They are all over Hollywood, the new blonde hopefuls. Go to Spago or Mortons or Chinois, the restaurants of choice these nights, and you will inevitably see some of them, making entrances and waving to friends. Hi, Anjelica. Hi, Jack. Go to any screening at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, and they will be there, making contacts. Hi, Sue. Hi, Stan. Go to parties, and they will be dressing them up. Hi, Fran. Hi, Ray. Visit any acting class, and they’ll be doing scenes. Hi, Milton. Hi, Nina.

There are lots of ways to get there, but the goal is the same and ambition is at the core. There isn’t room for everyone. Some will drop out, get married, and have five kids. Some will go back home. Some will have sad endings. Certainly Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe didn’t take the same route, but each in her own way got there. One by hype. One by talent. Jayne was always willing to go to the opening of a door in order to get her picture in the paper, but Marilyn held herself aloof once she didn’t have to be obliging.

In the Jayne Mansfield mold, there’s a girl called Angelyne, just Angelyne, and you’ve probably never heard of her. But you will. Half a million bucks is being spent on publicity to see to that. She has white-blonde hair and very red lips, and pictures of her sitting on the hood of her hot-pink Corvette are plastered all over the city of Los Angeles. That’s only the beginning. Next come billboards in Times Square in New York and Piccadilly Circus in London to spread the word about Angelyne. A mysterious benefactor is picking up the tab. So far her acting experience is confined to a television pilot called Cheeseball, but she says she’s a natural in front of the camera. “I love to tease the camera. Producers have told me I have more sex appeal with my clothes on than most girls have with their clothes off.” She wants a hot-pink house with hot-pink carpets in Beverly Hills. That’s what Jayne Mansfield wanted, and got. Jayne even got a pink-tiled heart-shaped swimming pool. Angelyne dismisses the comparison. ‘‘Hot pink is a different color pink entirely.”

There is a mythology of the great blonde movie stars, and I happen to enjoy it. I thrill to the lore that Louis B. Mayer, the most powerful man in Hollywood, destroyed the suicide note of Paul Bern to protect MGM’s investment in Jean Harlow. I still want to believe that Lana Turner was discovered at the soda fountain of Schwab’s drugstore on the Sunset Strip, even though I know it isn’t true. I like reading about how Harry Cohn personally groomed Kim Novak for Columbia stardom. I wanted to meet the latest group.

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“I’m interested in talking with young actresses who are on the verge of making it,” I said to the Hollywood agent on the telephone. She has an unerring eye for new talent. “Who are people talking about?” I asked.

“Meryl Streep.”

“She’s already there.”

“Jessica Lange. . .Debra Winger.”

“Oh, listen, one thing I forgot to mention. I’m only interested in blondes.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because that’s what people think of when they think of sexy stars.”

Silence. Then: “That’s pathetic.”

“She’s the blonde in Scarface,” they say to me about Michelle Pfeiffer. Now her I know. She made this year’s great movie entrance, descending, back to camera, in the glass elevator of a drug czar’s Florida mansion, wearing a green satin evening dress that seemed about to fall off her. Rarely in a movie have I seen an actress so perfectly groomed, so coolly elegant. There hasn’t been a platinum-blonde star for a long time, and I waited, fascinated, to meet her. She is on the verge of stardom. In the parlance of the industry, she is hot. She is appearing in one hot movie, has another coming out, and others await only her availability to begin shooting.

“Hello,” she said, when she arrived.

“Hello,” I replied, trying to zero in on the unfamiliar face. . . and then it registered: Michelle Pfeiffer is, alas, no longer blonde. She became blonde for the role. Nor is she a fashion plate. In fact, she has absolutely no interest in fashion or chic. Like Garbo, who cared nothing for such trappings either, she took on the accoutrements that went along with the part, so convincingly that I had assumed the end product was the starting point—the reason she had been cast in the first place. Not so. Drive is the answer—knowing what she wanted, and persisting. Director Brian De Palma was not even interested in meeting her at first, because she had appeared in the disastrous Grease 2. But for three months she went back for readings and meetings and finally a test with Al Pacino himself, which won her the part. A little more than five years ago she had a job as a checkout girl at a Vons supermarket to pay for acting classes. Soon she will appear opposite the equally hot Matthew Broderick in Ladyhawke. Even though she became blonde for a part, however, she doesn’t play the Hollywood game. She’s married, very private, and still takes acting lessons four days a week.

