcomb for CBS.

That sudden convulsion of film and television work has been joined by Simon & Schuster’s publication this fall of their collaborative novel “Pretty Boy Floyd,” from which McMurtry and Ossana read excerpts recently at Book Soup in West Hollywood. The appearance was part of the first extended book tour McMurtry has ever done, though it seems to have been to little avail. “Pretty Boy Floyd” has been given prominent display in bookstores and advertised heavily, but it has received mixed reviews and has not yet made it to the New York Times bestseller list.

Given the buzz already surrounding their unusual partnership--the New York Times characterized Ossana recently as “Mr. McMurtry’s companion”--”Pretty Boy Floyd” had been among the more eagerly awaited publishing events of the fall season.

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And why shouldn’t it have been? McMurtry is part of that small pride of American literary lions whose voice could be mistaken for no other, a writer with an epic sense of scale--as he demonstrated with the cowboy colossus “Lonesome Dove”--and a lapidary precision with dialogue that he has transformed into more than 30 screenplays. McMurtry, from 1989 to 1991, was also the first non-New Yorker to serve as president of the literary organization PEN since the 1920s.

Ossana, on the other hand, “has been writing ever since she learned to read,” according to her brief biography on the dust jacket of “Pretty Boy Floyd.”

If it is difficult to know what Ossana’s contribution was to the rather inert quality of the novel, there is no doubt she has been the driving force behind McMurtry’s recent burst of activity in Hollywood.

“She gets his juices going and keeps him wanting to write and keep writing,” says Jerry Katzman, the William Morris agent who represents the pair in much of their screen work.

Says McMurtry: “One of the problems I have with screenwriting is that it’s an interrupted activity. To write something and then have it reappear in my life seven or eight years later is like a marriage reappearing. Until Diana came along, I was a first-stage-of-the-rocket screenwriter. I do two drafts because I can’t do more than two drafts of anything, and I get some characters in there that are good enough to show to a studio. I can get characters on paper that major actors would want to play, but I have no sense of structure. Diana tends to worry the material in a way that’s good.”

As a form, the collaborative novel has been a literary slough of despond that has rarely risen above its mismatched talent pools, sinking even Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, who separately tried to navigate its murky waters.

If McMurtry’s enterprise has about it a suggestive whiff of hubris, it will be scented first in the collectively flared nostrils of the New York lit-crit Establishment, among whom McMurtry’s apparently heedless attempt to transform Ossana into his very own literary Eliza Doolittle must have raised a few eyebrows. Assuming snakes have eyebrows.

In Hollywood, where the dream factories have always encouraged an assembly-line approach to writing, last May’s announcement that Ossana and McMurtry would collaborate on a screen adaptation of the ‘50s television series “Father Knows Best” raised a slightly different set of questions. The first of these-- Father Freakin’ Knows Best ? with its correlative How much are they getting ?--begs the second question, stated with as much attitude as possible: Didn’t McMurtry once win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction?

“I think they see it as somehow beneath him,” Ossana says. “But Larry sees screenwriting as being a gun for hire.”

In that way, he’s a bit like Pretty Boy Floyd himself, about whom McMurtry and Ossana first wrote an unproduced screenplay, which they have now followed with what is either a novel, or a pre-release, pre-green-lighting novelization of a movie that they are still trying to sell to Hollywood. “Larry and I have a sense that if the book is successful,” Ossana says, “it will drive the movie.”

Before “Pretty Boy’s” pretty big first printing, Ossana’s sole exposure to the literary world consisted of typing the manuscript of retired Mafia Don Joe Bonanno’s memoirs. (“Mr. B,” as Ossana affectionately refers to the aging godfather once known to organized crime officials as Joe Bananas, is a client of the Tucson personal-injury law firm where she worked.)

It was Ossana’s seeming lack of experience that led to much of the speculation about her relationship with McMurtry, particularly in the gossipy old New York Times, where it was also reported that their agent had demanded that Ossana’s name be of equal size to McMurtry’s on the book’s cover.

“(The rumors) gave the sense that I was riding on Larry’s coattails,” Ossana says.

