On June 9, Washington will host a Hollywood-style benefit, a premiere of the movie "Jurassic Park." The beneficiaries are the Los Angeles-based Children's Action Network and Washington's Children's Defense Fund, whose founder, Marian Wright Edelman, is a close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton. (Hillary Rodham Clinton once served on the board.) The top price is $10,000, the lowest for adults is $250, and it is certain both organizations will come out of the night big winners. It's less likely the Clinton administration will.

Why? A glance at the benefit committee provides the answer. It is studded with Hollywood names - Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman, Ron Howard, Sally Field and a bevy of entertainment executives - who are already turning heads at this or that Washington restaurant. The event is sure to focus even more attention on the entree entertainment figures have to the White House, even the Lincoln bedroom. The new president's guest log is becoming hard to distinguish from a Valley Girl's autograph book.

Streisand has had her night in the White House, Liza Minnelli is booked for next month, and certain entertainment moguls - David Geffen and Michael Medevoy, for instance - have a"Too much Hollywood tends to trivialize a president."telephonic relationship with important members of the White House staff. That's more than can be said for many journalists, by the way. Geffen, who made his first billion in the record business, is said to be looking for a Washington apartment, and, of course, Clinton already has a West Coast one - the mansion his friends, the television producers Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, have apparently bought for his use.

Let's get one thing out of the way quickly: Washington can be a depressingly provincial, not to mention jealous, town. (Who do these Hollywood types think they are, anyway?) But something more serious is at work as well. Clinton has already established himself stylistically as John F. Kennedy reprised. Some of that is not his fault. He is young, attractive, energetic and what schoolteachers used to call precocious.

But his deliberate association with Kennedy - a visit to the grave site during inaugural week, his campaign use of a picture of himself at the Kennedy White House while a high school student and, especially, his friendships with Hollywood personalities - is a different matter. Above all, his tropism toward Hollywood recalls a part of the Kennedy legacy that is hardly worth reviving. In the popular mind, John F. Kennedy is rarely associated with legislation nowadays.

It goes without saying that, for good reason or bad, too much Hollywood tends to trivialize a president. Just as Americans tend to mistrust a sense of humor, misconstruing wit for lack of purpose, so do they mistrust glamour - or, for that matter, money made in the entertainment business. It seems to me, though, that Norman Lear, a White House guest, knows as much or more about America as, say, a steel tycoon. That might also be the case with Geffen who, after all, was such an acute judge of the entertainment market that he now owns his own airplane. Such a man is easily worth the time invested in dinner.

But steel moguls do not make the pages of People magazine or get featured on "Entertainment Tonight." Hollywood types do. Moreover, they personify a lifestyle and, often, an ideology that the American people find fascinating but not exactly exemplary.

Take Sharon Stone. Her best-known starring vehicle, "Basic Instinct," showed her nude several times and was so besotted with gratuitous sex and violence that Rupert Murdoch recently told Ken Auletta of the New Yorker that he "wouldn't have made that picture." In fact, Clinton himself might as well have been referring to "Basic Instinct" when he told TV Guide after the election that he would like Hollywood to start "deglamorizing mindless sex and violence." Yet, who had dinner with Clinton at the Vancouver summit? The very Ms. Stone, among others.

A president who was elected on a platform of fiscal prudence and tethering welfare to the Protestant ethic, one who is asking us all to pay higher taxes, is going to seem like a hypocrite if at the same time he pals around with people who think that sacrifice is a day without a personal trainer. This is especially the case if such a president is beginning to look like a bumbler whose staff, already overworked, is (according to the usually reliable New York Times) taking calls from Hollywood types seeking a briefing on one issue or another - and, in the case of John Ritter, Billy Crystal, Christopher Reeve, Sam Waterston and Lindsay Wagner, getting them from two Cabinet members, an undersecretary of state and a White House staffer.

Bill Clinton is in danger of becoming such a president. Lacking the sort of legislative achievement he himself once promised, having conducted an erratic policy toward Bosnia and confessing almost daily that he was ill-prepared for the awful realities of the Oval Office, he cannot afford to be pictured as an after-hours limousine liberal as well - a president whose seriousness of purpose is questioned by his associations. If Clinton wants to see some Hollywood stars, he could do what the rest of us do: Go to a movie.