LEAD: In a funny sort of way, Reuben Mark is suffering from too much success.

Colgate's Next Trick: Controlling the Chaos

LEAD: A RENTAL complex in this incorporated ''city within a city'' in Denver is trying to attract single parents and small families by offering child-care and self-help money-saving services.

For Singles, With Children

LEAD: LONG ISLANDERS searching for peace, quiet and open space increasingly are finding those features in a place little thought of as a recreational center: their local cemeteries.

Parklike Cemeteries Used For Leisure-Time Pursuits

LEAD: A year after his death, the recurring image I associate with Raymond Carver is one of people leaning toward him, working very hard at the act of listening. He mumbled. T. S. Eliot once described Ezra Pound, qua mentor, as ''a man trying to convey to a very deaf person the fact that the house is on fire.

RAYMOND CARVER: A STILL, SMALL VOICE

LEAD: There was new danger but also new hope for hostages in Lebanon last week. The captors' complex motives make the outcome highly unpredictable. The Week in Review, section 4.

The Hostages: Fear and Hope

LEAD: When Frank Viola joined the Mets in their locker room in Busch Stadium, St. Louis, last Tuesday afternoon, he and Ron Darling shook hands and smiled and exchanged pleasantries. But they didn't talk about ''the game.'' They didn't have to; it's been there, in the records and in their memories ever since they pitched in it against each other and made college baseball history.

Unspoken Reunion

LEAD: Despite a pledge during his Senate confirmation hearings to ''sever'' his ties to his former New York law firm, Samuel R. Pierce Jr. regularly did personal favors for his former colleagues and interceded with subordinates in the Department of Housing and Urban Development on their behalf, documents from his office files show.

Pierce Helped His Old Law Firm On H.U.D. Requests, Files Show

LEAD: Scarlett O'Hara, weeping at the bottom of her grand, gauche staircase, vows, ''I'll find a way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day!'' Margaret Mitchell's brilliant open ending has kept audiences arguing about Scarlett's resourcefulness for more than 50 years. But if ''Gone With the Wind'' had first appeared in the sequel-mad summer of 1989, Scarlett's famous final line would hold the sure promise of ''Gone With the Wind II.

Twice-Told Tales Can Cast a Spell

LEAD: It is not entirely happen-stance that photographs are at the center of the stormy political dispute brought on by indirect Federal support of works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Much more than paintings, sculptures, plays, novels and poems, camera images seem to bring the world directly to our doorstep.

Blaming the Medium for Its Message

LEAD: Iran and a pro-Iranian group in Lebanon today rebuffed overtures from the United States and Israel aimed at arranging the release of hostages, but Administration officials said the setback did not foreclose further diplomatic efforts.

IRAN AND CAPTORS DELIVER REBUFFS ON THE HOSTAGES

LEAD: CUSTOMERS of the Long Island Lighting Company are flocking to join a residential energy cooperative that allows the utility to turn off central air-conditioners, pool pumps and electric water heaters for limited periods during summer hot spells in exchange for cash rebates.

Lilco Conservation Plan a Hit

LEAD: At least four workers who complained about safety and environmental problems at four military nuclear plants run for the Government by private contractors say they were ordered by their superiors to see psychiatrists or psychologists.

4 Say Atom Industry Ordered Counseling And Harrassed Them

LEAD: Darryl Strawberry had not been in the starting lineup, and when the game was over last night, he was nowhere to be found in the clubhouse. But Strawberry, on a night he apparently wanted to be inconspicuous, had been forced to make one appearance on the night.

Mets Foil Expos Again

LEAD: At Synopsys, a small start-up company here in the heart of the Silicon Valley, Cindy Collart sits before a desktop work station. On her screen is a file written in familiar programming language.

Silicon Valley's Design Renaissance

LEAD:  THE CONTROL OF NATURE  By John McPhee.  Illustrated. 272 pp. New York:  Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $17.95.

A WAR AGAINST THE WORLD

LEAD: The New York City Housing Authority, the world's largest municipally owned and operated housing agency, is looking for a new director of design and capital improvement, which is considered one of the city's most demanding positions. The authority owns 318 projects of 178,000 apartments housing 570,000 people.

POSTINGS: Wanted by New York; Design Dir., 80K

LEAD: Late Monday afternoon, with one American hostage reported dead and another facing death, President Bush sat at a small wooden desk with a typewriter in the study tucked behind the Oval Office. He had rushed back from Chicago, canceling stops in Las Vegas and Oklahoma City and waving off suggestions from some advisers that the action might give the Lebanese extremists the impression that they could manipulate the United States Government.

Bush in a Crisis: Casting the Widest Net

LEAD: THE last time Joe Delmerico rode to a fire on Dobbs Ferry's Resolute Hook and Ladder, it was 1978. The company had been called to a spectacular blaze that gutted an Irvington landmark, an 8O-room cut-stone castle, paneled in oak and teak and built in l927.

A Volunteer Fireman, 91, Still Passes Muster

LEAD: Crack has turned emergency medicine at Highland General Hospital here into a nightmare, a scene of chaos and despair that is crushing the spirits of all who encounter it.

Urban Emergency Rooms: A Cocaine Nightmare

LEAD: Anyone who thinks that the classical music business rewards musicians on the basis of talent alone should contemplate the case of Eugene Fodor.

From Tchaikovsky to Heroin: A Brilliant Violinist's Decline

LEAD: ISRAEL'S kidnapping of a fundamentalist Shiite Muslim cleric nine days ago raised the curtain on a week of new horror and suspense over the fate of hostages in Lebanon. It started with a videotape of a hanged man that a terrorist group said was an American officer and with threats to kill more hostages.

Hostages Are the Victims Of Chaos as Well as Rage

LEAD: The Commerce Department reported that sales of new homes rose by 5.5 percent in June, the third consecutive monthly increase. The increase came after a sluggish first part of the year when sales fell to their lowest level since the 1981-82 recession. Seasonally adjusted, annual sales of new homes rose to 670,000 units, roughly the same as 1988.

Prospects; Housing vs. the Economy

LEAD: WITH increasing scientific evidence that exhaust from diesel-powered vehicles causes serious illness, including cancer, lawmakers and environmentalists are pressing the state to reverse its longstanding policy of not testing diesel trucks and cars for potentially hazardous levels of emissions.

State Urged to Test Diesel Trucks For Emissions

LEAD: The ball rose toward the afternoon sky today and then dropped quickly into Mel Hall's glove. There was, at that precise moment, a sense that the Yankees were going to crumble again, that their long, hot summer had reached another low.

Phelps And Hall Lift Yanks

LEAD: ''What do you mean Felix Bloch might not be guilty - I saw him do it on television.'' The conversation took place at the Denver airport, and it was with a top editor of a major metropolitan newspaper. My friend, the editor, had heard the ABC News correspondent John McWethy report that the United States diplomat Felix S.

August 6, 1989

Headlines from August 6, 1989

Colgate's Next Trick: Controlling the Chaos

For Singles, With Children

Parklike Cemeteries Used For Leisure-Time Pursuits

RAYMOND CARVER: A STILL, SMALL VOICE

The Hostages: Fear and Hope

Billboard 200

Batman (Soundtrack)

The Raw & The Cooked

Hangin' Tough

Repeat Offender

Full Moon Fever

Historical Context for August 6, 1989