Heidi Copes With Life in Media Fishbowl : Celebrity: Hemmed in at home, the alleged madam can’t escape the unwanted attention.

We are inside Ft. Heidi, where the siege has entered Day 5. TV news choppers are buzzing the pool again. The whup-whupping is so deafening that the alleged madam to the stars has to shout, even within the confines of her elegant living room.

“God, whatever mistakes I’ve made, I certainly didn’t expect my life to turn out this way,” Heidi Fleiss yells and moans at the same time. “Did you see what they did to me on TV? They stuck their cameras in the window and shot pictures of me running away from the door, and then they ran it back and forth in slow motion, like I was a serial murderer!”

It’s been a big week for the 27-year-old Fleiss, and it hasn’t been an easy one. Since Sunday’s front-page allegations that she had a celebrity clientele, she has become a celebrity herself.

Her four-line phone has chirped relentlessly. Paparazzi have kept vigil outside the gate. She complains that her ex-boyfriend, the director, falsely accused her on television of being a drug user. Then, to her jubilation, the ex-boyfriend was himself arrested for alleged pandering--the result, police said, of running his own call girl ring.

Fleiss’ friends say she has a constitution of solid steel, but the onslaught has been disorienting, even for her. For most of the week, she has been holed up in her Benedict Canyon home, with little diversion from her plight.

“I’ll kill myself before I go to jail,” she announced on Tuesday, only to spend Wednesday planning her toilette for her court appearance next week. She had to go to the dry cleaners, get a haircut and facial, do her nails and decide whether to bring an entourage.

“If I wanted,” she said with a laugh, “I could have 50 girls there in hats that said ‘Heidi Ho’! But I dunno--do you think that’d be appropriate?”

Even without the publicity, it would be hard for Fleiss to leave her $1.6-million house. After her June 9 arrest, every foray she made caused a minor scene. She has enemies--women friends of her ex-boyfriend-turned-nemesis, director Ivan Nagy, and boyfriends of women alleged to have been Fleiss’ employees. They follow her around at nightclubs and exchange ugly words, she says. They flick cigarette ashes on her and “accidentally” toss champagne in her hair.

Last month at the Monkey Bar, she got into a fistfight with a woman who sat in the next booth and taunted her until Fleiss stood, threw both arms up in the air and announced to a roomful of diners: “That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I am an alleged madam--and that is a $25 whore!” Furious, the woman threw a glass of cognac on Fleiss’ designer blazer and the 115-pound Fleiss pasted her with a right hook.

But her newfound celebrity has compounded her isolation a hundredfold. The media calls have been so frequent that she has stopped answering her phone and won’t go near her front door. Her most famous friends are avoiding her, confiding that their careers and reputations are at stake. And matters worsened, she says, after she lost her temper with a reporter from Variety and announced in a fit of pique that she would tell all for $1 million.

She says now that she regrets the statement--indeed, for the record, she has nothing to divulge, except the name and number of her lawyer, Anthony Brooklier.

It may be too late, however, for discretion. For weeks after her arrest, someone apparently clandestinely taped her telephone calls. Women who say they have worked for Fleiss have shown reporters mementos they say are from alleged johns, ranging from thank you notes on personal stationery to Polaroids to checks made out to cash.

Amid the cross-fire, a few close friends have rallied around. Victoria Sellers, the actress daughter of the late comedian Peter Sellers, got Fleiss to leave the house for a midweek lunch. They got takeout from trendy Chin Chin on Sunset Boulevard, arriving just as the news crews were winding up their man-in-the-street segment on the Heidi buzz.

Fleiss said they ducked out in time, but back at her house, Sellers’ Range Rover was blocked by a gauntlet of tabloid reporters and cameramen. Sellers cracked one tinted window and taunted them.

“You wanna meet Heidi?”

“Yeah,” they cried, rushing the vehicle.

“Ten grand,” Sellers baited them, then gunned the engine, calling, “ Not! “

But Fleiss’ family is another matter. The daughter of a prominent Los Feliz pediatrician and an elementary schoolteacher, Fleiss is aware of the pain she has caused her loved ones, she says. Bad enough that she was charged Thursday with felony pimping and pandering and a narcotics count. To top it off, Nagy was on TV day after day asserting--falsely, she says--that years of substance abuse have addled her mind.

“I saw my dad the other day and he said, ‘Heidi, is it true? And did you do all those drugs?’ ” Fleiss said. She didn’t answer the first part of the question, and denied the second, but followed it up with a joke: “I said, ‘Dad, with the kind of pressure I’ve been under, who wouldn’t need a Valium at night?’ ”

To pass the time, she bedevils her enemies. On Monday, she routed all callers--scores of them, from Connie Chung’s producer to the New York Daily News--to the phone of an unsuspecting man who made life difficult last week for a girlfriend of hers. Tuesday, she says, she sent Nagy a hate fax. Wednesday and Thursday were spent cranking out copies of a taped conversation that she said contains incriminating dialogues about one of her antagonists.

“This baby’s going platinum!” she chortled, romping across her living room in Fred Segal sweats and a Cartier watch, popping another copy out of the tape deck atop her big screen TV and setting it aside for distribution to the media.

Moments later, however, she was down again. For there she was on the evening news with Nagy--the man who, she says, first introduced her to the Beverly Hills madam and drew her into the seedy side of L.A.

Fleiss slumped into her big taupe love seat, her green eyes momentarily dulled, her frail wrists crossed in her lap.

“Oh, my God, this is so sleazy and gross,” she murmured. “They’re making it look like I’m at the same level as Ivan.”

The life went out of her. Then and there, she made a decision: She would unplug the phone and turn in early again.

* HOLLYWOOD REACTION: Director’s arrest jolts entertainment community. B1