UP IN HER PENTHOUSE TOWER on the 37th floor of the Sherry-Netherlands Hotel, the girl in the mini-dress balanced a glass of liquor (something red and daring swimming in a room-service glass) in one hand and a cigarette curling purple smoke into the air-conditioned air in the other. It was Hayley Mills, but you had to look twice to beleive it. There was a time (it really wasn't that long ago) when you could get a green sour-apple grimace out of even your very best friend by simply mentioning the name. A teen-age Melanie Weeks. Sweet. Too sweet. More peppermint-candy sweetness than anyone over the age of fourteen could stand without the aid of an Excedrin.

Well, there's a new Hayley Mills now. Freckles and chocolate-ice-cream smudges have long since been replaced by mascara and hot-pink lipstick. Hayley is a woman now. Just a tiny slip of a thing, really, but a full-fledged woman all the same. Twenty-one years old and ready to meet the world on her own terms. The last time she hit New York she came to plug a gushy little Walt Disney family film under the dictatorial aegis of a very stern father (John Mills) and a watchful mother (writer Mary Hayley Bell), who screened everyone before they entered the room and quickly showed them the door when the questions got too close for comfort. "Do you smoke?" or "Do you wear a bra?" Like that.

This time Hayley was back, more Sandra Dee than Shirley Temple, and ready with the answers. Snugly nestled in a suite with very grown-up gold-and-white-stripe wallpaper to plug a new film, The Family Way, in which she plays a married woman desperately trying to aid her impotent husband in the clumsy newness of sexual intercourse. She smokes. She drinks. She wears nightgowns. She even has a nude scene standing in a bathtub, and the censors are not happy. (In England, the film has become the Number One box-office smash in spite of an "Adults Only" rating and in America, where censorship is almost as silly, it has met head on with similar seal-of-approval problems, only recently winning a "Morally Unfit for Children" rating.) To top that off, Hayley was not living in the Sherry-Netherlands with her family, but with her new boyfriend, Roy Boulting, a much-married, 54-year-old British producer who, with his twin brother, John, directed her in Family Way. No bleached-blonde beach boys with ho-daddy haircuts for this girl. "Goodness, some people are so old-fashioned, aren't they?" she says if you ask her about it.

Hayley answered the door and led the way up an ornate brass staircase past walls of framed playing cards, like the set of a Peter Sellers movie ("Very flush, isn't it?" she giggled gaily), to one of the two bedrooms, apologizing because she and Boulting were "a little mixed up with the appointment schedule" and would I mind waiting a few minutes until they could get rid of "these boring people" in the living room. Through the bedroom her transistor radio tinkled merrily above a floppy pink hat and a pair of high heels she had kicked on the floor. The wait was brief. From downstairs, a whistle from Roy. The visitors had gone and the coast was clear. Settling down on the sofa next to him, Hayley started right in about the nude scene. "Do you honestly think people will come just to see Hayley Mills in the raw? How awful. Quite honestly, that scene does not warrant all the publicity. It is a very integral part of the film and there is nothing dirty-minded people can get a kick from. I didn't relish the idea at first - the bathtub was only the size of this coffee table - and it was also very cold. We filmed in the winter. Every day I dreaded the moment when I would have to take off my dressing gown for that scene. The thing that unnerved me most was this man on top of the set who just sat there directly above me the entire time working a crossword puzzle. Anyway, after the initial wetting I didn't mind. The whole thing was handled with great taste by my director here."

She punched Roy on the arm with her fist. "Ha ha," said Boulting, a virile guy with a beanbag face and a Mod haircut who doesn't look anything like fifty-four years old and who bounces about with more vigor than most of the syrup-lidded Muscle Beach movie idols Hayley's own age.

"Do you know what he made me do?" asked Hayley, tickling Roy in the ribs under his starched white Carnaby Street shirt. "He made me rehearse in the tub without any water."

"Ha ha," said Roy, grinning fiendishly.

"Anyway," continued Hayley, "I treated it like I was doing a love scene. The only difference between a love scene and a nude scene is that in a love scene you have to worry where the noses go and in a nude scene you worry about where the fanny goes."

They blew smoke rings, grabbed each other like bear cubs, lost in the hilarity of Hayley's pun, and when the smoke cleared, she said, "It's not a sex film. Besides, kids today know more about sex at the age of eight than their parents do. Especially now, with sex education taught in school, kids should be told the facts of life in a straightforward, truthful way. Sex isn't a dirty subject, is it, Roy?"

"Ha ha," said Roy.

"This," pointed Hayley, "is the first time I've ever played a married woman. Any woman, for that matter. I signed with Walt Disney when I was thirteen to do five pictures. I enjoyed working for him, but those films were very restricting. Conveyor-belt jobs. So goody-good, you know? And there was this image I created which was hideous. I wasn't supposed to be seen drinking or buying cigarettes or smoking in public. The reasoning was that the audiences for the Disney films were very young, and if they saw me smoking eight cigars a day, why shouldn't they? So I'd spend three months in Hollywood, then go back to England and do a quality film like Chalk Garden or Whistle Down the Wind so people wouldn't say 'Oh, Hayley Mills, Christ!' Family Way isn't the first good film I've done. Trouble is, all the good ones I've made are the ones nobody ever heard of. All this talk about me growing up is a surprise to everyone but me. I've had my own apartment in London for a year now. Oh sure, I led a pretty sheltered life as a child, but it was for my own sake. There was always a member of the family along on trips if I needed help. But in the long run, I feel it was bad for me. I had to break away, make my own mistakes, learn to have confidence in myself."

