BACK IN HIGH SCHOOL, all the world was divided into those who were virgins and those who were not. My friends and I, all of whom fitted somewhat ambivalently into the former category, were too sophisticated to admit seriously that we thought you were different once you'd done it, but that's what we thought. There was a general consensus as to who had and who hadn't: you could tell. And if one of our group had crossed the line, I think a wave of confused emotions would have swept us all--a mixture of jealousy, awe and alienation. We were saving ourselves, sub-consciously, not for marriage but for college.

Once we got there, we were all eager to shed our virginity like an embarrassing training bra that had grown too tight. For some of us it took two years, although one of my friends whispered the news to me triumphantly as soon as I walked in the door to her room freshman week. Another friend got herself very deliberately drunk and deflowered in the course of one afternoon after a particularly grueling math exam. To this day she refers to the experience as "a clinical procedure." But I think in each case the overwhelming emotion was relief, tinged with a vague disappointment: we had finally grappled our way out of the cocoon, but only to discover that we were still caterpillars.

JUDGING FROM the experiences of the 28 celebrities who were interviewed for The First Time, relief and disappointment are not uncommon reactions. "My God, is this it?" Nora Ephron thought to herself after losing her virginity in a Harvard dormitory. "Is this what I've been going through all this torment about?" And Clifford Irving's first thought after his first time was, "That was lousy. I've got to fuck someone else." Perhaps it's just one of the facts of life that sexual initiation is a drag. Nevertheless, the subject continues to hold a certain fascination, whose power can be measured by the number of people who are probably going to read this book.

A lot of them are probably going to be disappointed. Those who expect pornorgraphy are certainly in for a let down, and those who anticipate belly laughs will be only slightly more satisfied. Jack Lemmon's misadventure in a Harvard Square parking lot is good for a prolonged giggle (the attendant was approaching with a flashlight and Lemmon said, "Someone's coming," to which the woman replied, "Not yet"), but the net effect of these monologues is unmistakably depressing.

They're all depressing for different reasons, though, reflecting the impressive diversity of the 28 people interviewed. Al Capp is depressing because he says things like, "But my God, even the nice girls were cretins, and the ones who weren't were cretins and nasty too." Florynce Kennedy, the black feminist lawyer, is depressing because her life seems to have been so devoid of affection--"To me sex is like an interruption of my life and I guess it always has been." And Art Buchwald is depressing even when he's funny: "I put women on a pedestal, but fundamentally I was very hostile to them. I was trying to get even with my mother. Tying to get even with your dead mother is one of the futile drives. There's no payoff."

In their probing--some might say prying--into the childhood and adolescence of these people, the authors have left no stone unturned, and pain, guilt and neurosis come crawling out at every step. The interviews are by no means confined to the recounting of a first experience, which in fact tends to get lost in everything that came before and after. People talk about their first kiss, their last marriage, what they found out when they were in analysis, their parents, masturbation, and their attitudes towards the opposite sex in general.

What you end up with are a few stunning, even shocking anecdotes and a lot of trivia, some of it boring and some of it mildly interesting. The shocking anecdotes are sometimes a little difficult to take without a grain of salt, but most of them are all the more shocking because they're believable. Maya Angelou, the writer and poet, was raped by her mother's boyfriend at the age of seven, an experience which obviously left something of a scar. Liberace says he "thinks he was raped" at the age of 13 by "a big chesty broad who sang blues songs," and Lou Rawls was practically raped at the same age by an obese woman who was a member of the church where Rawls was singing: "I think I balled a wrinkle, she was so fat," he says.

THAT MAKES the trivia interesting is that it often tells you quite a bit about the era and the social milieu in which the person grew up, like a trip backwards in time and vertically in class. And since the celebrities are ordered alphabetically, you get some pretty stranged juxtapositions. One minute you're at the White House with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who always thought kissing was "a disgusting habit" and seems fairly contemptuous of the whole subject and the next minute you're in Butcher Hollow, Ky., with Loretta Lynn, who got married at the age of 13 knowing so little about sex that by the time she was 17 she had four children and "didn't even know what was causing them."

So there's something more to this book than plain old American voyeurism, although that's a large part of its attraction. The Kinsey Report it's not but it isn't just People magazine, either. Losing one's virginity is seldom either a pleasurable experience or a significant demarcation line, but it usually is one of the most important events in a person's life. The people who talk about themselves--and they are, in most cases, intrinsically pretty interesting--but also about relations between the sexes in general. Even making allowances for the unrepresentative nature of the sample, it seems pretty safe to generalize that most people, both men and women, get at least as much pain out of sex as pleasure.