Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
Stein, Benjamin J.
WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW? Benjamin J. Stein/St. Martin's Press/298 pp. $18.95 John R. Coyne, Jr. Ben Stein doesn't fit the mold—any mold. We first met in 1973, when he pulled himself out...
...As an unreconstructed Watergate irregular might recall, when Woodward and Bernstein brought down an administration with an often wildly distorted media campaign, they walked off with every journalistic award in sight, to say nothing of a bestseller or two and a movie...
...Stein's latest novel, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, is an exploration of selfishness and greed with anew twist...
...With each day, new rounds came whistling in, launched by a media giddy with slipping the bonds of professional integrity and thrilled to lay siege to a man they had always loathed without ever understanding...
...What is it...
...dissimilarities: for one thing, there's been no applause for the investigator...
...Barron Thomas is an aviation and real-estate tycoon who understands the Milken formula and succeeds without using it...
...Why has Stein, despite what many believe to be some of the best financial reporting of the decade, received no Pulitzer and very little praise...
...is on one level a love story, it is on another a contemporary morality play, a meditation on loss of control, the collapse of personal integrity, disrespect for institutional values, and—most of all—the need to rebuild...
...In this splendidly cinematic novel of ideas, Stein has diagnosed that disease, and prescribed a cure...
...For that, you'll have to read the novel...
...What is most unusual, in these times, is that they're both honest and decent people...
...There are more than enough Watergate analogies here, particularly between the Milkenites and some of the zealots from the Committee to Reelect the President...
...The last year of the Nixon Administration was not a particularly happy time for those of us who worked in the White House compound...
...Two of his novels, 'Ludes and Her Only Sin, use the Hollywood setting described in Dreemz to explore the central motif of all of Stein's work: the search for honesty, decency, simplicity, and goodness in a dishonest, amoral, selfish world...
...Stein can paint in both primary and secondary colors, with primary characters embodying societal themes and moral concerns, and secondary characters representing vices and virtues...
...Since then he has produced a flood of screenplays, articles, reviews, and columns, and written several novels and non-fiction works...
...The casualties—some physical, more mental—mounted daily, and the medical office peddled bags of valium like peanuts...
...We first met in 1973, when he pulled himself out of the careerist muck of Washington's legal bureaucracy to join the best White House writing staff ever assembled...
...Nicole Miller, a former Tennessee cheerleader who wants to succeed in advertising but becomes an alcoholic in the process, is his almost improbablynice girlfriend...
...We had just lost our splendid vice president, who had led the great cavalry charges against the ungodly in the golden years...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 47...
...Those who had ideals at the end were the ones who had had them in the beginning—such as Ben Stein, in whom a genuine and gentle concern for people in trouble was joined to a remarkable detachment that became cold and fierce in the face of dishonest, immoral, or—worst of all—amoral behavior...
...For Stein, power, money, drugs, and alcohol are all elements in a destructive and descending trajectory, spiraling downward in tightening concentric circles...
...Some questions are best left to the revisionists, but let's leave it at this: friends of Stein say that, just as Richard Nixon made powerful enemies by defrocking Alger Hiss, Stein has offended those who confuse Michael Milken and his followers with the Little Sisters of the Poor, and those are the people who hand out the awards...
...Thus, there are times when Nicole seems less interesting than Barron's alcoholic and addictive wife, who has to be dealt with before boy finally gets girl...
...This didn't necessarily mean that ideals were lost (or gained, for that matter)—merely tempered by a healthy cynicism...
...Although the resume entry may not have seemed the most rewarding for the career-minded, the White-House-during-Watergate was a splendid place to work, as the James brothers no doubt remarked of Captain Quantrill's headquarters in 1864...
...In Stein's hands, such anomalous characters are plausible, animated by his generous and essentially hopeful view of human nature...
...One of these, Dreemz, is a splendid autobiography that is taught in universities...
...But there are also notable John R. Coyne, Jr is author of The Kumquat Statement (Coles) and The Impudent Snobs (Arlington House...
...What is new is that they meet at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting...
...And many of those who emerged intact did so a good deal wiser, having learned some important things about pressure, people, values, and themselves...
...In addiction, Stein has hit on the perfect metaphor, for addiction is the quintessentially selfish personal affliction, and selfishness is the quintessential disease of an age still struggling to define itself...
...But since Thackeray struggled with Amelia, one of the novelist's central problems has been to create good characters in a world in which evil is often the operative—and always the most interesting—principle...
...They are also, in large part, the people Stein has been lampooning since he left his post-White House job at the Wall Street Journal (an improbable base for a political/cultural irregular) to move to Hollywood in the mid-seventies...
...In fact, although Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow...
...Boy meets girl—which is not unusual, even in our multi-gendered society...
...This clarity and relentlessness informed Stein's financial and economic reporting throughout the eighties, primarily for Barron's, in which he dissected the great Ponzi schemes of the decade—Drexel, the S&Ls, Keating, Milken...
Vol. 24 • December 1991 • No. 12
