Her Only Sin
Stein, Ben
.......................................................................................................................................................................... BOOK...
...Martin's Press/$16.95 Mark Falcoff Ben Stein is a novelist, film-writer, and social commentator whose work is of particular significance to me be-cause of several personal circumstances...
...can attest to the resemblance on the basis, at least, of having a lunch with him at The Palm in West Hollywood a few years ago...
...This is what I came here for...
...One of the few people in Her Only Sin who rings true is veteran producer Sid Bauman, product of a Jewish immigrant family in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn and a former member of the Young Communist League...
...Knowing this, I never confused the illusion with the reality, just as you couldn't be mesmerized by a magician's tricks if you knew all his secrets ahead of time...
...His idea, stated simply: "to seek gold in the L.A...
...The show was called "The Sister and the Vamp...
...Though the event took place a while back, I can still vividly recall the topics: (1) Money...
...What was my future in Washington...
...I hate you and your filthy story...
...Box 10448, Arlington, VA 22210...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Tyrrell yearns for your company...
...The city's think-tanks and the staffs on the Hill are overflowing with defrocked academics who praise Allah daily for finally delivering them to the promised land, and who laugh uproariously at the uneasy queries of their former col-leagues ("Do you have tenure at the Brookings Institution/Senate Foreign Relations Committee/Congressman Glotch's office...
...In three weeks the deal was made at NBC...
...Over lunch Stein told me a great deal about himself, and even more about Hollywood and Los Angeles as he saw it...
...The individual who rings most true is the narrator, a man whose curriculum and personality strongly resemble Ben Stein's...
...Then one day he sold a script to Columbia...
...what makes this one truly distinctive is that, instead of reeling in horror at the mixture of crassness, superficiality, and superlative climate, as Evelyn Waugh did, for example, in The Loved One, Stein positively revels in what he finds...
...Stein's problem isn't that he doesn't see that behind the tinsel is more tinsel—it's that he is fascinated anyway...
...In the one and only time we have met, he was astounded to learn how happy I was living in what for him had been the purgatory of his adolescence...
...Though The Palm is only two or so miles from my parents' house, I had never been inside, and was in fact only barely aware of its exMark Falcoff is resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...What Stein fails to see, apparently because he is too close to the subject, is that for many Americans who have moved there, Washington is fully as glamorous as Hollywood, in fact, is a kind of Hollywood—particularly if their last address was Decatur, Illinois, Memphis, Tennessee, or (as in my case) Eugene, Oregon, and if they happened to be interested in politics rather than movies and the people who make them...
...Echoes of both these authors can be found in Her Only Sin, as they inevitably are in almost any novel on the subject...
...There is a local branch of The Palm on 20th Street below Dupont Circle, but its functional equivalent is really the Hay-Adams Hotel...
...He added that he was the only person in the entire film community who subscribed to magazines like Commentary and The American Spectator, which I could well believe...
...BOOK REVIEWS...
...In fact, by balancing the capital against Hollywood, Stein sometimes throws its most relevant features into sharpest relief, and starts to write what might have been one of our first "bicoastal" novels, the author in heated debate with himself over two sharply contrasting life-styles...
...This is what I have come to California for...
...Well, Nix-on to them is just one more freak they've seen on television—it's as if I'd worked for Mr...
...A condo on Cathedral Parkway and a cabin in West Virginia...
...But the Baumans hardly exist anymore—except in nursing homes...
...It purports to be the diary of his first year in Los Angeles...
...He went to Yale Law and worked at the White House and the Wall Street Journal, moving to Los Angeles in 1977 to work for Norman Lear Productions...
...Joseph Sobran, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, Peter Berger...
...Chow...
...What the hell was wrong with me...
...We didn't practice it, of course (neither my father nor my grandfather was, as they say, "in the industry"), but living there it was hard to avoid noticing...
...There are, of course, many such books, since the city, try as it might, cannot cease to inspire them...
...The problem is that since he is comparing Washington with Hollywood in-stead of everywhere else, his standard of judgment is inevitably skewed...
...On the contrary: I think that all the things people criticize Los Angeles for are quite true—it just so happens that I like those things, and so does Ben Stein...
...3) Valley Girls...
...But here [in Los Angeles], on the freeway, if your car stopped in lane three, you would simply die as the other cars crashed into yours...
...She told him a story of a nun who became a detecREAD George Burns for America's Libraries ~mcrican Libre') A~wri:diim "ambitious and non-ideological...the Guide's loudest bang will be that of the exploding egos of the 300 journalists who are rated from poor to the best...
