November 7, 1982

NOW that the Marriott Corporation has bowed out, the search is on for someone to manage Playland, the financially troubled county amusement park in Rye, until its future is decided. Plans for next summer remain uncertain as the county, with Marriott's help, begins a recruiting drive among amusement-park professionals to take over management ''on a one-year contract basis'' while a controversial draft master plan is readied for public hearings and legislative approval. Last week, County Executive Alfred B. DelBello announced that Marriott's management role would cease with the expiration of its two-year contract on Dec. 31. The decision, Mr. DelBello said, was ''mutual.''

Skeptics, be quiet. George Washington not only slept at the Roe Tavern in East Setauket, L.I., on April 22, 1790, he even gave it a review.

The United States, seeking to avoid a political rift in the Atlantic alliance, has dropped its refusal to resume negotiations in Madrid on East-West cooperation. The Reagan Administration had declined to resume the Madrid talks with the Soviet Union because of the continuing crackdown in Poland. But the Americans have now won allied consent to make any East-West accord conditional on the Russians accepting and living up to such measures as allowing free trade unions and ending radio jamming. A senior Administration official said today that the American willingness to resume work on a final Madrid document was more tactical than substantive. He said it was inconceivable to the Administration that the Russians would accept the terms that would be laid down by the NATO alliance, or that any document would be approved.

KEEPING FAITH Memoirs of a President. By Jimmy Carter. Illustrated. 622 pp. New York: Bantam Books. $22.50. Jimmy Carter's term as President was essentially an interregnum, a bridge that carried the country from the end of its preoccupation with Watergate to the advent of the Reagan revolution. The man from Georgia arrived in Washington in January 1977, an out-sider who had confounded the political odds by getting elected in the first place. He left it four years later, still largely an outsider, after a stunning electoral defeat in which he lost 44 of 50 states. ''Keeping Faith,'' his personal account of those four years, is vintage Jimmy Carter, a mirror, in fact, of its author: honest, sincere, intelligent, dry, humorless and impersonal. There is little introspection in its pages, even less analysis of why and how things happened.

When a Federal agency tried to end rent stabilization at the Lincoln Towers complex in Manhattan about five years ago, it reckoned without the influence of Shirley Quill. The president of the Towers Tenants Association, she had been a labor organizer before she met her husband, Michael J. Quill, the late president of the Transport Workers Union. Mrs. Quill responded to the Federal threat by organizing an intensive lobbying campaign and an outdoor rally of the Towers' 9,000 tenants.