Ty Cobb's daughter was trying to control her temper. She was not happy with "Cobb," the film about her father, released last Friday. She was not happy with the film's director, Ron Shelton, who, she said, never contacted anyone in the Cobb family. She was not happy with "Cobb: A Biography," the book on which the film is based. And she was definitely not happy with Al Stump, the author of the book.

"Why don't they leave the private life alone and stay with Daddy's records and give him his due?" Cobb's daughter, Beverly McLaren, asked recently. "People want to know the dirt."

McLaren is in her 70s and is one of Cobb's two remaining children -- he had five. She grew up in Atherton and still lives on the Peninsula, and is cultured and serene, except when it comes to her father's image. Then she's protective. When asked for an interview about her father, she said, "If there are some questions I don't feel comfortable with, I just won't answer." The problem for McLaren and her younger brother, Jim, 73, who lives in Santa Barbara County, is that so much dirt adhered to her father during his lifetime, and the dirt happens to be fascinating. As portrayed by actor Tommy Lee Jones, Cobb was a paranoid, a psychopath, a racist, a woman-hater, a dirty ballplayer, possibly even a murderer. He also happened to be the best baseball player of his generation -- maybe the best who ever lived.

McLaren, who has not seen the movie, but read parts of the book, does not dispute in general the accuracy of the portrayal of her father, who at times seemed like a madman. She says, how ever, a scene near the end of the movie when a daughter, living in the South, rejects Cobb is pure fiction.

"It's made up," she said, her voice angry. "We didn't live in the South. I don't know what daughter it would be. I don't think he had an illegitimate daughter."

What McLaren objects to is the private hurt the film and book have inflicted. "I met Al Stump and I'm not very fond of Al Stump," she said. "I think he has no consideration for family, the fact that there are a lot of grandchildren and great grandchildren. I didn't extol my father, but I also didn't have a lot of unpleasant input for my children. Why should I?"

NO RESPECT FOR STUMP

McLaren's sister-in-law, Shirley, the wife of her brother Jim, is more blunt. "None of us have respect for Stump," she said. "He's just a money grubber." Shirley Cobb recently took her husband on a cruise through the Panama Canal so he wouldn't be around for the publicity attending the release of the movie about his father, but when they returned, they were besieged by calls from the media. "This is aging us fast," Shirley Cobb said.

The dilemma the Cobbs are facing is the dilemma inherent in biography and biographical films. The public has a right to know about famous people, but the family of those famous people is bound to suffer. There is no resolution to that problem.

Beverly McLaren may be put off by "Cobb," but she also seems, at various times in her life, to have been put off by her father, who died of cancer in 1961. She admits he could be "a rascal, psychotic, a devil." Asked to describe her feelings for Cobb, she replied, "Mixed. He could be extremely soft and kind or he could be awful."

Did McLaren love him?

"I don't think I did," she admitted, sighing, her voice barely audible. "I felt pity for him because he had wonderful opportunities to enjoy a heathy family and he didn't enjoy it."

When McLaren attended Mills College in Oakland, she and her father got into an argument. McLaren can't even remember the specifics anymore. Cobb flew into a rage, seemed threatening. He had flown into rages as long as she'd known him, often for reasons she couldn't understand, and this time she decided she'd had enough. So McLaren went back to Mills and didn't speak to him for almost six months. "I decided I couldn't take this anymore," she said. "I fought my father. He wasn't going to make me go under."

Cobb refused to give her away at her wedding. He and her mother, Charlie, were separated at the time; they later divorced. Cobb said he would give McLaren away if she could induce Charlie to return to him. McLaren refused the deal. "I didn't want her to go back," she said. "She lived in a nice house and she was happy and I wasn't worried about her." Some of the worry may have been related to beatings the movie suggests Cobb gave his wife. Asked if Cobb hit her mother, McLaren turned away, then replied, "I don't want to address that."

Cobb also tried to get McLaren to break up her older sister's engagement. McLaren refused. And he had a falling-out with his oldest son, Ty Cobb Jr., which he never resolved. "Daddy and Ty were separated when Ty was at Yale," McLaren said. "My brother got the same feeling I did. He just couldn't take it any longer, so he didn't live at home. There was a great schism between those two men."

McLaren stayed at her father's side the two weeks before he died, and in that time, her father apologized to her for many things, among them for his treatment of Ty Jr. As she narrated the apology, McLaren's eyes filled with tears. "Excuse me, I'm going to cry," she said.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

McLaren wishes "a good psychiatrist had the chance to study" her father, who, she thinks, was a mass of psychological problems. "He was always protecting himself against my mother," she said. "He felt my mother was poisoning us against him. He had an uncontrollable temper, wondered within himself if he was any good. I don't think a person that is sure of himself acts that way."

McLaren has a theory to explain her father's rage, his de mentia. They result from the tragedy that befell his family the year Cobb entered the major leagues. Cobb's father, an educator and later a Georgia state senator, was also a jealous husband. He went out one night, then sneaked home to see if his wife had taken a lover. When he tried to enter the house through his bedroom window, his wife panicked and shot him to death.

Cobb's father had expressed displeasure with his son's desire to be a ballplayer. He wanted Ty Cobb to be a doctor or a lawyer, but he finally gave his approval, accompanied by this grim warning: "Don't come back a failure." Cobb's father was shot to death a few days before Cobb entered the major leagues.

"I think a lot of Daddy's problems came from the tragedy with his father," McLaren said. "I had the feeling he really didn't like his mother. He was cold to her. She put him through a terrible thing. Daddy didn't have a chance to . . . go home to his father and get his approval. Daddy once explained to me, 'How do you prove yourself to a dead man?' "

Beverly C Mclaren