It was 7:20 a.m. and Richard Dreyfuss, asleep in the White House's Lincoln Bedroom, heard a quiet voice at the door. "Richard?" And then again, "Richard?"

The actor opened the door and there was President Clinton, eager for a chat with his Hollywood guest. In an hour-long bonding session, the two men discussed golf, child-rearing and Dreyfuss's opposition to the limits on habeas corpus in a recent anti-terrorism bill.

A longtime political activist, Dreyfuss wasn't in the Lincoln Bedroom last April by coincidence. His political adviser, Donna Bojarsky, helped get him there. On the same trip, she arranged for the star of "Mr. Holland's Opus" to appear with Hillary Rodham Clinton at an event for arts education and to lunch with Middle East peace negotiators Dennis Ross and Aaron Miller and the Israeli, Tunisian and Moroccan ambassadors. The next week she took Dreyfuss to Israel, where he met then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres and a long list of journalists, policy analysts and left-wing leaders.

Hollywood may well have hit on the ultimate status symbol. If a high-powered publicist can get you favorable press, if a personal trainer can get you enviable abs, why not have a political adviser to get you top-notch access? Now that's impressive. After all, lots of people in Los Angeles are rich and famous. But how many people get the Leader of the Free World for an hour-long one-on-one?

Having your own personal political strategist -- someone to direct political and charitable contributions, to define relevant issues, to home in on the decision-makers -- identifies you as someone who is well connected and deeply committed. It marks you as a serious thinker. Or at least as someone who has an employee who does serious thinking on a full-time basis.

Of course, this is not the thing for everyone. Having a political adviser presupposes having some politics. And not even Donna Bojarsky can book the Lincoln Bedroom for just anybody.

In fact, only a handful of Hollywood's movie stars and power brokers avail themselves of this particular luxury. Along with Dreyfuss there are Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Norman Lear. A few others, like Ted Danson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, have staffers similar to -- but not quite -- advisers. And Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner have publicists who are politically plugged in. Many others in the entertainment industry are politically active (mostly for liberal causes), but get their access in less exclusive forums.

With the arrival of the Clinton administration, Washington's historic love affair with Hollywood swelled to new heights of passion. Streisand and television producers Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason became regulars on the Bill and Hillary scene. Former TriStar Pictures chairman Mike Medavoy had a sleep-over at the White House; Billy Crystal, Christopher Reeve, John Ritter and Lindsay Wagner came in for briefings on environmental policy from Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt; senior Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos dated actress Jennifer Grey.

Washington veterans were not impressed. The prevailing sentiment was best expressed by Leon Wieseltier, cultural editor of the New Republic, in mid-1993: "The idea that these insulated and bubble-headed people should help make policy is ridiculous," he said. "Hollywood actors are even more out of touch than elected politicians."

But those celebrities with political assistants stayed involved.

"Relationships always matter," says Stephanopoulos, a frequent conduit for Hollywood. "If you have 50 phone calls and you have to pick two, there's a better chance you're going to answer the people you know."

And do the stars with access get to influence policy? "Well, sure," he says. "Any time you have a chance to talk to the president you can influence him. It's not the same as being a full-time policy-maker, but he likes to chat with people from all walks of life." Shying From the Limelight

So, exactly what do Hollywood's political advisers do? Are they Rasputins to the stars, guiding the naive to political power? Or are they merely overpaid secretaries, flacks who read Congressional Quarterly?

"I have a broad range of responsibilities," says Andy Spahn, whose title is director of corporate affairs for DreamWorks SKG, the new studio headed by Spielberg, Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Spahn also runs the David Geffen Foundation, a nonpartisan philanthropic fund. He adds, "I'm not interested in the story. It's a non-story." He hangs up.

An hour later, a contrite Spahn calls back. "We're trying to build a new studio here," he explains. "I do everything from politics and charity to community relations -- a broad range of stuff." On this day, for example, Spahn is helping Spielberg work out plot problems related to current affairs in a script for "Peacemaker," a film about the Russian mafia. He is also on the phone with his contacts at the State Department and the United Nations to set up filming dates in Eastern Europe for the same project.

