When B-N native Maggie Marr arrived in Hollywood in June 2001, she behaved like any properly raised young woman from the heartland.

Politely.

Respectfully.

Ready on the draw with a Mr. or Ms.

As a new employee for one of the entertainment capital's most powerful agencies, International Creative Management (ICM), she'd have ample opportunity to draw upon that respect: Some of Hollywood's mightiest A-list players are ICM's clients.

So the time that top-tier client Cameron Diaz called the office with a request, the newly hired Marr responded with a cordial but respectful, "Yes, Miss Diaz …"

She quickly learned the error of her overly-courteous ways.

"Maggie, don't call people by their last names," her boss chided her. "You have to stop that. I know you're trying to be polite. But out here, everyone calls each other by first names only. If you don't, it makes you sound like you're looking down your nose at them."

So it should have been, "Hey, Cameron, baby!"?

Yes, it should have been "Hey, Cameron, baby!" (Well, all right, maybe just "Hey, Cameron!")

Then along came another initially discomfiting job requirement - namely, that she listen in on every phone conversation that came through her office, her boss's line included, so she stays abreast of client dealings.

"At first, I didn't want to have to hear all the calls," she recalls. "I'd be thinking, 'How rude, I shouldn't be listening to what they're talking about!'"

So if, say, Ms. - er, Cameron - Diaz called to talk to her boss about anything or whatever, Marr was expected to be on the line, too, taking it all in.

After expressing her feelings of being rude by eavesdropping, "I got scolded for that, too."

Those were among the first of the many lessons about playing the Hollywood game that Marr, a 1987 University High School graduate, learned in short order.

Those lessons are part of what now inform her first novel, "Hollywood Girls Club," just out from Crown Publishing as part of a hefty $1.5 million two-book deal - one that will bring Marr back to her hometown roots Tuesday for a reading and book signing at Bloomington's Barnes & Noble Booksellers (7 p.m.).

The novel is culled from Marr's own experiences as an ICM junior agent interfacing with some of the industry's biggest names, from Cameron to Susan (Sarandon) to Samuel (L. Jackson) to Halle (Berry). It chronicles the "Valley of the Dolls"-esque saga of four closely bonded female power players trying to get a blockbuster movie made.

Jessica is a (surprise) super-agent for a fictional talent agency. Celeste is an A-list actress with marital woes. Lydia is a producer with a profitable track record. Mary Anne is (surprise) a "naïve writer" from Middle America.

In the time-honored tradition of the Hollywood expose, there is a generous dose of sex, power-tripping and treachery along the way.

To that end, Publishers Weekly characterizes the novel as a look at "a quartet of shameless, shoe-crazy ladies bent on building fame and fortune through blockbusters … Marr knows her power-hungry vipers … and the girls' club turns out to be a lot like the boys' club, but cattier and more fun to read about."

Notes Marr: "One of my good friends said 'you're in all four characters, aren't you?'"

Is she?

"You're a wide-eyed writer from the Midwest … you were an agent like Jessica … you're working at producing a movie like Lydia … and, as for Celeste, the actress, doesn't every woman feel like a star when she goes to a movie premiere?"

Trust her: Maggie Marr has been to many a movie premiere.

Not too shabby a fate for someone who began her career as a lawyer and didn't even make the move to Los Angeles until six years ago this summer. In that short time, she's power-played at ICM, become a potentially best-selling author with a two-book deal out of the gate and embarked on TV/movie projects as both producer and writer.

"Around seventh grade, I decided I wanted to be an attorney," she recalls. "I had no idea I was going to be a writer, even though I won a couple creative writing contests. In the Midwest, nobody really works in entertainment as screenplay writer or director."

Marr's dream of a life in law never wavered, and she left town in 1987 to major in political science and history at the University of Kansas, followed by an intern stint in the Washington, D.C., office of Sen. Paul Simon.

After attending Loyola University's School of Law in Chicago, she became an attorney for Cook County, representing abused and neglected children in court. Then came a mid-'90s move to Denver, so that her husband, Chad Henderson, could pursue his environmental biology studies.

