Second Wife City

...The dilemma should by now be familiar...

...It is a small row of oceanfront...

...It would be much the same as if primitive man asked the deity to have pity on his miserable self, fearful that boasting would tempt a fall...

...The woman had been in charge of a course called " c h a r a c t e r b u i l d i n g , " had been young, pretty, and had been busted by the Beverly Hills P.D...

...And, of course, many of them have wives half their age...

...house in Malibu, protected from the mobs at the public beaches by a guard dog and chain-link fences with barbed wire on top...

...My wife and I have come to call the Colony "Second Wife City," which does not amuse the neighbors at all...

...Now, everyone knows that interior design shops are to well-off middleaged, divorced Jewish women what Elba was to Napoleon, so perhaps as the phenomenon of second and third wives spreads, and with it the number of discarded Sarahs and Trudys grows, the asymptotic result will be the entire development of Los Angeles as an interior design center for the Pacific Basin...

...By almost any standard, they are dramatically well off...

...The writer-producer who lives next door (with his second wife and his little beard) drops in at night to complain that he has been cheated by a large studio and cannot possibly make more than eight hundred K this year, as opposed to the one point three mil he made last year, and that he is sick and tired of b e i n g " . . , pissed o n . . . " and made to feel like a bum...

...If so, where did the model come from, since only in Biblical times did all Jewish men wear beards...

...Can it be that the same stringent diets are causing so much unhappiness that even men who are paid a million do|lars for eight weeks' work cannot think of a kind word about their own lives...

...We rented a house here for the summer and I sat at the junction of sand and surf and saw what I could see...

...The wife of the family across the street, a maniac in tight toreador pants at the age of forty-five, like a ghastly recall of Shelley Winters in the movie of Lolita, strolled over almost every day to complain that her daughter was a slut, her husband had " . . . outgrown his s e x u a l i t y . . . " (whatever that might mean), and that she needed " . . . new outlets for the physical me . . . . " (I knew what that meant: Run and hide...

...More realistically, any progress in stopping the chemical warfare will depend on the international mechanisms adopted by concerned governments...

...And then there, is the complaining...

...Other nations have been less helpful...

...Although the UN report was not made public during the critical special session on disarmament, Rear Admiral Jonathan Howe, director of the State Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, has announced that the U.S...

...Houses h e r e s t a r t at o n e - a n d - a - h a l f Ben Stein is author, most recently, of Ludes: A Ballad of the Drug and the Dream (St...

...The women are, of course, second or third wives or girlfriends...

...Could it be that I am witnessinglhe classic California phenomenon, rigid conformity to a code mindlessly believed to display originality and daring...

...The problem is no longer to prove that the chemical attacks are taking place, but to make the indifferent member nations of the UN stand up and be c o u n t e d - - t o shame them into taking action...

...Take the Malibu Beach Colony, for example...

...Life here spreads itself infront of me like statistical data on the incidence of mortgage foreclosures, and I cannot stop myself from drawing concl~usions about the life I see day by day...

...I recall from my youth that on beaches in the East, primarily Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, sunbathers looked quite pleased to be on the beach, even if they were poor...

...Australia was given samples of contaminated vegetation from Indochina, similar to those used by U.S...

...2) What happened to all the first wives...

...None of this evidence--implicating the Vietnamese and Soviets in illegal chemical attacks--has been mentioned in any public forum...

...It fell to French officials in Bangkok to receive the most important evidence yet of the chemical warfare...

...All of them contained the tell-tale mycotoxin derivates...

...These samples were in turn given to the French...

...I have,reached a few new conclusions about life in Southern California...

...With the ASEAN states in the forefront, a consensus is emerging among, some nations regarding the seriousness of the issue, while a new report to the Canadian government has supported claims that some kind of toxic agent is in use in Indochina...

...Some officials are concerned with the plight of the Vietnamese--more than 200,000 still in re-education camps in the jungle zones of the country, on starvation rations, and millions marooned in desolate "New Economic Zones...

...Those who want to know have access to all the information...

...My wife tells me to go back to sleep, but I cannot help myself...

...exercise, health, and appearance that is quite literally the equivalent of living with one's own internal NKVD...

...But I have never heard so much complaining about the general state of the world as I have here, except for one brief semester in' law school when I worked as a legal aide at a poverty law office in the middle of an all black, completely impoverished public housing project in New Haven...

...I might as well have married the checkout girl at the Colony Market...

...Or does the totemic significance attach only to spoken communications on the assumption that a malevolent deity is blind or does not know how much a BMW 633csi costs and that there will be no retribution for that visible hubris...

