Capitol Ideas/Beyond the Ochre and Umber
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS BEYOND THE OCHRE AND UMBER It's surprising how few transcontinental airline passengers bother to look out of the airplane window. They are too busy studying real estate maps of Los...
...So he generously imputed it to his friend Laffer...
...They are too busy studying real estate maps of Los Angeles, lawyers' briefs, or wearisome government reports...
...I had lunch in this very restaurant with a 16-year-old actress last week," he said...
...The four-piece band came charging out onto the stage and their leader seized the microphone: "Hey," he shouted, how many queers have we got here tonight...
...Besides, he said, "the Two Continents doesn't have paper napkins.'' It has linen ones...
...Stein recently sold a script to the movies, and he also writes a highly readable column for the Herald Examiner, often addressing in an amusingly head-on way the taboo subject of status...
...On a book shelf behind him I noticed the titles Cactaceous Plants and Turtles of The World...
...Yay...
...Yay...
...Phillips of the London School of Economics, whose defunct curve blamed inflation on employment...
...Perhaps it still is, but you wouldn't know it from the immediately visible signs, which have a deja vu quality: TRAVELODGE HOWARD JOHNSON What, then, are the distinctive signs of contemporary culture...
...Laffer said he could only think of one other economist whose name has been connected to a "curve"-A.W...
...I'm beginning to think that it was Jude Wanniski who first drew the curve...
...The desert continues for about another hour, then one begins to see irrigated land, the occasional reservoir, outposts of civilization, the Los Angeles Aqueduct bringing water from the Owens Valley to the north, urban outskirts, suburbs, the San Fernando Valley, the Pacific Ocean...
...The supply of L.A...
...This writer will say, 'Look at Norman Lear...
...And then take Norman Lear...
...They read Hobbes, not Rousseau, '' the Producer yelled in my ear...
...I drove to Rodeo Drive, a smart street in Beverly Hills where someone was dusting off the sidewalk with a feather mop...
...A few days later I went to a punk rock show with a movie producer who is an after-hours aficionado of L.A...
...Laffer went to a prep school in Cleveland, and to Yale, and he learned "not to draw on linen...
...I had been intrigued that very day by a story in the paper about Suzanne Somers, who believes that "her $30,000 a week salary is below that of comparable stars on other successful television series...
...Stein suggested that I meet him at The Palm restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard...
...Strangely enough, Laffer doesn't remember the occasion...
...You'll recognize it because there will be about a million Rolls Royces and Mercedes outside," he said in a droll voice...
...Even so," Stein added, "almost all these people really do get cheated one way or another, no matter how much they are paid...
...Yes, there were one or two books on economics as well, but he has sensibly not allowed himself to be buried by the thoughts of defunct economists...
...Can anyone shed further light on this new supply-side mystery...
...to the north a great white ice sheet...
...I've been staring out of the window for the past hour, and to date I have spotted a dozen dots, which can be presumed to be farm houses...
...Hmmmmm...
...When I told someone this, the only thing that surprised him was that the customer was American...
...It is spread out below me, partly obscured by the DC-10 wing...
...Thus a lot of people struggling against those monumental odds are likely to conclude after a few years that "the system" is somehow to blame, that they are unfairly at the mercy of crassly commercial businessmen, and so on...
...preceded the demand for it...
...From what Stein said, I gathered that one of the problems with Hollywood is that people never know whea they are well off...
...crumpled crevasses, dry branching gullies, wrinkled earth, the Colorado River, the West...
...He told me right off that one of the problems writers encounter in Hollywood is that there are too many of them: One in a thousand film scripts is sold...
...He gets $20 million, say, but he says, 'Look, the network is making $100 million ...' And because of taxes, Norman only keeps a few cents on the dollar anyway...
...One called him "the Laetrile of economics...
...But for the first time since coming to L.A., I could feel the cutting edge of popular Western culture...
...So he thinks he's being cheated...
...I stood outside the airport concourse and awaited my chauffeur, like Jeremy Pordage in Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer...
...I admired a framed picture of William O. and Kathleen Douglas, well-known stars in Hollywood, and did a lot of soul-searching before deciding against a cashmere sports coat costing $875...
...Some had strangely dyed hair...
...We entered the inky-indigo club...
...Are they still in English...
...They gave us unfriendly stares, dressed as we were like Saturday-night liberals...
