FOR DEBBIE, THE BOOK STOPS HERE

Debbie Reynolds is writing her autobiography. “I thought I’d better do it before the children do,” she said unseriously, in an eyes-lifted reference to the present vogue of caustic tell-alls by star offspring.

“I’ve been working with a writer for months, and I’ve just now divorced Eddie (Fisher). It’s very slow work.”

Her book is tentatively titled “Unsinkable Me,” a reference, naturally, to her success in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” She doesn’t like it. “Too on the nose,” she feels.

Daughter Carrie Fisher came up with a better title, she says: “Money Dearest,” although that, too, may hit the nose a little too squarely. “It’s perfect,” Reynolds said with a philosophical grin one afternoon earlier this week. “All I’ve done is earn money for all my husbands.”

She lives these days with a new husband, Richard Hamlett, a builder, in a comfortable but unspectacular house in the San Fernando Valley. Her brother lives in a trailer on the property and her mother lives in a house she bought for her across the street. “I think I like the Chinese idea of a family living all around a central space.”

Debbie Reynolds has indubitably worked relentlessly hard, for 40 show-business years, ever since she was 16. Tonight she and Donald O’Connor bring their show, which they have been trooping around the country for a year, to the Universal Amphitheatre. It is their first appearance in Los Angeles, and she was slightly apprehensive, also nursing an inflamed larynx. But the advance sale looked good and the larynx was being assaulted by medication.

Their act is already heavily booked for 1988, including the possibility of a lengthy stay in London.

Last month she made her first film in 16 years (since “What’s the Matter With Helen?” in 1971). It’s a movie for television called “Sadie and Son,” in which she plays a widowed policewoman.

“The shock was terrific,” Reynolds says. “On the nightclub circuit, you go to bed at 4 in the morning. Here I was getting up at 4 in the morning. We were shooting in Canada, where they don’t know about quitting time. One day we shot 22 hours, and at the end they were shooting close-ups . Now in those circumstances, there is no cinematographer now living who can make me look terrific. You’re lucky not to look like a piece of ancient cheese.”

She sighs. “But I don’t complain. I can remember Bette Davis saying”--herewith a splendid imitation of Davis--” ’Dahling, I don’t know why anyone complains. We shot all those classic films at Warners in 13 days.’ I think of complaining, and I hear that ‘ dah -ling.’ And I say, ‘If you could do it, I can do it.’ We did ours in four weeks. Completely impossible. Funny script and fun to do, but who knows? I was born lacking the ability to judge.”

Reynolds was one of the first of the Hollywood stars to put a nightclub act together--that was nearly 25 years ago. She played the Riviera in Las Vegas, and then Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn, later bought by Howard Hughes. She wearied of doing the act alone, she says, “and I asked myself who would be in a show that I’d like to see?” Donald O’Connor, her partner in the inimitable “Singin’ in the Rain,” was a fast and supremely logical choice. “I gave him top billing,” she says. “I always give the man top billing. Then I get what I want.” They get along famously; not a quarrel yet, she notes.

Her dream of a Hollywood museum seems not much further advanced than ever, although prospects and rumors float up as often as production deals are announced in the trades. She invested a very large amount of money at the time of the great MGM sell-off, to keep the artifacts from being scattered to the winds.

She also has the Mary Pickford collection, and among other itemage, 9,000 costumes. Most of her holdings are in storage, although in her den she has some remarkable furnishings from “The Good Earth.” (They did know how to decorate a set for keeps in those days.) She built a special alcove at one side of her house for Harold Lloyd’s grand player piano, with rolls that some of the day’s greatest pianists punched just for him.

Four years ago, after making an elaborate presentation, she and Jack Haley Jr. and their associates lost their bid to put a museum in the Pan-Pacific Auditorium. Two years ago, when the Joseph Magnin store in Las Vegas was vacated, she negotiated with Hughes’ Summa Corp. for the building. “It wasn’t Hollywood, but it would have been ideal, 60,000 square feet of space ready to go.” But the corporation had other plans.

“What I concentrated on when I bought,” Reynolds says, “was material from Academy Award films. I wanted--want--to do a room for each of them.” She hears talk again of a museum that would stand near Mann’s Chinese. But no one has talked to her.

For a long time, she says, “I would introduce myself to people as Princess Leia’s mother. Now I say I’m Carrie Fisher’s mother.” Her daughter’s novel, “Postcards From the Edge,” is being very favorably reviewed. And while it reflects something of Carrie’s troubles with chemical dependency, it is not, her mother insists, anything like straight autobiography.

But she remembers that when Carrie was first experimenting with pills, Cary Grant was cited as approving the idea. “I called Cary and asked him if he would call Carrie and talk to her. He did, and told her he didn’t approve of the idea at all. I’ve always been terribly grateful to him for his kindness.”

Reynolds’ own autobiography, she says, “will be funny or I won’t release it. No sex tell-all book. It just so happens I’m not Shelley Winters and I don’t have all those wonderful things to report.”

She does have the odd memory or two. In the early days (she is purposely vague), a very famous male star and a very famous female star she was working with were having an ill-concealed fling. One lunchtime they were studying their lines somewhere in the shrubbery, when the female star’s equally famous husband came on the stage.

“I hopped on my bicycle and rode all over the lot, screaming her name and yelling ‘Your husband’s here.’ ” Disaster was thereby averted, at least temporarily.

In her backyard stands an ancient but still-bearing crab apple tree, much pruned, with knobby consequences. “Friends tell me to cut it down,” Reynolds says. “But it’s me, tough and knobby.” She hauls up a leg of her pants suit to disclose bruised shin and a knee knobby from earlier bruises. “My dancers,” she explains. “We miscalculate now and then. No, the tree stays. We’re both survivors.”