LOS ANGELES _ It surely would have bothered Herman Melville if he had known Hollywood would film his ``Moby Dick'' in 1930 as a love story in which Ahab survives his showdown with the great white whale and comes home to wed Joan Bennett.
But, if she had written ``Moby Dick,'' it probably wouldn't faze Barbara Taylor Bradford, not even if Hollywood had cast Tom Cruise as Ahab and Flipper as the great white whale.
Take the case of her 1991 best seller ``Remember,'' which NBC has turned into a two-part miniseries that premieres tonight at 9 ET. The network decided to switch the locale of her story from France to the Netherlands. Though Bradford suspects the motive was ``a production deal'' NBC had with interests in Amsterdam, it doesn't bother her in the least.
``I think it would be wonderful if you could take a novel I've written and put it on television exactly as I'd written it,'' Bradford observes during an interview at a Universal City hotel, ``but I don't know how many people would watch it.''
Bradford has what you might call a liberated attitude about screen adaptations of her novels. Five of her eight best sellers have been filmed so far, all for television, and a sixth (``The Women in His Life'') is in development. She readily acknowledges that none has made it to the screen as she wrote it.
In the case of ``Remember,'' the changes weren't limited to dropping the memorable rustic farm locale in Provence and the urban settings in Paris. NBC also decided to film all the English scenes in Ireland for reasons of economy and left the book's bete noir, Charles Devereaux, irredeemably bad in the movie, even though he undergoes what Bradford calls ``a change of heart'' in her novel.
None of it bugs Bradford, who actually thinks ``it's a marvelous script, one of the best that's been done.'' Her main concern, she says, is that they don't mess with the ``main thrust'' of her story about world-famed TV journalist Nicky Wells (Donna Mills), her passionate affair with photographer Clee Donovan (Stephen Collins) and her tragic involvement with Charles Devereaux (Derek De Lint). They didn't, she says, and that's why she thinks the movie should retain all the book's suspense.
By now, Bradford, 60, understands why books need to be changed when they're turned into movies. And if she doesn't understand, she rationalizes a lot.
For example, she says she believes NBC changed locales in ``Remember'' for ``practical reasons'': They had to film in the summer to have the movie ready to show in October and Provence was full of tourists then and is ``so expensive.''
Bradford says she doesn't mind seeing ``Remember'' take place in Amsterdam because, ``It hasn't been seen a lot on television, and it's a very pretty city with those canals and all those tulips.''
Though Bradford concedes many of her readers complain about the whimsical changes TV makes, she always advises them to lighten up. Her attitude is simple: Watching a TV show isn't like reading a book, so don't expect them to tell the story the same way.
``I have a lot of thought process in my books,'' she says, ``a lot of things you can't show on film. So, I tend to let the pros do it. They know better than I do about putting a book on film.''
Bradford's attitude isn't common among the world's best-selling authors, such as Anne Rice. Though they still haven't cast Tom Cruise as Capt. Ahab, he has been cast as Rice's most memorable character, the vampire Lestat, in the upcoming big-screen version of her ``Interview with the Vampire.'' Rice has been grumbling loudly about it, claiming Cruise is compromising her concept of the character who runs through all her best-selling novels in her ``Vampire Chronicles'' saga.
That sort of thing doesn't disturb Bradford. Katherine Tempest, her heroine in ``Voice of the Heart,'' was dark and petite, but the TV version starred tall, blond Lindsay Wagner.
``I saw Katherine looking like Vivien Leigh,'' Bradford recalls, ``and Lindsay Wagner looks nothing like Vivien Leigh. But Lindsay brought to that part the qualities Katherine had.''
Other best-selling authors have gone to extremes to get some degree of control over the movie versions of their books. William Peter Blatty, who won an Oscar adapting his own best seller, ``The Exorcist,'' was so disgusted by Hollywood's sequel, ``Exorcist II: The Heretic,'' that he wrote his own different sequel, then produced and directed the movie version, ``Exorcist III,'' himself.
Another author of literary blockbusters, Tom Clancy, fumed and raged so publicly over early script versions of Paramount's adaptation of his ``Patriot Games'' that the studio feared it might lose the chance to film future adaptations of his techno-thrillers featuring agent Jack Ryan. Brandon Tartikoff, then head of the studio, personally intervened and worked with Clancy. The revised film became a box-office smash, and Clancy has now teamed with Tartikoff to make films together as independents.
Author Larry McMurtry has taken another approach. Though his Pulitzer Prize-winning ``Lonesome Dove'' became a critically acclaimed, top-rated miniseries on CBS, the author didn't like the script for the upcoming CBS sequel. So he published his own, completely different best-selling sequel, ``Streets of Laredo,'' last summer, beating the Nov. 14 TV premiere of ``Return to Lonesome Dove'' by a couple of months.
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Bradford never whines over such things, even though her books have sold as well, if not better, than all the above. In fact, she's one of the world's most popular novelists, selling 47 million books in 82 different countries since 1979. And this year she signed one of the richest contracts in publishing history, paying her $30 million to write her next three books for Harper-Collins.