...I asked him how these same people responded to him—after all, he'd worked for Richard Nixon...
...That was what made him so amusing, in fact: he was like a traditional English traveller, whose purpose in going abroad was to confirm the fact that foreigners were funny...
...He assured me this was very far from the case...
...As he writes of his first moments at the airport, "It was THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 35 , wonderful—warm, dry weather with a gentle breeze...
...Whatever one may think of his judgments, this is a pretty fair summary of the career pattern of more than a few Washington Yuppies, or to be technically precise, Muppies...
...Or here is his attempt to decode anthropologically the rites of the film community: I learned that Hollywood had a different lingo from the rest of the nation...
...He got forty thousand for a first draft and a set of revisions, and then he was officially a writer...
...they are...
...These are the apparatchiks who outlast all administrations...
...He even has the same first name...
...T or Bela Lugosi...
...A devastating account of the growth of bureaucracy by Hillsdale College President George Roche, former chairman of the government agency, the National Council on Educational Research...
...The people that Stein writes about are merely Johnny-come-latelies who are trying to step into the roles of people they grew up dreaming about...
...Forty-five more humid summers and freezing, wet winters...
...If your car broke down in Washington, he writes, you pulled off to the side of a leafy street, walked down to an embassy or drug store and there waited calmly for help from the Auto Club to arrive, perhaps reading a book while you listened to WGMS [a local classical FM station...
...In a way, to compare anything with Los Angeles tends to invalidate the comparison from the start...
...They actually think they are underpaid, and they imagine that they are poor working stiffs exploited by the `bosses' just like coal miners or garment workers...
...The Malibu crowd he writes about didn't invent Brie and Dom Perignon...
...It was only when I went away to school that I discovered how the mythic dimensions of Holly-wood loomed in the consciousness of people who'd never been there...
...the rich more frightening than the poor...
...In the process it tells us much more than we ever wanted to know about an industry that, let's face it, has lost much of the genuine glitter it had during the 1930s, when—the bottom line—it actually produced a superior product...
...And gossamer is just about the right word, because in Her Only Sin, the characters are absolutely two-dimensional, like actors in a medieval mystery play identified by signs around their necks (Envy, Greed, Lust, Charity...
...The Washington Times "Mr...
...The quintessential Californian, after all, is not a native at all—he's a transplant from somewhere in the snowbelt, trying his level best to live the legend...
...The city has a kind of reverse rationality, which I grew up accepting as part of the landscape, much like the smog or the complicated underpasses of the freeways...
...BEN STEIN'S HOLLYWOOD-AND MINE HER ONLY SIN Ben Stein/St...
...Hollywood for Ben Stein is a kind of free port, an open city, where long-repressed desires can finally find their expression...
...86 Maple Ave...
...For him Hollywood and his life "in the industry" is a form of permanent rebellion against the bourgeois respectability of his upbringing, and an opportunity to have a lot of fun—which apparently he didn't have as a lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission or as a speechwriter for President Nixon...
...For those who have not read Stein's work on this most interesting subject, these are exceedingly nubile young women between the ages of 14 and 17 who are extremely precocious about certain things—drugs, sex, cars, money, who's who in "the industry" (television, films, and so on)—but who cannot identify, say, the seat of government of the Irish Republic...
...the dust jacket even extravagantly suggests that Stein's book is an updated version of The Last Tycoon...
...I had the feeling that he was having a better time than I ever could, because, after all, he was new to everything, and much more industrious in his search...
...Washington has long needed a novel to tell this story, and some of the passages of Her Only Sin show that Stein could write it if he were so inclined...
...Howthese same people try to make even more money on tax dodges and other scams (such as he was in fact outlining at the time in his novel 'Ludes, published shortly thereafter...
...As a parking lot attendant once contemptuously observed to me of the plethora of Rolls-Royces rolling up to the restaurant where he worked: "They rent 'em...
...Actually, Stein's style has been steadily improving (there are some really excellent passages in his latest novel, Her Only Sin), but it seems to me that he's really a social critic who should be writing essays...
...As Stein himself writes, there and only there are "the women more frightening than the men...
...It does, in fact, deal with the rise of a movie mogul, in this case a woman who goes from being a statistician and media-marketing analyst at the White House to head of a major studio...
...The old Hollywood characters were really characters—some of them...
...A manicurist who lived down the hall from me on Horn Street went to Para-mount every day to manicure the nails of an executive in the TV department...
...I went to Princeton and ended up teaching for ten years at a third-rate state university in the Pacific Northwest before finally chucking it and moving to the nation's capital in 1981...