McMurtry’s coattails have been considerably lengthened--and his hide coarsened--by the publication of 17 single-handed novels, so he knew what he was getting Ossana into.

“The publishing business is conservative, and if you try to do something different like a collaborative novel, you’ve got to expect trouble,” he says. “Diana was naive about how mean the New York publishing world can be, but the knives were not really out for her; she was just sort of stabbed in passing.”

Ossana resisted even having her name on the novel for a while, and at one point sent faxes around to everyone involved in the project to say so--”thinking everyone would just heave a sigh of relief,” she says. “I just thought it would make everything simpler if my name wasn’t on it. Larry was, after all, a proven commodity, and I thought that way Simon & Schuster wouldn’t have to wonder if this would be a good book. But everyone started faxing back and the phone started ringing.”

“Everyone was horrified,” McMurtry puts in.

“It was so odd to me,” Ossana says, “that people should care about me. I don’t have the need or the desire for all that attention. The important thing is the work.”

“It’s important that what’s true be true,” McMurtry corrects her. “You wrote half the book, you should have your name on it.”

Since the conclusion of their collaboration on the novel, Ossana, 45, has gone to working on her own book.

“There’s bound to be speculation that she’s the girlfriend,” McMurtry says. “It’s always assumed that it’s romantic, whether it is or not.”

Isn’t it romantic?

“Call it an amitie amoureuse ,” McMurtry replies. “That’s all one can say.”

Well, maybe not all.

There was a time, early in their friendship, when McMurtry and Ossana would grow too enraged to speak to each other in person, resorting to volleying letters back and forth between their neighboring Tucson homes.

“I would turn my phone off for three or four days, and he would be frantic,” Ossana says, pleased with herself at the memory of this. “That’s one thing he can’t stand.”

They met by chance almost a decade ago while eating at a catfish restaurant here and stayed in touch while McMurtry continued to lead a life that was as relentlessly picaresque as his novels. He has homes in Washington; Archer City, Tex.; Tucson, and Los Angeles and had perfected what he calls a “tricoastal existence,” usually spending about a week in each place before starting the cycle over again.

“He would see me in Tucson three or four days a month, but we would talk five and six times a day on the phone,” Ossana says. “Larry has many women friends--or did--and he talked to them on a regular basis on the phone. It was his life.”

“I was the Proust of the message machine,” McMurtry adds.

“Larry is a very private person, and when I met him he had his life very compartmentalized,” she says. “When he’s in your town being your friend, you feel like you’re the only friend in his life. I know that his other women friends, and even his family, are very possessive of him, and I guess I’m different because I’m not at all possessive of him.”

McMurtry had come to Tucson to visit a friend, Leslie Marmon Silko, the author of “Almanac of the Dead,” and the two began collaborating on screenplays, though they never attempted to write a novel together. “Leslie is a great writer,” McMurtry says. “She truly does have genius, and I don’t think you collaborate with genius.”

He and Ossana continued to run into each other socially, and a few months after they met, the two traveled to Washington together so he could show her the antiquarian bookstore, Booked Up, he owns there (one of three shops he owns by that name).

“Things evolved,” she says. “We just kept getting closer and closer.”

The intensity of McMurtry’s friendships with women--particularly well-known ones such as Diane Keaton, Cybill Shepherd and Silko--have made him the object of what must, for a bespectacled boy from Archer City, be gratifying speculation about his standing as a literary Lothario. McMurtry explains his relationships in terms of endearment, as part of his aesthetic life, not his athletic one.

“The capacity for a male novelist to be friends with a woman--whether novelist or not--is born of curiosity about emotion,” he says, “because women are much more articulate about it. I really don’t relate to men. I don’t find out anything from them, and I think I have such a driving curiosity that I just don’t want to waste time. So I’ve not only enjoyed my friendships with women, I’ve also derived my whole view of human character from them. Which is very useful when you’re writing 18 novels.”

McMurtry’s Tucson bookstore is in what might charitably be called a transitional neighborhood. “I see it all as Benettons and Calvin Kleins in a few years,” he says, “but right now it’s all junkies from the rehab center across the street, pimps and whores from the Circle K, hustlers and scramblers.”

