The Nation's Pulse/Malibu Diary
Stein, Benjamin J.
THE NATION'S PULSE MALIBU DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein November 11, 1988 eterans' Day. I was awakened by V a knocking at the door. It was loud knocking, because the sound of waves is almost...
...I saw these incredibly cute shoes, only they're flats, and I just wondered what you think about flats . . . " It was a normal day...
...Mimi may be able to change something about her sister's bachelorette party...
...With guns...
...I like it...
...Mimi," I said, "I'll have to call you back...
...There was a band playing throbbing music, a hundred young men and women who looked like the girls and boys in Bright Light% Big City, with neat shirts, neat suits, and long hair,dancing to the music...
...he asked...
...I walked out to the living room, noticed that the Pacific was just about up to the balcony, as it always is in the morning...
...Stein," the parts salesman said, and winked at me as he left...
...25.00 , . one of the very best biographies that has appeared in the Soviet field in many years...
...But I do it by hand...
...We talked about securities fraud for a few minutes, and then I tried to go back to sleep...
...270 pp...
...She wants to have this bachelorette party...
...As long as you're here," I said, "please call the police and report that someone vandalized my car...
...The two deputies grinned and flirted...
...At the Malibu SuperCare Drugs, where they collect insane-looking people the way museums collect paintings, a ferociously angry-looking middle-aged Jewish housewifely type in unbecoming pedal pushers was arguing with the clerk, a surfer type with a glazed look and long blond hair, about a computerized clock she had bought that did not work...
...THE KINGSTON PRESS Boris Savinkov: Portrait of a Terrorist By Karol Wedziagolski Edited by Tadeusz Swietochowski 'Translated by Margaret Patoski Savinkov, Sidney Reilly's friend and the figure around whom many of Reilly's plots revolved, is here portrayed vividly in the last phase of his life by a comrade in arms...
...So now we know which is stronger, physics or Mrs...
...The rage and aggression of the wealthy Jewish Malibu housewife versus the implacable laws of physics and conductivity...
...Needless to say, Mimi is not my wife...
...It was 1:30 in the morning...
...A knot of my students from Pepperdine were in front of me in line...
...We'll do it another time...
...No, that's what it costs...
...she asked, and she squeezed my arm...
...A few minutes later, a familiar face appeared...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 35...
...It's a restaurant founded and run by Ali McGraw...
...She asked me what I taught, and when she learned it was about film, she told me that her "...ex-ex-ex husband . . . " was a famous producer...
...Thanks anyway...
...A woman of about my age, with that rich, tanned, creased look of Malibu, asked me if I was a celebrity...
...All right, but my sister and my shoes are important, too," she said, and of course she's right...
...You're kidding...
...I love grocery stores, and this one is my favorite...
...Having a good time...
...In my grocery bag the clerk had stuffed a flyer for something called "Global Cooperation for a Better World...
...I'd like to report that my husband's car has been vandalized...
...And I want to also, but I have to talk about fiduciary duty, too...
...This," I thought to myself, "is the ultimate contest...
...The surfer clerk unhesitatingly took the offending circuit board, threw it in the trash can, and handed her a new one...
...We all giggled together for a while...
...Some creep had keyed it along its entire passenger side, leaving a huge long gash...
...I ate my sandwich and fought off the flock of pigeons that tried to steal it...
...It is lit up like a TV stage...
...On the slum part of Malibu Road," I said...
...Sure," I said...
...There was another call...
...Until he came along with his cursed Twist, men and women actually shared something besides vanity when they danced...
...She didn't live in the Colony at all, but in a far more modest home, certainly worth no more than two million dollars...
...I Hate Myself For Loving You," the band played, and the kids danced...
...She preceded me down Malibu Roadin her jeep...
...I liked it the first ten times I heard it, and I still like it...
...They were famous films, but I'm almost certain that another friend named Arnold Koppelson produced them...
...Why...
...Ibought my New York Times and walked over to the benches near the playground to read it...
...Much insight is also given on the post-Revolutionary period and on Russo-Polish relations...
...29.00 The Red Eminence: A Biography of Mikhail A. Suslov By Serge P. Petroff This is a major biography of Suslov, the party guardian, chief theoretician and elder statesman of the USSR...