...We stood in line with about a hundred AWOL Marine Corps recruits who were wearing black leather jackets...
...Within a few days I arranged to have lunch with Ben Stein, the former White House speechwriter whose book The View From Sunset Boulevard documents quite thoroughly the prevailing anti-capitalist trend in Hollywood...
...Then he announced the first number: "Let's Have A War...
...here below purpled hills, rilles, and Rockies...
...Only the elements...
...Within a few minutes we had landed...
...This has also been established with greater statistical precision in a study forthcoming from The Media Institute in Washington, D.C...
...the AWOL marines responded in unison...
...So there you have a kind of pyramid of envy, call it Hollywood Green, which keeps a lot of people in a state of unnecessary mental turmoil...
...What's all this about our over-populated environment, then...
...But by Tom Bethell somehow he never came and in the end I rented a car...
...My theory is that Wanniski knew economic curves are not taken seriously unless they are drawn by people with Ph.D.'s...
...Then, take the writer who is paid $200,000 for a script," he went on, "and he says he's being cheated...
...Soon even the farm houses end...
...Invidious comparisons obscure our blessings...
...There would be no picture without my script,' the writer will say to himself...
...Giorgio's has a bar, and numerous photographs of the stars who have patronized the trendy haberdashery...
...But instead of applying for a steady job at the Department of Human Resources, or whatever, they take it out on capitalism...
...and of these, one in 250 is actually made into a film...
...Others were wearing swastikas...
...I asked Laffer if he met with much envy from other economists in view of his sudden fame, or notoriety...
...I could barely hear him above the din...
...Next I set off in search of Arthur B. Laffer, the famous economist who appropriately lives in Los Angeles- Supply-Side Land...
...I'm studying a large-scale map of Colorado myself...
...It had all been arranged by telephone...
...It was built with effort, not natural resources, and it is "maintained'' with envy...
...punk...
...For the next few weeks I would be the "writer-in-residence" at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner...
...But she says she's being cheated...
...Laffer, who looks about ten years younger than he really is (40), was sharing his office with numerous toy parrots and figurine turtles...
...She's making $8500 a week...
...The plane-shadow is now plowing across papier-mache foothills, fir trees clustered on top like iron filings on magnetic poles...
...He paid for them with $100 traveler's checks...
...According to the Institute's president, Leonard Theberge, the study finds that two-thirds of the time they are shown on prime-time television, businessmen are depicted either as crooks, con men, or clowns, and rarely if ever as engaged in productive activity...
...Behind the bandstand were signs reading: FAG GAY HOMO LEZBO Signs of our times...
...But when you're with them you can feel it...
...A gentleman next to me bought five shirts and a couple of sweaters, costing $980...
...Next time I'll tell you about how secretaries come to Hollywood and become film producers within a couple of years," Ben Stein promised...
...We want to go to Salvador...
...But he has no 'points.' No share of the profits...
...So everyone thinks he is being cheated...
...Laffer occupies a tiny office in the University of Southern California's Hoffman Hall...
...He paused to wave at a record producer, and pointed out an extremely thin TV actress who has "a $400-a-day cocaine habit...
...I don't judge motives...
...Perhaps I should make their discovery the grand object of my visit...
...He spotted my faded East Coast Brooks Brothers rig and recommended a tailor: Giorgio's on Rodeo Drive...
...Huxley, arriving in Los Angeles in the 1930s, was immediately intrigued by the signs: EATS COCKTAILS JUMBO MALTS FACIALS The city was then at the leading edge of popular Western culture...
...According to the writer Jude Wanniski, Laffer first drew his curve-which graphically illustrates the argument that when tax rates rise above a certain level then people start paying less, not more taxes-on a paper napkin in the Two Continents restaurant in Washington, D.C...
...It isn't like the old peace and brotherhood rock scene," the Producer said in a low voice...
...Certainly he was the first to publish it...
...Sandstone monuments, the salmon-pink desert . . . No natural resources here, gentlemen...
...They don't believe in the perfectibility of man...
...I encounter substantial amounts of aggression from economists," he conceded...
...He gets $20 million.' Or another writer who was paid $300,000 for a film script, and the film was a hit, grossing $40 million...
...The jet shadow is plowing a determined furrow across ' ochre and umber squares, suede-colored rectangles which soon give way to great unbordered spaces without a sign of life...
Vol. 14 • May 1981 • No. 5
