FOR TALIA SHIRE, DATING IS HER APOCALYPSE NOW

People  ::  7/23/79

One evening last month Talia Shire put on a robe, plopped her pajama-clad 3-year-old into her car and cruised the theater district near her Beverly Hills home. When Matthew asked what was going on, Talia told him, "We're driving around to see if there are any lines at Mommy's films. If there are, I can buy you more toys." 

Now, she sighs happily, "I guess I'm going to be buying him more toys." Her pregnancy in her two current smash movies was happenstance - in Prophecy she carries a possible monster and in Rocky II a potential one, an incredibly hirsute Rocky Jr. - but Shire, 34, is all for productivity. 

"I'm nuts about being a mother. I would love to have another child - and soon," she says. There's just one problem. Like Stallone's, her marriage is taking the count; she and composer David (All the President's Men) Shire separated last July. Back-to-back Oscar nominations for her role in big brother Frances Coppola's Godfather II and as Rocky's mousy Adrian enabled her to hold her own in a showbiz family but made for other stresses. 

After studio make-believe "your personal life can break down unless you have marks on the floor to guide you," she finds. "At home there are no marks." Talia plunged into work "to avoid the pain." 

She finished a TV movie, Daddy, I Don't Like it Like This, with Burt Young, her brother in Rocky. (Though his role may be phasing down in the trilogy, Burt credits Sly with "raising my standard of living about 90 percent.") And this spring Talia was also seen in Old Boyfriends with John Belushi. This fall comes "my Apocalypse Now", an untitled work about a woman's self-discovery. Shooting it "was hard for me emotionally," she says. "But you learn to be a pro, to wash your hair and go to the set. If your heart is broken, you let that happen in front of the camera. I was falling apart." 

Since moving into a rented home, her personal life is slowly coming together. "I am only now starting to have a breather," she says. "I was turning Matthew into the man in my life." Though she palled around with Prophecy director John Frankenheimer, she claims "there is no relationship" and sees several men casually. "I'm in that strange new place, the dating ritual: 'Do I pick you up, or will you pick me up?'" she winces. "I am a package deal, a woman with a child. That's a good barometer, a test of the self-indulgent man." 

With a hot career, she can afford to be choosy. "I am more self-reliant than ever before," says Talia.