...Well, I live in the Colony, and maybe you'd like to come over for a drink...
...Students, housewives, real estate agents, leather faces lined in money, etched with the distinctive lines of a carefree life lived in sun and surf...
...331 pp...
...This is Mrs...
...It was packed, as always...
...Plaza...
...I felt hungry and lonely...
...Benjamin J. Stein is a writer and producer in Hollywood...
...I did very much want to know," I said...
...It was my assistant, Mimi, the 22-year-old blonde demon researcher, who, on no evidence, assumes that she and I will soon be married...
...She had pulled its back off, revealing a whole city of fine filaments, connections, and electronic gadgetry...
...I really shouldn't even call it dancing...
...Don't get me wrong...
...I clicked into call...
...That's too much...
...I wash cars for most people on Malibu Road...
...It advertised a national premiere event at UCLA, without specifying what it was...
...Estelle Cooperman...
...I told them I was, and one punched the other and said, "See, I toldcha . . . " and then they left...
...Plus, she said...
...Even a braino like me could dance with the hardest hard girl at the Ocean City Ballroom in 1962 on the night before Marilyn Monroe was found dead, and we would have some little something in common...
...How much...
...It just makes me a little bit sad that someone as rich as P. can't think of a better, newer lie...
...So I was right to go home alone after all...
...His continuous and powerful influence is shown within the broad context of Soviet politics and ideology - an ideology of which he was the undisputed overlord...
...A few minutes later, I drove up to the shopping center again to buy a newspaper...
...She turned around and saw me watching her...
...On the flyer was a list of sponsors, and I'm not kidding, on the list were Fred Segal, a noted couturier to the young, rich, and tasteless here, Soleil Moon Frye, the star of a TV show called "Punky Brewster," Mother Teresa, Jimmy Carter, Lloyd Bridges, and Jack Lemmon...
...I have known P. for twelve years...
...I was in New York for the opening of Forced Enema, and some friends took me to Le Cirque, and while I was just sitting there talking deals with Carl Icahn and Don Trump, this incredibly beautiful girl came up to me and whispered in my ear and demanded that I take her back to my suite at the U.N...
...To me, it's like being in a casino where you win at every turn of every card...
...I tried to go back to sleep, but I had a call from a lawyer for whom I am working as an expert witness...
...Okay," she said cheerfully...
...I cursed a lot, and then drove back to my apartment...
...It was just shaking, and bore about as much connection with dancing as I used to know it as "The Cosby Show" does to drama...
...Wright, AUS, Rat...
...To my shock, at night on Fridays the Adobe turns itself into a nightclub...
...At the door was a disheveled black man...
...Thank you, Mrs...
...The looting of RJR shareholders will happen no matter what I write...
...Which would triumph: the impersonal, immutable laws of Newtonian physics as expressed by the top-of-the-line modern techniques of modern assembly, which were somehow being violated and refused to yield to the woman's anger, or the woman's anger...
...It was Mimi, calling from La Jolla...
...BOX 2759 CLIFTON, NEW JERSEY 07015 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 "Just their teacher," I said...
...had produced...
...THE KINGSTON PRESS INC...
...They were only part-time deputies...
...I walked back to my car...
...The circuitry, made in Singapore, said nothing...
...Well, why not...
...Wayne L. Sanford, Publisher ( World War II Publications ) ft . . a clear, objective, fin2erican version of the evidence Brig...
...General C.C...
...Aren't there any publicists left in Hollywood to think up new lies for him...
...Three boys asked me if I was "the guy from Ferris Bueller...
...I figure it took about five seconds of drunken work, and it's going to cost me a thousand bucks minimum to get it fixed...
...Thanks," I said...
...As always, there were hordes of BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches (the roller skates of Malibu), and Jags packed in like ants in an ant farm...
...I blame Chubby Checker for this...
...Benjamin Stein," she said...
...Because I have to talk about this big LBO that's going on...
...They usually were an engineer at TRW and a car-parts wholesaler, respectively...
...It's an enormous structure, right where the old, decrepit, but star-filled Colony Market used to be...
...Idrove over to the new Hughes Mar- ket in Malibu...