Hayley's older sister, actress Juliet Mills, was the first to urge her out of the nest. "Stand on your own two feet," she said. When her Disney contract expired, Hayley took a flat with her eighteen-year-old brother Jonathan, who works in a London film studio. The family was outraged. Then Hayley's first new film under her new flag of independence turned out to be Family Way and unknown to them both, her costar turned out to be her own father, who stood by on the set watching austerely while his director fell in love with his daughter. "I know he knew instinctively what was going on, because he was always making funny remarks which made me angry," says Hayley.

"All directed at me," added Roy. "Don't ask me why I fell in love with a little girl the same age as my own children. Ask her how she could fall in love with a miserable, ugly mugger like me. I'm fifty-four years old with a wife who still has not divorced me and a large number of children." How many? "Too many. When we met, Hayley was not even twenty-one yet. Our relationship was very formal during the film. Wasn't it, darling?"

Hayley threw her blonde curls back and giggled. "To all intents and purposes."

"I always said I would never become emotionally involved with an actress, but the theory proved impossible in actual practice. Now people want to know if we'll marry. Of course we will, but in England if you make a statement like that to the press they will hold up your divorce forever. Mine is an ugly business that has been going on for several years. It was supposed to be final May 23, now they've lifted it again for 'further evidence.' So I don't know when we'll be free to marry."

Annoyed by the subject, Hayley stuck out her tongue, made a green face, and darted up the stairs looking a bit like Lady Jane Grey in a mini-skirt on her final lap to the Tower of London. When she was gone, Boulting added: "When this thing began to get serious, I asked her, 'Hayley, are you looking for a father image?' She said, 'Hell no, I have a father with a strong enough image as it is, and I don't need another.' I don't want her to leave the guidance of her parents to be guided by someone else. That would be exchanging one childhood for another, wouldn't it? Anyway, isn't that a middle-class myth about marrying when you are both young so you can discover beautiful things together as beautiful youths? I've been married three times. The first time my wife and I were twenty-two, completely ignorent, incompetent, and incapable of conducting a thoughtful relationship. It's a hoax perpetrated against the youth of today, like the one about beautiful families - peel away the layers of most big families and you'll find they all hate each other."

Hayley popped back into the room. "I heard that. My family is very happy."

"Nonsense. It's a professional family with an image that is only just now beginning to lose its force. It's been a long time a-dying."

"Darr-lingg," hissed Hayley, eyes narrowing beneath black eyeliner. "Our work was our lives."

"See what I mean?" said Roy. "I think the Redgraves are much healthier. All individuals. They never were concerned with presenting an image."

"Well, I grew up that way. What happened to us just happened. I can't remember ever living like a child. We had tea with Dad in his caravan on the set of Great Expectations and followed him around on tour. He'd be onstage doing Shakespeare and Mother would be off somewhere writing a book and the three of us kids would sleep in the matinee boxes on Nanny's day off. I was no more than six. I never had friends my own age, only my parents' friends. I never really liked boys my own age because they bored me. Still do. Oh, there was one character, but that was more of a brother-sister relationship. When I met Roy, I never considered age. I tried to force myself away from the idea of love, but that was idiotic. I tried hard. Went to Africa. No good. Came back to London, saw him again. Went to France. It was something I could not deny and after a while I said, 'Why should I?' Since I met Mr. B here, I've-"

"-stopped biting your nails," finished Roy.

"Right. A nasty sight that was. Now I want to go under hypnosis to stop smoking, but I'm afraid the neurosis would manifest itself in some other way worse than the smoking. I believe in hypnosis and also astrology. It's a very legitimate science. I don't follow rigidly what it says in the paper every day, but I've learned a lot about the character of people born under certain signs. I'm Aries, Roy's Scorpio. The news is very bad there. Still, my father is Pisces and Mother is Aquarius and they're not supposed to get on either."

"They don't," said Roy.

"Shut up."

It was almost time for them to dress for the swank cocktail party Warner Brothers had arranged to introduce them to the press. "Christ, what a bore," said Hayley. "You never get used to it. I just finished a new film in Singapore - a Noel Coward play called Pretty Polly about a mousy girl who has a torrid affair in the orient. No nude scenes, but it's pretty sexy. Now I think I must turn to the stage and get away from movies for a while. I'm the only member of my family who has no stage experience. I played an angel on top of the Christmas tree once and also a bee. But I want to play an evil bitch in something. Can you see me as an evil bitch, Roy?"

"Ha ha," said Boulting, patting the remarkable child-woman on the fanny as they headed up the stairs to take their baths and meet the public.

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