Much of Spahn's time is taken up with managing philanthropy for Geffen, with whom he worked before joining DreamWorks. Last year, he says, he sifted through more than 3,000 requests for donations and endorsements from the Geffen Foundation; many of the grants eventually went to causes related to the studio chief's agenda of supporting AIDS research, civil liberties, the arts and the Jewish community.

But Spahn, 43, is also the DreamWorks chiefs' liaison to Washington. Or from another perspective, Washington's link to DreamWorks. Spielberg donates more than $1 million a year to charities and supports the Democratic Party. Katzenberg apparently is little involved in politics or charity. But Geffen is one of the Democratic Party's most important allies on the West Coast. He hosted two dinner parties for Clinton this spring, raising about $1.5 million for the presidential campaign, and will host another in September, according to Spahn.

As with most of the political advisers working in Hollywood, Spahn's background is in local and national politics. He was an aide to the ultra-liberal California assemblyman Tom Hayden in the 1970s, and worked in Washington for several years for Democratic heavy hitters George Mitchell, Tony Coelho and Alan Cranston, principally on campaign committees. He was also the finance director for Gary Hart's unsuccessful presidential bid in 1984.

But Spahn is reluctant to disclose even these benign details; it's as if there is something wrong with acknowledging that Hollywood bigwigs get advice on how to be politically effective.

Robert Redford's consultant is even cagier, calling from a cellular phone somewhere west of the Rockies; she doesn't want to say where. "I don't give interviews," she says. "It's just a personal rule about my work."

Redford is a passionate environmental activist both via personal lobbying efforts and through his Sundance Institute in Utah. In recent years the actor has fought for passage of the Clean Air Act, the Energy Conservation and Protection Act and bills regulating strip mining. One of his latest efforts was to record radio commercials protesting a plan to build a radioactive waste dump in Ward Valley near the Colorado River in Southern California.

Much of this activity passes through Joyce Deep, who has been with Redford for five years and is all but invisible in his public life. Starting out as a campaign photographer for former Ohio governor Richard Celeste, she worked in Chicago politics for a decade before moving to Los Angeles on the USA for Africa fund-raising project in the late 1980s.

"Joyce is our primary liaison to Redford, and he is one of the stalwarts of the environmental community," says Andy Goodman, a TV writer turned activist who heads the Environmental Media Association, a group that raises consciousness in Hollywood on matters green. "When you work for a famous person, part of your job is not to block the limelight."

Now the question becomes: Why can't these people read their own newspapers?

"Look," says Bojarsky, a no-nonsense redhead who probably talks too fast for most people in Los Angeles to understand, "Richard {Dreyfuss} is smart. He reads, he writes, he doesn't mind speaking." Nano-pause. "But he doesn't have time to spend in the trenches of politics. He has professionals {on his staff} in every other field, so at a certain point he decided he needed a political professional. I'm not exactly like an accountant or a lawyer -- it's more fluid than that."

It's more like a collaboration, she explains. Dreyfuss is interested in volunteerism, national and community service, arts education and the Middle East peace process. But when she came to work for the actor five years ago (she had been working on presidential campaigns, including those of Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis) he was on several dozen different boards; she changed that to a handful. "Many issues interest him, but you can't make a difference in every area. You can't be educated on every issue," she says.

Margery Tabankin agrees. The former head of the influential Hollywood Women's Political Committee, Tabankin is now political consultant to Streisand and also runs Spielberg's Righteous Person's Foundation, created to disburse the profits of "Schindler's List." (Her work for Spielberg is apolitical.) "Barbra is a political junkie," says Tabankin, who has worked with the performer for 10 years. "People don't understand that while she's a director, a singer and an actor, she's really involved in following the public debate."