Like a succulent, McMurtry requires steady irradiation from the sun to help ease the migraine headaches that have plagued him since childhood, so he rises at first light and by 7:30 has usually polished off his daily five-page constitutional at a manual typewriter. This frees him to spend the remainder of the day examining dusty hardcovers at his bookshop.

When Warner Bros. asked him in May of last year to rewrite a Pretty Boy Floyd script that the studio had bought and then shelved, McMurtry’s muscular prose style had been so withered by a reaction to heart surgery 18 months earlier that he initially turned down the job.

“He looked at it and said the same thing he had been saying: ‘I can’t make this character sympathetic,’ ” Ossana recalls. “I was getting sort of desperate for him to snap out of it by that time.”

It didn’t help that neither one of them knew Charlie Floyd’s story. “Until then, I had thought Pretty Boy Floyd was a boxer,” Ossana says. “Both of us did.”

They did enough research to convince themselves that Floyd’s life was almost irresistibly cinematic and then began writing.

“I would give Diana a five-page segment,” McMurtry says, “and she would expand and refine it. When we finished the script, we still had a certain amount of momentum as collaborators, and we didn’t feel we were through with Charlie Floyd.”

Their only disagreement while writing the novel happened as they were going over the first draft of the manuscript together for the first time.

“I was excited because some of it Larry hadn’t seen,” Ossana says. “We were reading and he says, ‘You know we’re going to cut at least a hundred pages of this.’ I was aghast. I said, ‘No, we’re not. Over my dead body.’ And we didn’t cut a thing, maybe three or four words in the whole book.”

Shortly after they finished the novel, McMurtry and Ossana were hired by Universal to write the adaptation of “Father Knows Best.” Again there was some whispering about Ossana’s unseen role, this time that she was operating as a sort of Kitten with a whip: Hi , Mom. Hi , Dad. Hi , Princess. Hi , Bud! What’s Yoko Ono doing here ?

It wasn’t as if Universal had to beg McMurtry and Ossana to take an interest in its project.

“When we heard Larry and Diana had an interest--and more than that, a take on the material--that was the creatively interesting thing,” says producer Sean Daniel. “They saw the show as a touchstone of the culture, a way to do a real-life family comedy in a modern setting. These are smart, tender, insightful writers, people who have found ways into the lives of American families in the past. ‘Terms of Endearment’ is a masterwork of contemporary Americans struggling with life. The notion that they could turn a similar eye toward a perfect American family in both a comedic and realistic way was what made the idea provocative to the studio.”

The studio was so pleasantly dumbfounded that McMurtry would soil the hem of his sackcloth and ashes that he was required to travel to Los Angeles with Ossana and do a pitch, just to prove his heart was in the right place. Recalls Ossana: “One thing the Universal people said to Larry really annoyed him. They asked him, ‘Why would you, Larry McMurtry, want to write this?’ I felt him tense up and the air get thick.”

McMurtry studied his cowboy boots for a moment, and replied, “I’m very annoyed by people presuming to know what I would and would not like to write.” And that was the end of the discussion.

“I never saw ‘Father Knows Best.’ I came very late to the television age,” McMurtry says. “But I’ve talked to people about it, people who really loved it and were comforted in their own imperfect family lives to know that there was this family that always came out OK.”

McMurtry has usually come out OK artistically in Hollywood, where such acclaimed films as “Terms of Endearment,” “The Last Picture Show” and “Hud” and television’s seminal miniseries “Lonesome Dove” have been adapted from his fiction. But he had fared less well financially at the hands of super-agent Irving (Swifty) Lazar, who died last December just as many of Ossana and McMurtry’s projects were in a state of ferment. (McMurtry also harbored a deep affection for Lazar, and delivered a moving eulogy at his funeral.)

“It happened that just as he really faded, we had all these deals--three screenplays and the novel--and it was beyond him,” McMurtry says. “The contracts were nightmarishly scrambled, he didn’t give a damn, and he was selling the future as far ahead as he could possibly sell it so he could spend the money before he died.

