Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy enters the room wearing glasses just dark enough to suggest an air of mystery, the kind of glasses that a writer of the books Clancy writes would wear, although not the sort favored by insurance agents -- which is what Clancy used to be. I'm for him all the way. Clancy is a writer, isn't he? We writers need to stick together. Heck, I'm even willing to forget about that insurance stuff. Boy, it'd be great.

Stage 15, Paramount Studios, a typical Hollywood day. Sean Connery of Scotland is being made up to play a Soviet navy officer. Producer Mace Neufeld is praying for bad weather for an important sea shot near San Pedro. Co-star Sam Neill is rehearsing. The set is a 16-ton mock-up of a Soviet sub's control room, mounted on a huge mechanically maneuverable platform 22 feet above Stage 15's concrete floor. "Full left rudder!" Neill barks, and as he does, there is a quake. A real one, 4.

Tom Clancy is America's most wish-fulfilling policy-maker, and in his eighth spectacular and scary novel, "Debt of Honor," he plunges America into a foreign policy that is at once unthinkable and very thrilling--a campaign that the present State and Defense departments can only wish they had the talent to fight. Real war with Japan.

"Giving your book to Hollywood is like turning your daughter over to a pimp," Tom Clancy was quoted as saying more than once during the battles he had with Paramount Pictures over the film adaptations of his best-selling political yarns "Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger." But Clancy's Cold War with Hollywood seems to be ending. His first TV project, the four-hour miniseries "Tom Clancy's 'Op Center,' " airs Sunday and Feb. 27 on NBC.

Although publicists have been known to go to extraordinary lengths to create interest in a new book, all G. P. Putnam's Sons had to do to promote Tom Clancy's latest novel was to let events follow their course in Colombia. The central thesis of Clancy's book, however, a secret invasion of Colombia by elite U.S. troops, is scarcely new. Credit for that ingenuous idea seems to belong to New York City Mayor Ed Koch, who first suggested a "friendly" invasion.

His bid for Patriot games fell short, but author Tom Clancy is still in the hunt for a blue-and-gold October--and September, November and December, for that matter. Had former New England Patriots owner James Orthwein not kept his promise to give local investors the first chance to buy his team, Clancy might not be pursuing the Rams today.

If the Strategic Defense Initiative is so full of holes, then why are the Soviets so eager to stop it? Do they know something we don't know? This leading question was for a long while the best defense of SDI against its many scientific and political attackers. An answer to that leading question is the premise of Tom Clancy's new novel. Yes, the premise goes, the Soviets do indeed know something we don't know.

Judith Krantz is angry. No, she's madder than angry. Judith Krantz is livid, raging, fuming, and any other adjective you can find to describe her fury. "They keep telling me they feel as bad as I do. Like hell they do," she says peevishly. "Nobody feels as bad as I do." Why is the diminutive, dainty and usually demure Bel-Air author seeming like her evil twin this morning? (Surely, that was a Krantz plot sometime.

Will moviegoers rally to a Cold War thriller in the aftermath of the Big Thaw? The question hovers in the air like nuclear fallout, as Paramount Pictures readies to launch its $35 million-plus screen adaptation of Tom Clancy's best-selling novel, "The Hunt for Red October." Starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin, and directed by action meister John McTiernan ("Die Hard"), the film surfaces Friday at 1,225 theaters across the country.

Harrison Ford took a deep breath and held it. And held it. And held it. He closed his eyes and sat back in a high-legged director's chair, seemingly oblivious to the sounds of crew members hammering and shouting instructions nearby as they prepared to shoot the climactic scenes of Paramount Pictures' "Patriot Games." As the seconds ticked by, Ford rocked slightly from side to side and then straightened up and looked down at his wristwatch. Forty seconds. Fifty seconds. One minute.