...Stein was obviously both fascinated and repelled by these girls, of whom he seemed to know more than a few: they were so unlike the young ladies he grew up with or dated in Silver Spring, Maryland, "nice" girls who took piano lessons, had their teeth straightened, wore pleated skirts and sensible blouses with training bras, and had their first drink of alcohol at the senior prom...
...As a friend of mine who works at a major consulting firm said, "Let's face it: this town pays people far more than they're worth...
...Stein's account continues to be the source of undiminished pleasure even though I've reread it nearly a half-dozen times...
...But now in Her Only Sin he has become a part of what he describes, taking the whole thing much too seriously, and summoning Balzacian techniques to make sure that the reader doesn't miss a thing...
...palm trees instead of the subways...
...A deputy undersecretaryship of Housing and Urban Development...
...Here is one tantalizing example...
...Each $ 5.00 in paperback...
...It is also a place totally out of touch with reality, or rather, a place where reality assumes unaccustomed forms for which most people simply are not prepared...
...The comparison is far from outlandish: with its huge ceremonial open spaces, its splendid Palladian, Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian architecture, and its artificially low skyline, the capital is really the largest back lot in the world...
...Now, the reason I found this so bracing was not, as you might think, that 1 was tired of people putting down my home town...
...Subscribe or renew today...
...I wouldn't say that Stein is a great novelist, but American fiction being what it is these days, one takes one's literary pleasures where one can...
...who do not need to wait for a sabbatical and a Guggenheim to see London or Milan or Cape Town or Buenos Aires...
...It's here, after all, that the big stars of the industry live...
...For Stein this is a bit difficult, because he hasn't been in Los Angeles long enough to see that even there everything that goes up eventually must come down...
...who know everybody...
...Instead of premieres or the Academy Awards, it has embassy black-tie dinners or White House receptions...
...Near the door to the parking lot are a few beautiful girls in short shorts and tight T-shirts...
...His father was a cabinet member...
...and who at the very least live in a kind of dignified semi-affluence that only a professor with a richly endowed chair at Harvard or Yale could even aspire to...
...New Order ^ Renewal (please attach mailing label...
...the children more frightening than the adults...
...deal...
...When I was a kid we already knew the term "old Hollywood phony" and had no difficulty spotting them, but it takes an outsider like Ben Stein to pin them down once and for good...
...I had just finished reading The View from Sunset Boulevard, his study of the ideolo8ical content of American sit-corns, as well as of the political views of the people who make them, and I ventured the thought that perhaps the latter's left-wing inclinations were a product of guilt—a sense of shame that they were making these fabulous sums doing something which was, well, both easy and trashy, while ordinary men and women had to struggle to support their families...
...It only ran for forty-six episodes, but it paid Veralynn Procter fifteen thousand per episode and then she became an executive producer on "Alladin's Laddies" and now she lives in a house in Pasadena that was built by one of the founders of Bethlehem Steel...
...If a woman whom you meet at The Palm while you wait for a table says, "I'm a producer on the lot at Universal," that means she is a secretary to a property manager...
...As the narrator in Her Only Sin relates: At about one in the morning I awoke...
...Their fantasies were fed not merely by passing half the hours of their adolescence in dark theaters all over America, but by devouring the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Nathanael West...
...Wanniski's guide is great fun and his insights into the fourth estate make the MediaGuide a hard book to put down...
...From page one he had a soulmate following his pilgrimage with a combination of sympathy and fascination...
...For my part, I found it amazing that he took Los Angeles seriously as a social phenomenon and thought it worth so much literary energy...
...One just shrugged one's shoulders and went on one's way...
...Adolph Menjou, please phone home...
...I came of age in Hollywood...
...Thus, by a rather circuitous route, Stein and I have now exchanged places, and each of us thinks he got the better of the...
...He grew up in Washington, D.C...
...But with Hollywood no longer a place but a state of mind (movies, after all, are even made nowadays in New Jersey and Pennsylvania), Stein would do well to return to Washington, and write the novel the city is still waiting for...
...In his own personal geography its polar opposite is Washington, D.C., where he grew up and spent the early years of his career following the kind of trajectory which his parents had (at least implicitly) mapped out for him...
...They've been re-placed by thirty-five-year-old kids from New York (Park Avenue, in fact, in-stead of Brownsville) who went to the University of Wisconsin (because they just missed getting into Harvard or Yale) and jumped from protesting the Vietnam war to dealing in drugs to controlling major studios through leveraged buyouts based on a family trust fund...
