The Nation's Pulse/Letter from Hollywood
Stein, Benjamin J.
THE NATION'S PULSE LETTER FROM HOLLYWOOD by Benjamin J. Stein y ou probably wonder what I've been up to since you last heard from me. I'll make it easy for you. You won't have to guess. I'll...
...I get to renew my acquaintances with writers I haven't seen for a long time...
...Since I got back from Washington last week, no fewer than three of the most beautiful women I know, all twenty-five, all gorgeous, all radical party-hardy animals, have called to tell me they have bleeding ulcers...
...He blew out a huge cloud of cigar smoke, wiping away for a moment the sweet salt smell of the ocean...
...A tiny girl in braids asked me for my autograph because of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, so the walk was a big success...
...Both of them were with blonde girls who made whippets look like walruses...
...Just as they said their vows on their park-like property a paid aviarist released two hundred trained pigeons which flew around and then flew away...
...The way all three of them tell me about it, they went to the doctor and the doctor told them that a combination of stress plus "lifestyle" gave them the ulcers...
...Earl paused for a moment and said, "I think it has to do with my doing a really lot of meditation and visualization...
...Plus, I think it has to do with going to the desert a lot and getting my aura balanced...
...This strike is about the egomania of the Guild leadership," said the producer...
...That might have had something to do with my bleeding ulcer, because I got it right after I went to the parties...
...I don't know what's in store for me...
...I talked face to face with someone here "What accounts for this boom...
...When I turned back I saw Bruce Dern walk by, frowning...
...It gets really hot on the line in Century City or Hollywood...
...She's twenty-five...
...And I'm not worried about the writers who are (continued on page 47) D id you know we're having a Writers' Guild Strike here...
...Occasionally, a colleague starts to look faint and the cry, "Comrade...
...A Mitsubishi, to day . . ." a Lear 24, a Falcon 50, a Twin Otter, a I cannot even remember the last time Jetstar, and he's really thankful...
...fads sweeping the really cool people in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills...
...Without us there wouldn't be any movies...
...So now the couple is having a birthday party, and Staci has to ask me a. question...
...I think you can tell it's going to be a trend...
...Also, every few weeks I have to go picket in front of a studio...
...Ha, ha," said the twenty-sevenyear-old writer with the golden pen...
...I spend entirely too much time hearing people talk about money, so I walked down the beach with the home renter's dog...
...But it was for big money...
...asked...
...I went to a party at the Malibu Beach Colony home of my pal D., who is a producer of made-for-TV movies...
...Yeah, I do...
...I had thought the main point was to get work, but I guess I was mistaken...
...Neither of them died, so I guess thebleeding ulcers aren't quite as bad as I thought...
...There's a lot of talk about how we're all suffering so terribly because of the strike, but how we won't even think about giving up until we've won all of our points...
...Only she hadn't gone out to S.'s beach house for drinks...
...All three of them live a life which would wear out a panther, let alone a twenty-five-year-old white chick...
...It's been going on for five months, and it's sort of a disaster...
...Right...
...I could give you a list of all the famous guys that one of them went out with since I met her seven years ago, but I won't because a lot of them were married and now they're bigtime movie and TV stars and they'd probably want to sue me just for fun...
...Of course not," she said, which I believe about as much as I believe Abu Nidal saying he's just a tourist...
...Stalin said that splinter groups make the main body of the proletariat stronger...
...Malibu Colony size money...
...Has he called you since...
...Anyway, just keep on top of this one for a while...
...First of all, there are a couple of new Ben Stein's latest book is Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: The Diary of a Mad Screenwriter (Bantam Books...
...Amazingly, all three of them experienced this vomiting and shortness of breath on the same nights that they had stayed up until four or five blowing cocaine and drinking California Chardonnay...
...It's a lot of fun...
...We're all invited to a surprise birthday party next week...
...And it didn't stop there," the bleeding ulcer girl, a Gina Lollobrigida lookalike, told me...
...All of the girls said no more dope and no more of that acidic Chardonnay...
...I told her I was sorry...
...These are so hot that they haven't even been on "Entertainment Tonight...
...It may be over by the time you get this...
...Then we all went to another house he has on Broad Beach, right down the beach from some other rich guy's house, and it was just party-hardy all night...
...He rents his place, with one large bedroom and three tiny ones—and a Jacuzzi the size of a soccer field—from Memorial Day through Labor Day for $30,000 per month, for a grand total of almost $100 K. There were a lot of producers at his Fourth of July party, plus a few writers...
...Evian for Marty...
...smog by late afternoon...
...Your wife still gets those terrible neckaches, right...
...We carry our signs, which are pictures of a typewriter with a scary red streak of lightning coming out of it, and the word STRIKE in giant letters...
...There are empty tables at Morton's by ten o'clock, and people like me get to sit next to people like John Hughes and David Wolper and Hall and Oates...
...The one at Morton's had a whole bottle of Far Niente, at $45, and I didn't even get to share...
...Of course not," she said...
...Oooh," the blonde whippet said...
...I told them to shove it up their ass...
...One of the girls even told me I was to blame for her particular ulcer because I had introduced her to a lot of studio executives and none of them had given her a job yet, so I must have just been introducing her to raise her hopes and then she would just have them dashed again...
...By the way, just since I started telling you about what's new, I had a telephone call from the bleeding ulcer woman in Utah...
...My beautiful gofer, Sarah Lee, has some kind of gynecological woes that she won't discuss but that make her pale and sorrowful...
...Otherwise they'll stop thinking I'm their friend, and they won't call me, and I'll have to spend all my time talking to my lawyers, and I don't want to have to do that, because they charge me $200 per hour and each hour only has twenty minutes.he doesn't want to buy there...
