Wonder What She Does After the Late News? : Books: Mystery fan Kelly Lange’s been going home to her computer. Her first novel, ‘Trophy Wife,’ set in L.A.’s garment industry, has just been published by Simon & Schuster.

She “cheated” to get her first job in broadcasting as “Ladybird,” a traffic reporter on KABC radio. She then graduated to “weather girl” on KNBC-TV Channel 4 and, finally, after a messy fight in the mid-1970s, she became KNBC’s first regularly scheduled female anchor. She has been on the air, reading the news, ever since.

Now, without missing a day of TV, she’s also a novelist.

“I read mystery novels for escape because it’s totally different from what I do every day, which is the who, what, where, when and how--and that, as you know, can be pretty bleak, the landscape of hard news,” said Kelly Lange, co-anchor of Channel 4’s 4 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts. “At night, to unwind after the 11, I’d pick up a mystery. And one day I just thought it would be fun to try doing one, and I started fooling with it and pretty soon I was working from midnight to 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning. It was so much fun. It became an addiction.”

It also became “Trophy Wife,” Lange’s first novel, published by Simon & Schuster.

It’s a tale of murder and whodunit within L.A.’s garment industry and the ultra-rich world of manufacturing titans and “impossibly thin and coiffed-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives” models and wives with such names as Devin and Marva. There’s an aggressive reporter--TV-type, of course--named Maxi Poole, who, Lange admits, is in part based on herself. But mostly it’s about sex and murder and marriage and big-business shenanigans--Chanel lipstick, $6,000 Christian Lacroix dresses and decolletage spritzed with Giorgio.

Lange says her celebrity did not help get the book published because no publisher would buy it before it was completed. It did, however, help her get a major literary agent at William Morris, also home of her TV agent. “They’ve got to be polite to me,” she said.

The agent sold the book once it was completed, and she is already one-third of the way through mystery No. 2.

“But this--news--is my primary job,” she said during a dinner-time interview between newscasts at the station where she has worked for 25 years. “I really love it. It’s where the action is. Home, writing the books, that’s a solitary pursuit. That’s me and my computer. It’s a hobby. It’s fun. But news is what I love.

“I’ve been tired here. I’ve been pushed. I’ve been tense and terrified, but I’ve never been bored. I’ll be here for, I don’t know . . . they’ll have to throw me out.”

*

After growing up in Andover, Mass., and graduating from Merrimack College, Lange came to California in the mid-1960s for adventure and to become a teacher. She needed another year of school to get her teaching credential, however, and, while taking classes, she saw an ad for a radio contest to become a helicopter traffic reporter.

She went to the contest site in Sherman Oaks--where scores of women were lined up outside a radio van for an audition--read the copy handed to her and knew she’d failed to impress. She soon discovered, however, that they were continuing to hold auditions at other locations throughout Southern California.

She went home, wrote her own copy, memorized it, then went again on another day when the van was in Buena Park, with different clothes, a different hairdo, even a different name--her real name is Kelly Snyder.

“I was ready,” she recalled. “I was good. I said, ‘Nothing is moving on the San Diego Freeway. A guy is sitting in a lounge chair on top of his car, reading the paper. Why not? No one is going anywhere.’ It was funny. Kelly Snyder got a letter saying, ‘Thank you very much for trying.’ Kelly Lange won the contest. So yeah, I cheated.”

Lange flew above the freeways for eight years doing traffic on the radio. Four years into that run, she simultaneously began doing weather at Channel 4. That was after getting turned down for a news position by every TV station in town. Back then, women were virtually invisible in TV news.

Each station, she said, “had a token woman.” ’ ‘Girl , they called it. One news director here in town interviewed me, listened to my hopes and dreams, and said, and this is an exact quote, ‘I like you. I wish you the best. But I’m sorry, honey, we have our girl.’ ”

*

After six years of weather, she demanded a promotion and, thanks to a bidding war with KABC-TV Channel 7, was made an anchor at Channel 4 in 1976.

Lange, who in person is friendly to everyone who passes by and seems genuinely interested in them, said that being the same person on the air as off is the key to any anchor’s success.

“There have been people in this business who seem to have everything--they’re great-looking, they have fabulous credentials--but they don’t do well because they put on an act, or there’s too much ego. And people see that,” she said. “You can’t try to fool them. If you aren’t the same person on as you are off, they won’t trust you. And [the TV] news [business] is all about trust. Who you like, who you trust, because every station is pretty much doing the same news.”

She laughs good-naturedly at the suggestion that the public perceives anchors simply as faces--overpaid stars who walk in, get made up, read news copy and go home. She said she is constantly checking and rewriting her copy.

At first, that perception, made worse since she was “the blonde weather girl,” hurt. But maturity and survival have left her immune to the opinions of others. Immune, too, it seems to the ups and downs of office politics. She was removed from the 11 p.m. news a few years ago but eventually was reinstated with Paul Moyer; now it’s the market’s most-watched local newscast. Ratings for her 4 p.m. show are mediocre.

“How’d it feel to get bumped like that?” Lange said. “Life’s too short. Besides, who are you to think you should be doing this or that, that you’re so great and better than anyone else? I mean, come on. We all have personal triumphs and personal kicks in the butt. So you can’t rail too much. I mean, look at the world around us and what so many people go through. I’m going to complain about what show I’m on, or not on? And I’ve been here long enough to have been in favor and then out of favor. I’ve been a hero and I’ve been a bum, depending on who is in charge. I guess ego is just not as fragile as when you’re less mature. And if I’m not mature by now, it would be sad.”

Mature women are a relatively new thing in television news. Lange said that the idea that women have to be cute and thin and wrinkle-free is not exactly law anymore, although none of the female news stars--Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Jane Pauley or Kelly Lange--are ever seen with gray hair, even as gray hair makes many male broadcasters more desirable.

*

“It’s changed a lot,” said Lange, who has a daughter in her 30s. “All those women who have the prime spots in TV news at the networks are not 25 anymore. Yes, I guess we all were 25 when we started, but I think we are all still around because we’re good and we work hard. We’ve been allowed to age gracefully on the air, I think. Just like the men.

“Now would somebody be hired at my age [which she declines to specify]? I don’t know. Probably not. You’re still supposed to look right and take care of yourself, and that’s probably expected more of the women in the business than the men. Men are considered distinguished and wise as they get older, and women--well, I won’t say it.

“But just like you have to put up with some of the tabloidization within the news business, to adapt, to get an audience, and then fight as hard as you can for those stories that are substantive and beneficial, it’s the same thing here. You have to work within the system that exists or else you’re just tilting at windmills. You’re left with your purity, but you’re going to be out, railing to nobody, with no platform to do anything good.”