...Of course it was true—which is exactly the point about Hollywood...
...Morristown, NJ 07960 (201) 267-2515 $14.95 plus $1.50 postage and handling 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 Hillsdale College Press...
...cops redirected traffic around the site...
...What was I doing that was so great at the White House...
...The girls ran up and hugged me while a studio photographer took pictures and other passengers looked on...
...How much it cost to live in the city...
...the elderly more frightening than the young...
...and Michael Novak Raymond Gastil, Richard Derham, Lewis Engman, Nancy Sherwood Truitt, Mark Frazier, Melvyn Krauss, and Kendall Brown The Christian Vision: MAN AND MORALITY J. Brian Benestad, Thomas Burke, Carl Henry, James Hitchcock, Leonard Liggio, Ron Nash, John Reist, and Keith Yandell D.T.Armentano, Yale Brozen, David Button and Tim Ozenne, Joseph Reed, and F. M. Scherer To order or inquire about quantity discounts, call or write: HILLSDALE COLLEGE PRESS HILLSDALE COLLEGE HILLSDALE, MICHIGAN 49242 517/437/7341 POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC PLURALISM IN THE THIRD WORLD II4NII'IUN^ 111 I Nh10114 {\ ITI-RL\ I' POER 1' IN A FREE SI X:ILII' I~~rrxaxJ NI l~av~rpa~ I11 vi III VIII IV IX V X tive...
...it's here that the big productions are staged...
...they're just silly enough to waste their money on both...
...Maybe it was all taking shape even as we ate The Palm's justly famous greasy hamburger steaks and wonderful onion rings...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1986 37...
...Instead, he writes breathlessly: For six months a redheaded waiter served me and my various dates seaweed, dumplings, and spicy beef at Mr...
...I can't wait to make that picture," that really means, "Get out of my office...
...I always thought of movies as something made with a camera, ac-tors, and a bunch of guys in levis and tennis shoes holding booms and reflectors, while L.A...
...This is poor material for a replay of The Last Tycoon, and Stein cannot be blamed for not being able to rise above it...
...1 year $21 ^ 2 years $39 ^ 3 years $55 Name Address City State Zip P.O...
...istence...
...For ex-ample, if a studio executive says, "I love it...
...This is true not merely for people who hold (or hope to hold) political office, but also for those who work with and for them: lobbyists, journalists, lawyers, and economists...
...The title of the book is taken from the license plate he orders for his new Mercedes-Benz convertible, a car such as his parents, economists both, would never dream of owning...
...how much he and his wife paid for insurance on their cars ($300 per month—which led me to assume they were expensive and imported...
...Not that I don't like his books—quite the contrary, I find them endlessly fascinating...
...My Hollywood, I can assure him, is better than his...
...My first book by Ben Stein—it re-mains my favorite—was Dreemz (1978...
...How much people spend on restaurants per month in Los Angeles"people" in this case being film people ($5,000-$10,000...
...But it is one of Stein's favorite places, and apparently the restaurant of choice of the film community and its many adjacent activities (sports, records, television, advertising, modeling...
...It is one thing to grow up in Hollywood, another thing to be seduced by it...
...it's here that legislative aides in the state capitals scheme and cheat eventually to come, first to work for a member of Congress, and then—most glorious of consummations!—to be members in their own right...
...If you meet a ratty-looking kid with herpes blisters on his lips who tells you that he has twenty development deals and has just made a picture that made forty million in rentals, and if he tells you this while he is snorting cocaine off a Porsche key, he is almost certainly telling the truth and will probably soon be up for an Academy Award...
...2) Politics, and particularly the politics of the film industry people...
...Dull skies, boxy buildings, and anesthetized faces of the bureaucracy...
...For that matter, they might even think that New York is the political capital of the United States, or maybe even Sacramento...
...mine was not...
...Little did I know that he was describing some of the raw material which would eventually appear in Her Only Sin, but at least when I read them recently I knew whence they had come...
...Journal of Commerce 1986 MediaGuide Jude Wanniski's Critical Review of the Print Media • A survey and evaluation of the major political economic press • Ratings of the leading political, foreign, financial reporters and columnists • A critical look at the big news events of 1985 AVAILABLE FROM POLYCONOMICS, INC...
...His stories are merely didactic devices to say what he could express more forthrightly—and more interestingly—without the gossamer filter of fiction...
...Of course, this is all of a piece with what originally attracted me to his work in Dreemz, but with the important difference that in that first book he maintained a critical distance from his subject...
...It's fantastic...
Vol. 19 • June 1986 • No. 6