...I got dressed and drove over to the 1 Cross Creek shopping center to buy a turkey sandwich at John's Garden...
...I thought so...
...The next morning, she kissed me, very caringly, very tenderly, and said, `By the way, I'm only fifteen.' I just thought you'd like to know...
...The food is fresh and cheap and alluring...
...We could both dance the "Philadelphia Style" jitterbug, or the "Washington Style," and we could have a pretty good time...
...Just as I was falling asleep, the phone rang...
...He shrugged his shoulders and walked away...
...They stared a lot at Mimi, who winked at them and asked if she could go for a ride in their car some time...
...An hour later, two part-time reserve sheriffs deputies appeared with guns and clubs...
...Of course, the woman triumphed...
...They held each other, talked, showed that they bore a common socializing process by knowing the same dance steps...
...It was quarter of two in the morning...
...and I do mean ex...
...Would you like me to wash your car...
...She told me the films her ex...
...They were just doing their part...
...Surprise...
...It was a publicist for RJR Nabisco, about which I am writing a critical article...
...Mimi asked, and again, I had no good answer...
...She forgot to add "Gramps," but it was all right anyway...
...I bought Diet Cokes and frozen French toast, and then I went to the checkout line...
...She was also shouting at it, demanding to know why it didn't work...
...It was loud knocking, because the sound of waves is almost deafening in the morning, and I wouldn't have heard it unless it was loud...
...But I want to talk about what shoes I should wear to my sister's bachelorette party...
...Charles F. Elliot, Institute of Slim-Soviet Studies George Washington University DID STALIN RIEALLY KILL HIS MINE I' Find out this and more in .. . STALIN'S DOCTOR, STALIN'S NURSE By N. Romano-Petrova with an introduction by Alexis Scherbatow 112 pp...
...This thorough study includes the impact of the knowledge of the atrocity at Katyn Forest on the Yalta Conference and the Nuremburg 'Tribunal...
...At that point the "call waiting" told me there was another call...
...She called the Malibu Sheriff's Station...
...24.95 . . a rare glimpse of one of the World War 11 atrocities about which there has developed such an atmosphere of mystery...
...I'm so mad at my sister," she said...
...She had let herself in and was lying on thebalcony in her bikini...
...I was the oldest guy in the place by a long way, except for a couple of scary guys with scary looking women with drugged looks...
...She was staring at this circuitry with alook that would have frightened Tito...
...You'll never guess what happened to me," he said...
...If you call it by its name, it's just a man and a woman standing on the floor and shaking, without much rhythmic content, studiously avoiding looking at each other, making absolutely no social contact, showing no knowledge of any shared dance steps, displaying no ability to harmonize thought and action...
...P. walked away...
...I stood at the bar, drank Ramlosa, which is even hipper than Evian, and watched the dancing...
...Any old way, I stood at the bar and pondered what we've gained and what we've lost, and I watched a woman in front of me standing still in a white sheath dress, dancing in her place while her date pounded kamikazes...
...The sky off Point Dume grew dark...
...So I took her back, and Don Trump and Carl Icahn were just like staring at me and droolTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 33 ing...
...This is pretty much his standard story which he tells me every time he sees me...
...It just sat there and didn't work...
...Mimi was there...
...It was P., a legendarily successful producer of movies, a man who earns more each year than a Rockefeller cousin...
...My wife is almost as old as I am, which is forty-three...
...Very nouvelle Southwest and light vinaigrette on the chilled greens...
...With selected letters from Savinkov to Pilsudski...
...Horror show...
...he's producing a health spa and a resort in the Philippines . . . " She told me several more times that he was her ex, and then she asked me if I lived nearby...
...ime passed...
...My wife is back in town being sick with Epstein-Barr virus and getting facials at Elizabeth Arden...
...It is about as big as two airplane hangars...
...I went out to the Malibu Adobe...
...9.50 20 X OFF IF YOU ORDER THREE OR MORE BOOKS I SEND FOR OUR COMPLETE CATALOG I Katgn Killings: In the Record By John H. Lauck How could 15,000 Polish prisoners of war, mostly officers, simply disappear early in World War II on Soviet soil...
...240 pp...
...Forty dollars...
Vol. 22 • January 1989 • No. 1
