CITIZEN KOOP : Former Surgeon General's New Shingle Could Read: 'America's Family Doctor'

In his transition from title to person, home is no longer red-brick government quarters. Koop, like ordinary folk, has a new, huge mortgage on a small house in Maryland.

The beard stays. It never \o7 has\f7 been a statement of Amish beliefs, as often suggested, because Koop is Presbyterian. He grew the beard years ago to camouflage multiple chins. How many? "Triple chins," he admits. "But I haven't looked lately. I'm not sure I can feel them anymore."

As surgeon general and leader of the 7,000-member Public Health Service, C. Everett Koop preached high health and balanced diet. As civilian practice, Chick Koop eats marbled steaks, likes his martinis dry and his macadamia nuts dipped in Cool Whip.

"Darn good genes," Koop explains. "My cholesterol level is right on the border between normal and abnormal, but what you probably don't know and the country doesn't know, is that . . . at the age of 73, it doesn't matter what my cholesterol level is as far as predicting my heart attack.

"I think the worst thing about the cholesterol effort in this country is that it has frightened about 30 million (senior) people that don't have to be frightened at all."

So the Koop candor hasn't surrendered, the insights aren't retired and the mind remains open for his new business--as America's family doctor. Or Dutch uncle.

"I want to be seen as an opinion maker," he says.

Koop was in California recently making those opinions for audiences in San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles and to those "wanting to know what I thought because of who I was, rather than the title I used to have.

"So I am very pleased to see news reports, headlines and magazine things talking about C. Everett Koop and not talking about the former surgeon general."

Koop is writing his memoirs. He will be host of five prime-time television health specials for NBC and produce videotapes that may do for individual health habits what Jane Fonda has done for thighs.

He was in Paris last week to receive an anti-smoking award and warn Europeans about \o7 their\f7 tobacco problems. He continues to visit AIDS patients in hospices, to lecture students in universities and offer free advice to the curious who still allow him no privacy in waiting rooms, on airplanes or riding the New York subway.

And for the first time since leaving his federal post in July, Koop is talking to the media--but only to interviewers selected by the Beverly Hills agent he now shares with Gerald and Betty Ford, Donald Regan, Alexander Haig and Bill Cosby.

"I have to be very careful not to be overexposed," he said. "If I accepted what is offered, with radio and with television, you would see me every day and I don't think I could last six months.

"I am approaching the limit of what people can take in the way of 'don't.' You must remember that all my messages begin: 'Don't.' "

In this new life, there might even be a bluffer, tougher Koop. He always was direct. But in government service, he said, "there is a kind of an in-built, inborn restraint. I don't do that (government service) anymore. I can be as outspoken as I wish."

So here is Koop on abortion, a procedure he adamantly opposes: "I'm absolutely disgusted with the rhetoric and the bashing that one side does against the other. I think they have both forgotten, in a sense, what their first love was."

On the lighter side, on Betty, the woman he married 51 years ago: "My wife is the world's greatest non-accumulator of worldly goods. She should have been a nun."

On smoking, from a man who quit his comfortable pipes 15 years ago: "I am making a plea for the European Common Market to fight smoking as a continent and not piecemeal as countries."

Of his conflicting images as blusterer and humanitarian, as moral dictator and compassionate healer: "I'm all the good things."

On AIDS: "Everything that turns up confirms heterosexual spread, numerically and geographically . . . most recent estimates are that there will be, in the year 2000, a hundred million people who are HIV positive."

On the media that took years to warm to Koop: "I view the line between veneration and ridicule that the press can give you as a very narrow knife edge."

On the past eight years when he became the most visible, the most controversial and, say even former detractors, the most effective surgeon general in the 119-year history of the Public Health Service: "I'm bloodied and scarred.

"But the veneer of approval and accolades has really removed any sense of bitterness I had about those first nine months (of nomination hearings). For the entire second Reagan term, really since October, 1986, when I put out the AIDS report, the acceptance and the appreciation that seems to come from the public has been very gratifying."