Marr found a position with the city as a prosecutor in domestic violence. But when Henderson decided environmental biology wasn't working out, he decided to become an actor. That decision eventually sent the couple packing again, this time to L.A.

"It was either that, or New York; we said, 'let's move to L.A., it's cheaper and warmer.' Some of our friends thought we were nuts; some thought it was a great idea." (The latter have had the last laugh, by the way.)

What about Marr's law degree?

"I figured talent agencies were the graduate schools of entertainment and a great way to get an overview of the industry," she says. After applying to two, she got offers from both in June 2001. She accepted ICM's offer and ended up where every talent agency newcomer starts: in the mailroom.

"Two other attorneys were pushing the carts with me," she notes of this not-unusual level of mailroom pedigree. "I pushed the cart for six months and then became an assistant to the best motion picture agent in the business." Eventually she rose to the level of agent. The odds of which happening to a woman are, she says, 1 in 4,000.

Her job entailed selling subsidiary rights for books and films to TV, "which meant reading a lot of books, which I still love to do. It was a pretty fun gig." Some of it began to rub off on her imagination.

"Characters started popping into my head and wouldn't leave me alone." Conversations and scenes - some inspired by her "rude" phone call eavesdropping, some by the famous stars and behaviors she had witnessed in direct dealings - began forming.

None of the characters, she says, are based on individual celebrities, a la, say, an infamous Hollywood tell-all like Jackie Collins' "Hollywood Wives." They are composites. And the prevailing expose has less to do with scandal and sordid tabloid antics than in exploring the parameters of friendship among women in power positions.

Though it was hatched in a different age, Marr declares Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" the standard-bearer for the Hollywood fiction genre. "She really hit it for her time. Women are more powerful now, but surprisingly, Hollywood hasn't changed much as far as how movies are made."

In what Marr suspects may be the first reversal of its kind in talent agency history, she went from ICM agent (a position she left) to ICM client after her first four chapters were submitted to a "good friend" in the book department of the agency's New York office. She didn't identify the author. But the friend soon outted her: "You wrote this, didn't you?"

The friend liked what she read, offered an advance and, many more chapters later, the rest is history, with a contracted sequel, "Secrets of the Hollywood Girls Club," due next year.

Ramping up her activity, Marr has also turned movie co-producer, with two films - "King of Pipers," starring Gabriel Byrne, and "Paddeyville," directed by actor Eric Stoltz - in preparation. And she's written a script for a TV series pilot called "Daughters," another female-bonding chronicle.

As for her talent agent days, they are over for good, Marr says.

She's having way too much fun on the other side of the fence.

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At a glance

What: Author Maggie Marr in book signing

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 1701 E. Empire St., Bloomington

Cost: Free

Information number: (309) 662-1506

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The story

In Hollywood, four women join forces and friendships to remain on the A-list. They are:

• Jessica, the uber-agent with hot, demanding clients and an ice-cold fiancé

• Celeste, the "It" actress whose action-flick producer husband has just dumped her for a fresh-faced newcomer;

• Lydia, the producer with the magic touch, whose current pet project is falling apart;

• Mary Anne, a naïve writer from Minnesota plucked from obscurity to polish Lydia's script.

Together, the quartet fights to make the film a box-office hit.

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The clients

Among the clients Maggie Marr came to know and work with as a junior agent with the powerful ICM Agency in Hollywood are:

• Cameron Diaz

• Halle Berry

• Susan Sarandon

• Samuel L. Jackson

• Kate Beckinsale

• Patti LaBelle

• Terrence Howard

• Brittany Murphy

The projects

Among the movie projects that Marr was associated with during her ICM tenure:

• "The Wedding Crashers"

• "Charlie's Angels"

• "Meet the Parents"

• "Meet the Fockers"

• "Little Black Book"

• "Shopgirl"

• "Underworld 1 & 2"

• "Austin Powers in Goldmember"