GRAMMER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY DOESN'T SPELL SALES SUCCESS.

Byline: Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

It's been a very cold season for sales of star autobiographies - and the word among literary circles is that publishers are now starting to be more cautious about contracting for celebrity memoirs.

Kelsey Grammer's recent "So Far" has been, in the eyes of one publishing executive, "a terrible disappointment in the book business. It just never took off." The insider added, "Kelsey's fellow comics - Ellen DeGeneres, Paul Reiser, Jerry Seinfeld and Tim Allen - have all scored best sellers, but theirs were comedy books. Kelsey's was the grim, dark story of his life, and it appears that while people might like his TV character on 'Frasier,' they don't care that much about him."

Mary Tyler Moore's recent memoirs sold better than Grammer's and so did Loni Anderson's - but not that much better. The public has been reacting as if it simply knows as much about celebrities' lives as it cares to know - with their stories having been the fodder for gossip headlines for years.

There's also the fact that, like the movie and the music businesses today, the book business has been finding consumers highly selective about what they'll buy. Says one analyst, "People are keeping their money in their pockets until they feel there's something they have to have."

Born to run: Kate Jackson - who underwent successful surgery last year to correct a congenital heart defect - might well be taking part in the famed Iditarod, Alaska's grueling, 1,100-mile dogsled race.

Kate plays a musher in the Jan. 9 CBS mystery drama, "Cold Blooded Murder."

"You haven't lived until you've gone flying up and down hills in the woods at night behind 15 dogs full out," she said.

Iditarod musher Kate Persons, who trained the actress for the TV movie, has invited Jackson to ride Persons' second sled in the March dogsled race. The one-time "Charlie's Angels" star is talking about heading to Alaska in February for a month's training. "I've got to. I'm not going to make an idiot out of myself falling off in front of the world."

She reported that Persons wants her to make a practice run "from Nome to White Mountain, Alaska, about a hundred miles away, then back."

"Murder" is Jackson's second film since the surgery. She said, "I choose things that call for lots of physical stuff. Rather than talk about myself and how good I feel, I'm much better at showing anybody who might be facing a tough time that you can fight hard, get it together and come back. ... A picture says a thousand words."

Unsinkable again: Debbie Reynolds, who hasn't been at the forefront of movie star names for decades, is already getting some great buzz for her performance as Albert Brooks' mom in "Mother" - though the film, written and directed by Brooks, just started shooting last month.

Brooks' latest, which also has Lisa Kudrow of "Friends" and Rob Morrow of "Northern Exposure" in the cast, has to do with a man's complicated relationship with his mother. The offbeat filmmaker reportedly first tried to get Nancy Reagan to star.