“Two months before his death, I went to Hollywood and I asked him to retire,” McMurtry says. “I wrote him a seven-page letter detailing the things (that were wrong) because I felt that he was going to embarrass himself really badly because he didn’t know what he was doing. With Irving you got Irving, you got contact with a really interesting man. To me that was worth whatever I lost, and I probably lost $10 million or $15 million.”

It is McMurtry’s 58th birthday, and his lawyer in Los Angeles has sent him 50 cases of Dr Pepper in glass bottles. “That’s a lot of Dr Pepper,” McMurtry says. “Not that I won’t drink it. The glass bottles are very refined, though. I won’t drink Dr Pepper in anything but glass bottles, and I’ve drunk hundreds upon hundreds of cases.”

After half a century of this intemperance, McMurtry had quadruple-bypass surgery in December, 1991, then came here to recuperate.

“I ran into a cow in a rented Lincoln in Texas,” he says. This is where the story begins. “I’d been moving books from my ranch house to this mansion I have in town. It was about dusk on a summer evening. I was on a country road, and this Holstein suddenly sidled across the road and I hit her and killed her. I had an uncomfortable night, but I had stirred up a lot of dust moving those books.

“The next morning, I was going to town for breakfast and when I got in the car the air-bag light began to blink,” he continues. “The air-bag did not come out when I hit the cow and I hit her a mighty good whack. As I drove to the Lincoln (repair) place, I passed the clinic where my internist practices, so I stopped to get something for dust asthma. He didn’t think I looked too good, so he gave me an EKG and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re having a heart attack.’ ”

The closer to death he gets, the more obvious it is McMurtry is enjoying himself.

“An ambulance was brought, but I was in a room so tiny they couldn’t get the stretcher in,” he says. “They wouldn’t let me step out of the room, so they had to dismantle the stretcher. I could have easily died of all the things that happened while they were trying to save me. Then on the way to the hospital, the ambulance drivers became excited when they found out they were hauling the author of ‘Lonesome Dove’ and they drove straight off a very high curb.”

“He had kind of a psychic trauma,” Ossana says. “It was very scary. He wrote ‘Streets of Laredo’ during that period, but he says it was almost as if it was faxed to him by his former self.”

“My intention was to get back into my life, go back to running the bookstores, giving lectures, traveling around, buying books,” McMurtry says. “I tried it for a couple of weeks and I completely faded out. I felt like I had become an outline, the content drained out. I think it’s because you die during the operation. You’re jump-started back to life, but there’s a gap. That’s a profound thing. To this day I still have a sense of not being myself.”

The sense of unreality of self had also happened after “Lonesome Dove” appeared on CBS in 1989, when McMurtry discovered that there were people posing as him on both sides of the Mexican border, like ghost images on a television screen.

“Because of the popularity of the miniseries, I began to develop a number of impostors,” he says.

One lived in a trailer park and apparently promised women he would put them in his next movie if they were nice to him. Another had persuaded a woman he was about to marry in Houston that he was the celebrated Texas author, while a third made such a nuisance of himself in the Mexican resort Puerto Vallarta that McMurtry finally hired a private detective to track him down. “He signs books,” McMurtry says. “He has a temper, and when he gets drunk he spits on people.”

This had gotten to be a bit like the old ventriloquist’s trick--McMurtry would sip reflectively from a bottle of Dr Pepper in Arizona, while somewhere across the border Senor Larry was spitting it out on a tourist--until the impersonator began to feel more like McMurtry than McMurtry did.

His impostors seemed to have moved on, finally, no doubt as baffled as his readers by the strangely inert quality of “Pretty Boy Floyd.” Like Floyd himself, the novel leaves few fingerprints and none of the memorable prose sentences that McMurtry once described as “the DNA of a novelist’s identity.” These once-glittering strands now lie at his feet, a chalk outline of Charlie Floyd. Or is it McMurtry himself?

“The funny thing is, after the heart surgery I began to feel like one of my own impostors,” he says. “I felt as if I was impersonating myself. . . . “ Ossana, sitting nearby, opens her mouth as if she is about to speak. But then she eases back into her seat and says nothing.