...I'll just tell you...
...He was sitting across from a producer who also had a big fat cigar...
...Yeah, and I went out to his place at the Colony to have drinks with him, and I think he's really kind of cute...
...D. has decided that he wants to spend his summers in Malibu, but THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 29 STEIN (continued from page 29) begging the producers to go back to work...
...day with morning haze, burning off "I'm glad to see you're taking care about noon, clear skies, and heavy of yourself," I said...
...All of the girls assured me in breathless tones that they were going to change their lifestyle radically because of their bleeding ulcers...
...I didn't go to S.'s Fourth of July party...
...We make the movies...
...I'm not sure what all of our points are...
...Right after she called, the Gina Lollobrigida lookalike bleeding ulcer girl also called...
...He told me 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 he was getting into corporate acquisitions as his next thing...
...Here they were, as happy as pigs in slop, and probably not knowing Yiddish anymore even...
...Staci," I asked, "did you do him...
...The pickup in employment...
...Lots of dates, lots of dope, lots of wine, not much sleep, a lot of worries about paying off the old American Express bills...
...I haven't filed my 1987 taxes yet and it's August, so I guess the worst is yet to come...
...But they're not going to succeed...
...But the point is really about the bleeding ulcers...
...The low dollar...
...Everybody in the Colony was having a party...
...I just wonder if you realize that I'm making my Margaritas with only one shot of Tequila now, and I never just drink straight Tequila shooters the way I used to...
...Our housekeeper has a cough that makes Camille seem like Mike Tyson...
...Then I saw Robert Culp, from "I Spy," and then Scott Baio and some beautiful girl from "Knot's Landing," Nicolette something, but really glamorous, playing with paddles, and then some woman movie star, and it was all swell...
...A reviving oil business...
...I mean to ask her about the bleeding ulcers, but I keep forgetting...
...It's about the producers trying to break the Guild...
...The one at Spago only had three glasses of Chardonnay...
...I have to tomorrow will be a carbon copy of to-avoid alcohol because of my ulcer...
...I who was not insane...
...rings out, and a cute little thing in shorts runs up with an Evian for Marty...
...It's being given by a woman who used to work for me...
...A nyway, the second trend is about beach houses and flowers...
...Every night the weatherwoman appears on TV and says, "Well...
...They're gladiolas and hydrangeas and roses and hollyhocks . . ." "Just tell me," I interrupted...
...You won't believe this, or maybe you will if you know me, but in one afternoon, two different girls—one of the bleeding ulcer girls and another one, a braino from Sarah Lawrence—called to tell me that S., a gorilla in this town, a guy who produces movies that make as much money as all of Namibia makes in a century—has been bombarding them with great big arrangements of yummy flowers...
...Really cute...
...Anyway, since I got back from Washington, I've taken two of the girls to dinner—one at Spago and one at Morton's...
...The other one, big tall Sharon from Sarah Lawrence, called me about an hour later and basically told me the same story...
...He did send me flowers though, and they're really gorgeous...
...One of my researchers cannot walk a block without having to take a nap...
...So, what prescription drugs do you have that would make me really, really I 'm sure I don't know how this hap- 1 pened, but someone has put a curse on my household...
...By the way," said the young man with the cigar, "a studio called and offered me money to scab...
...He wrapped his arm around his girlfriend and swept his cigar toward the glittering Santa Monica Bay...
...Lots of dates with guys who make a million dollars a year and make love to them and don't even give them any money or anything...
...She married a forty-year-old millionaire...
...My wife and I drove back home to Mulholland Drive to watch the fireworks over Universal City, but after a while all fireworks look the same, so I blew it off and went to sleep.realize how careful I'm being with my new condition...
...Now, for a guy to send a woman flowers in Hollywood if she hasn't at least sort of done him is about as common as getting a free Carrera in the mail, but I have to pretend to believe these girls...
...Further incredibly, this party began at his house in Holmby Hills, and then went by caravan of Porsches and BMWs to his house in the Malibu Colony...
...At one picket site all they had was Gatorade, and I don't think anyone got thirsty that day...
...My wife has been sick in bed for a week...
...I hope you THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 47 high for tomorrow's party...
...I love it when he talks about Stalin...
...Incredibly, both of them met him at his Fourth of July party...
...You think so...
...Splinter groups don't hurt us...
...The biggest one is bleeding ulcers...
...Neither of them wore a shirt...
...Did you do him...
...All of them could tell because they had nonstop vomiting and shortness of breath...
...Pretty soon little kids in high school will be saying they have bleeding ulcers, and then maybe they'll be carrying bumper stickers on their notebooks that say, "A year ago I didn't even know how to spell colitis and now I have one...
...The third one has gone on a six-day drug and alcohol tour of Maine, from where she calls me every four hours to tell me how many Bloodies and Margaritas she's had, and how totally wasted she is...
...Everybody looked ethnic and happy, as if the whole crew had been suddenly wafted from Krochmalna Street or wherever Isaac Singer writes about in Warsaw to Malibu without any of the intervening unpleasantness...
...So go figure...
...My friend Earl, who runs an airplane To me, it is 1988's way of saying, brokerage in Van Nuys, called me to tell "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorme that he's selling the most airplanes row, creeps in this petty pace from day he's ever sold per month...
...My favorite, a young guy who wrote one of the summer's megahits and nowis up to $300,000 for a draft and a set, and is not even thirty, had a big fat cigar...
...We are the workers...
Vol. 21 • October 1988 • No. 10
