``Here, I want you to read this,'' she says, handing me a card full of orange, yellow, and green Ellerbee trees ``it's the most important thing I know about what we do.'' The quotation on it is from historian Will Durant: And there's a quotation for her new boss at ABC, Av Westin.

But a fan at the next table recognizes her and calls over that she's written the best book since Alice Walker's ``The Color Purple.''Įllerbee has brought along what you'd least suspect someone in the hard-edged TV news business would enjoy doing: hand-painted greeting cards she has made for friends. She is without her trademark horn-rimmed glasses, and her eyes are a startling shade somewhere between hazel and blue. When she sits down at the table with a wide, slightly shy smile, heads turn. In her own low-key way, she has made an entrance that can't be missed. Her long chestnut hair, which the networks have sometimes suggested she edit, cascades in Hollywood waves over her shoulders.

She breezes into the restaurant looking distinctly un-newscasterish: faded blue jeans, jonquil yellow T-shirt, blue work shirt slung over that, and blue gumboots. The Linda Ellerbee of the networks is as throaty as Bacall, as crisp as snap beans, a writer of considerable and pungent wit who cares about words the way some women care about star sapphires.

Her book ``And So It Goes'' has scurried up the nonfiction best-seller list to hover between third and fourth place Columbia Pictures has bought ``And So It Goes'' for a movie in which Ellerbee may be played by producer-star Marsha Mason (if Miss Mason chooses to), or Debra Winger, or Karen Allen ABC News has signed her on for a new $350,000 contract that includes co-hosting its new TV magazine, ``Our World,'' which premi`eres tonight, as well as continuing ``T.G.I.F.,'' her offbeat view of the nearly news on ``Good Morning America,'' and perhaps anchoring a late-night news show following ``Nightline.'' During station breaks, she is also writing a novel. But evidence continues to mount that the report may be true: Ellerbee, reached at a Greenwich Village restaurant, denied the allegation. INFORMED sources close to Linda Ellerbee, the network newscaster, said today that she's a cottage industry.

And So It Goes by Linda Ellerbee