“She’s the blonde in Reckless," they say to me about Daryl Hannah, who has a way of swinging her hair around that hides her face. In Reckless, looking Waspy, acting trashy, she removed her clothing piece by piece in the high school swimming pool and made love in the boiler room. It was, she says, the hardest scene she ever had to film because she’d always sworn she’d never do nudity. She suffered for days afterward and worried about what her parents’ reaction would be.

“People always stare at blondes,” she says. The patrician twenty-two-year-old, who did those amazing calisthenics in Blade Runner, began acting and earning a living when she was eleven. You are not with her long before you sense her strength and determination. Her concentration is total, whether she’s discussing the gazpacho, her horse, her dirt bike, or her career. Especially her career.

“I’ve always known the limitations of every role I’ve played, but that’s how you build. I’d say to myself, ‘Now I’m going to do a big role in a not-so-good film, and now I’m going to do a small role in a big film.’ I was always clear about what I was going to do.”

She has made eight films, most recently The Pope of Greenwich Village, her favorite to date, in which she plays opposite Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts. She has also appeared in her boyfriend Jackson Browne’s video of “Tender Is the Night.”

All of a sudden, wherever you look, Daryl Hannah is looking back at you. She is the girl of the moment, the face of the year. Be here, be there, they say to her. Meet this person, meet that one. But Daryl sets her own pace. She has no publicity agent and doesn’t see the need to have one. She used to share a house with Rachel Ward, who she says paid as much for her publicist as she did for rent. “I’m antisocial. I don’t have a crowd. But Rachel always knew everyone, and I’d get dragged along. We were living in this shack right on top of Highway 101. The shower never worked. The toilet was always overflowing. It was basically a one-bedroom house with no lock on the door. I was doing Blade Runner and she was doing Sharky’s Machine, and we were working all the time. Both of us were from pretty wealthy families, so we sort of felt we had to pay our dues and suffer.”

“She’s the blonde in Never Say Never Again," they say to me about Kim Basinger, whose roster of leading men reads like an Irving Lazar guest list, from Sean Connery to Burt Reynolds to Robert Redford. Watching her enter and walk through the crowded restaurant, I was reminded of a Hollywood premiere I attended years ago with Grace Kelly. At that point, Grace had made High Noon with Gary Cooper. She had finished Mogambo with Clark Gable, but it had not been released. Not a head turned when she passed the fan-filled bleachers on the way into the theater. Yet a few months later, with the release of Mogambo, she became one of the most recognized faces in the world.

“These girls have been working since they were kids. They always knew what they wanted to be. Doesn’t anybody just get discovered anymore? And screen-tested? And groomed for stardom?”

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Heads did not turn to stare at Kim Basinger either. As yet people outside the industry do not recognize her. That is likely to change radically with the release of the Redford film, The Natural, and she seems to cherish what are possibly her last months of anonymity. She talks about her movie career as her job. “This is my job,” she says. Or, “My job looks glamorous, but it’s not.” She still has traces of a Georgia accent.

It’s hard to imagine Kim Basinger in the days when moguls created careers and stars were totally dependent on the studios. “I would have been the biggest pain in the ass,” she says. She doesn’t consider anything about her career accidental. She has been earning, and earning big, since she won a Miss Breck competition at age sixteen and ended up a top model and cover girl. Her modeling earnings made it possible for her to turn down the first acting jobs that came her way—including a long-term contract on Charlie’s Angels—jobs that might have slowed down her progress if she had accepted them.

