NEWT, THE MULTIMEDIA EVENT

IT'S JUST AS WELL SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH HASN'T given up his day job. His brief life as an author has been one setback after another. First he saw his $4.5 million advance drop to one buck to avoid the appearance of impropriety, though his agent is still due her $675,000 commission from his royalties. And now, thanks to last week's warning from the House ethics committee,he has to pay for the book tour out of his own pocket.

If it weren't for the fact that Gingrich stands to become a multimillionaire in the long run, you would feel sorry for the guy. After all, the best thing about a book tour is suites in nice hotels with unlimited room service, the $5 Coke on a silver tray that drops down from publishing heaven. On HarperCollins' tab (backed by an advertising, marketing and promotion budget of $500,000), Gingrich was looking at the Four Seasons and the Ritz Carlton, according to publicist Steve Sorrentino. On his own nickel, the Speaker may be using up his frequent-flyer miles and wolfing down Big Macs. "Newt isn't rich," says Jim Baen, the nonrich publisher of Gingrich's novel 1945, who should not be confused with the very rich publisher of Gingrich's nonfiction title To Renew America, Rupert Murdoch. Says Baen: "He should flaunt his poverty and stay at Motel 6."

Indeed, the Speaker is not wealthy by congressional standards. (According to his financial-disclosure statement released last month, Gingrich's assets are worth somewhere between $84,000 and $373,000.) But he is certainly moving quickly to become so. Gingrich is the first member of Congress, if not the first author, to have a fiction and a nonfiction book published within days of each other. Meanwhile, he has an agent shopping 1945 around Hollywood, where screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct) facetiously rejected it as having too much of the loveless sex and mindless violence that Bob Dole deplores.

When he's not getting rich, he's becoming ever more famous. There's Gingrich the Small-Screen Star, who appeared regularly on National Empowerment Television; and Gingrich the after-dinner toastmaster, who can command $50,000 a plate at a fund raiser; as well as Gingrich the erstwhile college professor. If he doesn't get a grip, we may soon have Newt the Fragrance as well as coverage of Congress on a pay-per-view basis.

Like Dr. Johnson's dog walking on its hind legs, it's not that Gingrich does all these things well; it's that he does them at all. Publisher Baen doesn't pretend that Gingrich wrote the novel his name is on, in the sense we understand writing, but he did attend three meetings. "Newt provided the plot and some of the characters, and his co-author wrote a first draft, and then they flopped disks back and forth," says Baen. That may be how the "pouting sex kitten," who twines her fingers in the chest hairs of the main character before moving along to another crucial body part, made it into the final version.