...Sarah and Trudy have tong since been displaced by Heather and Kelly, but where are Sarah and Trudy...

...Every one of these men, at some point during the day, emerges from his house with a woman about half his age, so thin that she makes Lauren Hutton look like a hippopotamus...

...The answer to this question explains another startling California, or Los Angeles, fact...

...A TV executive who is about to marry the daughter of a German billionaire is bitter that the father-in-law has not already altered his will to provide for him...

...he asked me...

...Like a mad, short-circuited sociologist among the producers and the starlets and the tax-shelter attorneys, I keep coming into the living room with a new analysis of California-life...

...those-who do not simply dismiss eyewitnesses as liars and diplomats and relief workers as "politically motivated...

...It would show far more individualism to have no beard, so perhaps the object of the exercise is to show conformity...

...But t~he thought occurs to me that the thinness of the men and women in the Colony must have something to do with the looks of pain and suffering under the hundred-dollar haircuts and above the fivethousand-dollar silicone jobs...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 11...

...Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Howe stated that the main avenue for protest against the use Of chemical weapons is enforcement of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, and that mere possession of the toxin-derived weapons is a violation of the 1972 biological weapons convention...

...In general, relative to their age, they are uncommonly healthy...

...efforts to stop chemical warfare have shifted to the UN Committee on Disarmament...

...For my next analysis, I am going to try to understand why any grown man or woman would allow his or her child to be an agent...

...Here, I am at a loss to explain...

...experts in first isolating the chemicals, but its experts failed to find any suspect chemicals on the leaves...

...In a city of substantially less size than New York City, about ten square miles are given over exclusively to the display and sale of furniture, carpets, and interior design fixtures...

...Ben Stein SECOND WIFE CITY Sunning with t h e sad sacks o f Hollywood...

...And even there, the complaining had an end when the complainers would tearfully thank the attorney for getting back their lost welfare checks...

...million each, and t h a t ' s generally for a tear down that needs complete reconstruction...

...The reaction of France has been particularly disappointing...

...Why do rich beachcombers look so miserable...

...3) Why do all the wealthy men and women on the beach look so pained...

...To stay as thin as a whippet well into middle age requires an exercise of will power, a never-ending attention to diet...

...The commercial office-space mogul who lives two down (with the little beard and the pinched-face twenty-five-year-old wife) was and is hysterical because the school where his three year old, Jason, goes to nursery school, at forty-five hundred per year, has just fired his favorite teacher...

...In my thirty-seven years, I have lived in neighborhoods of lower middle-class people, middle-class people, and even upper middle-class people...

...The houses are on tiny lots right next to each other, with each household's five Mercedes crowding up against the next household's five Mercedes...

...What the...

...But other diplomats are sympathetic to the " r e - building" of the region and the UN High Commission's policy of returning political exiles to the Communist states controlled by Vietnam...

...But in that case, why do the same people flaunt the fancy cars and the (second) wife's jewelry...

...Both the man and the woman set their faces grimly and stride along the beach as if showing the world that they can suffer the fate of living at the Colony and come back for more each day...

...My theory is that the complaining has totemic significance, to ward off the evil eye of failure...

...last weekend for turning tricks out of an apartment on Camden Drive when she was not at work teaching character building...

...First, I noticed that the modal inhabitant of the Colony is a Jewish man of about fifty with a thin waist and a tortured look (only thinly masked by a beard...

...Am I supposed to live on my salary while my wife clips coupons...

...In turn, the general ill-humor of the men could have some effect on the women's state of mind...

...On the very day the samples were taken, REgis Debray, enfant terrible of Marxist orthodoxy and currently foreign policy adviser to President Mitterrand, was touring Vietnam as a guest of the Hanoi government and holding cordial talks with party officials...

...This could explain the men's appearance...

...The epoch in the Colony is the first and only time I have lived among truly rich people...

...In any event, there is rich material here...

...But her e , the complaining knows no bounds, either religious or economic or of age or time...

...In July, four Khmer Rouge guerrillas, seriously injured in an attack of "yellow rain" on Cambodia, were brought to a Thai border hospital, wlaere samples of their blood were taken...

...Martin 's/Marek...

...Because of its perceived "independence" from the United States, France could play a critical swing role in mobilizing world opinion...

...hell's the point of that...

...10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 Now, as a mad sociologist, I have to wonder: (1) Why do all these men have little gray beards...

...Why do these people complain constantly...

...Like many other embassies in Bangkok, the center of intelligence collection on the chemical attacks on Cambodia and Laos, the French mission to Thailand is split between different political factions...