Home for her is somewhere in the hills—“Oh, near Calabasas,” she says, waving her hand in a northwesterly direction—and she shares it with her husband Ron Britton, who does her makeup on all her pictures, and a sextet of dogs. “All I know about acting is, you just do it. God bless Stanislavsky, but I can’t even pronounce his name.”

She’s the blonde who was nearly in K*A*0*S. Kelly Collins always carries a large portfolio of her modeling pictures, including a group portrait by Lord Lichfield of the most beautiful girls in the world. And she is certainly beautiful, although by now my eyes are exhausted from so much beauty. Modeling’s okay, she says, but it’s a movie career she craves: “I can’t imagine doing anything else but acting.” She had the lead in K*A*0*S, but the title proved prophetic. The financing fell through at the last minute, and she was left stranded on location in Colorado. Undaunted, she knows another picture will come along. She has movie connections: her stepfather, Bobby Bass, is a stuntman in all of Burt Reynolds’s movies, and her mother is Ann-Margret’s hairdresser. And oh, yes, her sister is Bo Derek. “I want all the toys you can buy with success,” she says. “My sister lets me play with her toys, but it’s nicer if they’re your own.”

“Whom have you seen so far?” It was my friend, the agent, calling.

“Michelle Pfeiffer.”

“She’s hot.”

“Daryl Hannah. Kim Basinger.”

“They’re hot.”

“But these girls have been working since they were kids,” I said. “They always knew what they wanted to be.”

“That’s right.”

“Doesn’t anybody just get discovered anymore? And screen-tested? And groomed for stardom?”

The bed, the desk, and the floor of my hotel room are littered with eight-by-ten glossies and resumes. Winnie Gardner’s the one who studies with Milton Katselas and wants to be the new Goldie Hawn. Or is it the next Faye Dunaway? Valerie Fitzgerald just did her first part on Fantasy Island. Lisa Niemi’s the one who pays for her acting classes by doing carpentry. The Schneider twins are really called Candi and Randi Brough. Linda Kerridge looks like Marilyn Monroe.

They’re all so clean-looking, the new batch. So laid-back. So far from the glamour myths. Or are they?

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One day when I was double-parked on Rodeo Drive, I saw a blonde coming out of Lina Lee, her hands full of expensive-looking packages. Her face was mostly hidden by dark glasses, but something about her was vaguely familiar. Tall, sensuous, a class act, she stepped into a black Rolls Comiche and didn’t look at the parking boy when she tipped him. However she had got to where she was, she was used to being there.

Of course I didn’t follow her, but it just happened, as these things sometimes do, that she followed me, although she wasn’t aware of it. For three red lights her $150,000 car stopped right behind my Hertz rental, and I was able to study this blonde success story through the rearview mirror.

At one point she pulled a bottle out from beneath the dashboard and drank thirstily. It was only Evian water, but the slightly wanton gesture triggered my memory. Once at a party I had seen her drink Dom Perignon from a bottle, and I had later written the gesture into an actress character in my first novel. It was Alana Collins Hamilton Stewart, the ex-wife of actor George Hamilton, the about-to-be-ex-wife of rock superstar Rod Stewart. A onetime aspiring actress, she had let her career get sidelined by marriages, children, and jet-set fame.

She lives in a mansion behind heavy security gates and a high wall, just down the street from Barbra Streisand. In her art nouveau ballroom, which dances two hundred, she entertains the likes of Warren Beatty and Cher and Julio Iglesias and Irving Lazar. Her comings and goings are always chronicled in the press. “I suppose you want to know what color my underpants are,” she snapped at a pesky reporter recently. “Well, I’m not wearing any!” She is a bona fide Hollywood celebrity, but she still yearns for what she came here for in the first place: movie stardom.

And for Alana that is not an impossible dream. You don’t travel in her circles without acquiring connections, and the right connection, in the person of glitzy producer Allan Carr, has finally come up with a starring role for Alana in his remake of Where the Boys Are. Listen, it’s a beginning.