Streisand's agenda has to do with civil liberties, racial equality, abortion rights and the environment, Tabankin says. "One doesn't ever tell Barbra what to do. She writes her own material. Not a dime gets spent that this woman doesn't approve of." These days, Tabankin is helping the star target critical congressional or local legislative races (many of the consultants interviewed said they would be active in the campaign to defeat Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina), or suggest where an appearance might do the most to further a cause.

"None of these people aren't smart enough to do it themselves," Tabankin insists. "I don't think it's insecurity so much as if you're interested in this stuff, you want to do it well." Helping to `Maximize Time'

The phone rings in Norman Lear's office. The word's out in Hollywood that the 73-year-old producer has hired someone to handle his political affairs, a position that has been vacant since former adviser Betsy Kenny left to get married a couple of years ago.

It is Diana Sciocchetti, newly plucked from People for the American Way, a liberal Washington think tank founded by Lear in the 1980. "I'm just helping him to maximize his time," she says, adding giddily, "I feel like I won the lottery."

The following day Lear calls to talk politics. First, he says, he resigned from the Democratic Party in anger over what he perceived as Democratic complicity in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy. Is he otherwise happy with the Clinton administration? More or less, he responds. "There should've been a health bill," Lear mumbles, then adds -- before a more specific question can intervene -- "I'm not all that politically astute. I'm not a scholar on these issues; I have strong feelings, and I have a sense of things." The rest, apparently, is Sciocchetti's job.

Lear, however, makes no apologies for not knowing more. What's important, he says, is that he cares. "I'd say there's a certain Eastern jaundiced view about people in this community who somehow can't be trusted to care. We have to have hidden agendas," he says. "That's such a bore by now."

Lear ought to know. By all accounts, he hired Hollywood's first personal political consultant in 1983 -- Bob Burkett, a lawyer. "If he was busy buying a script and wanted to help {Iowa Democratic Sen.} Tom Harkin, I would help him. We'd have a reception at Norman's house for 75 people, the candidate would appear, and he'd walk away with the money," says Burkett, who now splits his time between L.A. and New York running a paper company.

Burkett went on to work for Geffen but really made his mark orchestrating the political rise of Ted Field, scion of the Marshall Field fortune and head of Interscope Records. In the late 1980s and early '90s, Burkett channeled $2 million of Field's money a year to philanthropic causes and built his client into one of the most influential members of the Democratic Party. In 1987 Burkett raised $400,000 for Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and in 1992 organized Clinton's biggest pre-primary fund-raiser, at Field's Beverly Hills mansion; there was another do there after the nomination, when Streisand sang.

"Ted wasn't interested in being a visible player," says Burkett. "He said to me, `Put a program together. Let's see what we can do.' "

As it turned out, Burkett -- with Field behind him -- could do quite a lot, and herein lies the particular clout of political know-how allied with Hollywood's dazzle. In May 1991, when the Democratic Party was broke and President Bush was flying high in the polls, the Democratic National Committee was desperate to raise money for research and polling. Together with DNC Chairman Ron Brown, Burkett organized a meeting at party supporter Pamela Harriman's home in Middleburg, Va., bringing all the likely candidates -- including Clinton, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lloyd Bentsen and then New York Gov. Mario Cuomo -- together with 18 major donors. The meeting raised $3 million. And it enhanced Field's profile in the party. He left politics when Interscope Records came under criticism for distributing gangsta rap music after the 1992 election; Burkett went into business.

But the former consultant insists: "I never leveraged the money for influence, nor was I ever asked to do that. This may be hard to believe, but if I had ever attempted to do that I would have lost my job."

To believe Hollywood's political consultants (current and former), they don't jockey for access. They don't use their connections. They're not paid to create influence. But who could blame them for being so modest? Political operatives traditionally exist in the shadows and rarely talk on the record. At least if they want to keep their jobs.

All the more so in this murky netherworld where glamour meets power, where glitter meets history, where the mutual admiration is a heady mix.

But Bojarsky insists that it's all for the public good. "It's not personal," she says. "It's not about their pocketbook or a specific area. Mostly they're looking for responses in an approach to the country. It's a broad approach to good government."