Many have presumed her relaxed attitude is because she has an advocate on the inside: her husband, movie producer Robert Bradford, who has produced all but the first of the TV adaptations of her books.
Yet Bradford insists neither her immense literary reputation nor her husband's influence mean much at television networks.
``I don't have any control at all, not even when he does it,'' she says of her husband, who attends most of her interviews. ``The writer has the least control of anyone.''
So where does her easy-going attitude about Hollywood adaptations come from? Bradford suggests the answer is cold, hard experience that opened her eyes.
It all began, Bradford recalls, with the filming of her first novel, ``A Woman of Substance,'' as a six-hour miniseries for the now-defunct Operation Prime Time ad hoc network in 1984. Her husband had refused to produce it for her because he had never done television, and feared she was so emotionally involved with the story that ``whatever I did, it wouldn't be right.''
So Diane Baker, who played a small part in the miniseries, produced it instead. It was a huge success and made Bradford a hot property for television. Moreover, Bradford was pleased with the result.
That encouraged Bradford to badger her husband into producing the TV version of her sequel, ``Hold the Dream,'' in 1986. But after rejecting three ``lousy'' scripts for the movie, producer Bradford came to his wife and begged her to do the screenplay herself.
``I had only six weeks to do it,'' she recalls. ``They locked me up in a studio in London and threw away the key. I realized the problems the minute I started.''
Robert and the film's director, Don Sharp, gave Bradford a crash course in screenwriting that changed her attitude permanently.
``You must keep it moving forward and not tell them anything they don't need to know,'' Bradford says. ``And in my book there was a lot they didn't need to know.''
The four-hour sequel was not a critical success, but it did teach the author a valuable lesson: ``Never again. I definitely wouldn't want to be a screenwriter.''
Ever since, Bradford has practiced what she so often preaches: Don't criticize somebody's creative work unless you think you can do it better yourself.
Actually, the attitude suits Bradford, who's a hard-working, pragmatic woman like the female characters she usually places at the center of her novels. Her women often rise to the top by beating others at their own games. They may suffer serious indignities, but they always retain their integrity.
Bradford's dealings with Hollywood certainly fit that pattern. She has compromised when necessary, but only in the filming of her books, not the writing of them. If the TV movie versions bring more readers to her books, Bradford figures they're pleasantly surprised to discover there's more to her than TV suggests. She refuses to keep TV's needs in mind when she's developing a story and never imagines a price tag hanging on each new plot.
``I never think about it or else I'd probably never write another line,'' she says. ``Once I go to my typewriter, I don't think about what I'm being paid. I just think about doing my job.''
The professional integrity she admires in her characters is characteristic of her own work ethic. Like many of her heroines, she comes from a humble background and had to make her own way in the world.
``I was an only child, much-loved, spoiled,'' she says, ``from a very ordinary family.''
Her mother was a nurse and nanny; her father an engineer with the Royal Navy. (She based the character of Winston in ``A Woman of Substance'' on him.) Raised in Yorkshire, she decided at age 12 to be a writer after selling a story to a magazine. Her mother was a voracious reader who got her interested in books early and also took her to the movies twice a week through her childhood. Bradford now believes she was ``force-fed'' on the nutrients a writer needs.
But it would be another 30 years before Bradford would fulfill her dream of becoming a novelist. She left school at 16 for a typing job at the Yorkshire Evening Post. Six months later, she landed a reporting job there and by 18 was a woman's page editor. At 20, she went to work on Fleet Street, then England's journalistic center, and gradually established her reputation as a newspaper columnist.
``A lot of my success is due to that training,'' Bradford believes, ``understanding deadlines and learning about people by gaining insight into their character.''
Over the years, Bradford tried but failed to complete four novels. It took her two years to finish her fifth, ``A Woman of Substance,'' the story of a poor girl from Yorkshire who becomes a department store tycoon in London.
``I worked weekends and every night,'' she said. ``It meant giving up all my social life and all my spare time.''
That dedication is a common ingredient of Bradford's heroines. She hasn't let success affect her work habits, either. She still believes she owes her good fortune to ``sheer hard work'' and spends eight to nine hours a day at her typewriter. (She won't use a word processor on the grounds that ``if it ain't broke, don't fix it.'')
Bradford lives in Manhattan in the comfortable style her working-class heroines usually achieve by page 400 or so. She moved to the United States when she married Robert in 1963 and is now an American citizen. She has transformed herself into someone quite different from the eager Yorkshire kid who walked into a newsroom at age 16. Still, she likes to think she retains the ``common touch'' by hewing to her work habits that made her what she is today.
Right now, for instance, she's closeted with her typewriter, trying to get the manuscript of her new book, ``Everything to Gain,'' ready by the Jan. 1 deadline. When she's locked up like that with her story, Bradford seldom goes out and rarely socializes, but swears she has plenty of good company.
``You see, I have all these characters who become very real to me,'' she says. ``If they didn't, I don't think they'd become very real to the reader. I may be alone when I'm writing, but I'm never lonely.''