Ben Stein's Diary / Half-Century City
Stein, Benjamin J.
Half-Century City by Benjamin J. Stein Monday H ere I am in Baltimore, Maryland. It's nighttime. I'm staying at the wonderful Stouffer Harborplace. My room looks out on the harbor and a giant...
...You must excuse me...
...If I am only for myself, what am I? (8) Do your best and don't worry and don't feel guilty...
...This one has just gotten divorced and is broke...
...The life on the set was even better today...
...I blew out the candles and prayed for peace, as I always have done...
...In Hollywood, self-obsession and nurture of the fractured self are what life's all about...
...Every time I do this, I'm aware that someday a doctor will tell me that I have eaten my last crabcake...
...and Sid Dauman, a plutocrat/artist and his wife, Leslie, an actress...
...It's valuable to know who you are...
...3) Liquid assets equals freedom...
...7) If I am not for myself, who will be...
...Nothing on earth can give you the self-esteem that spending time with your kids does...
...I flew in last night, business class, on American Airlines...
...Tuesday H ere I am, on the set in a remote corner of Baltimore...
...There was Larry Lissitzyn, a Vietnam war hero and friend of Larry Jekyll, another war hero...
...Chaos...
...What do you think...
...Maybe I am missing something...
...I told him that if he didn't start acting better, I was going to poison him...
...Violence...
...My sister, who was home from college on vacation, I think, wordlessly came in, cleaned up, and allowed me to go to sleep on clean linens...
...He is only 29 or something equally ridiculously young, so what could he know about being 50...
...Do any kids not love to play video games...
...That one is divorced but has a nice boyfriend...
...The first thing I did was study a list I had asked my father to prepare for me...
...I asked...
...Do not fight over small matters with the ones you love...
...They both wished me happy birthday...
...Michael Chinich, who made me almost a movie star, and his ace cook wife, Mottie...
...Right now, even though he's making money at fashion design, he wants to write a novel...
...I got dressed and went to meet my driver, a young, well-spoken assistant director who was also a restaurateur, and roared off to the set...
...my fabled editor from the Wall Street Journal, Bob Bartley, one of the most influential men in America and one of five people who shaped the new political landscape...
...I guess I'm just a big fat ham actor...
...The whole thing was that the Welsh boy caught the boy from an old English family in flagrante delicto with another boy from a wealthy family, and he had them both caned for poor attitude...
...Billy Farhood, a high school friend who's now a shrink...
...0 ff to dinner with Alex and a group of people for my birthday...
...They remind me of growing up in safe little Silver Spring...
...That was very careless of her (and goes back to what I was saying about people being excessively disorganized and paying for it...
...Bill Silverman, now a major lawyer in D.C...
...Where it was assumed that you would do the best you could in school, to justify the hard work your grandparents and parents had put into becoming middle-class Americans...
...You wouldn't know it, but I'm really a religious maniac...
...Can you believe that, Daddy...
...This is a line I learned from listening to Bob and Ray, those two perfect geniuses of radio back in my youth...
...It turns out that the baby was not fathered by the man she thought, but by the man she had an affair with about the same time she was having the insemination...
...I think the answer is never...
...They complied sullenly and said Happy Hanukkah in a weird voice...
...and Barry Walker, a businessman in Palm Beach...
...I felt euphoric...
...I pay a ton of property tax, but I would cheerfully pay more to get more cops on the street and more prisons and more courts...
...I went into a crab restaurant called "Phillips" and ordered two crabcakes...
...I was not used to drink, so I fell asleep and then awakened, barring madly...
...I could barely stop eating it...
...for more than eighteen years and still don't have nearly as many friends as I do in the east...
...We were close to running out of gasoline...
...How did he take the news...
...I often think that if instead of the Supreme Court making prayer illegal, it had made prayer mandatory, we would be in far better shape...
...Teasing is really a cruel thing that young people do to one another...
...The cinnamon roll was stale, too, but I only discovered that after I got back to my room and was preparing for bed...
...I brought it home and showed it to my father...
...They all, without exception, look as if they give something of a damn about other people...
...She did 'the single kindest act anyone ever did for me until I met my wife...
...At least something has improved...
...By and large they can talk and listen to other people talk...
...The way to do that is exactly the way to get through this life: Accept God's will...
...I'm not a star," I assured her...
...It now turns out that the real father wants nothing to do with his baby...
...I arrived by subway with my dear friend Ona, who came up from Philadelphia...
...Baltimore—City of Shared Confidences...
...the ineffably kind Peter Bloch, my editor from a man's magazine called Penthouse, where I contribute about how to be successful and live without stress killing you...
...He was quite calm about it," the script woman said...
...Having me do five commercials in two days—which is my task—is like asking me to eat five crabcakes in two days...
...I heard revelers and merrymakers passing by all night long...
...There are all too many people in this country who lead extremely disorganized, spiritually empty lives...
...But it's safe and secure at the Republican Women's Club, and I have family and friends...
...Disorder...
...and gorgeous Juliette Capretta...
...My own feeling is that we should have a huge tax increase to pay for a real war on crime...
...I was sitting behind an English couple who looked as if they were having a nervous breakdown...
...Before I sleep, I usually have a snack, call every single person I have ever known, say many prayers, carefully read the Wall Street Journal, and then listen to Bob Dylan's "Idiot Wind" on my Walkman...
...Terry has actually brought sheets and blankets so that I can take a nap on the tiny fold-out chair in my tiny dressing room...
...This is not a Hollywood group...
...I won't say who it's patterned after," he said, raising his eyebrows suggestively...
...This is getting ridiculous...
...My room looks out on the harbor and a giant aquarium and some big ships...
...He's a brilliant surgeon who works now as a fashion designer under an assumed name, which happens to be a woman's...
...At Christmastime, it's a treat...
...I sometimes worry I'm going to go the same way...
...I'm staying in a tiny, clean room at the National Republican Women's Club...
...Share God's gifts, and try to live by the Commandments He laid down a very long time ago...
...That allows very little room for interest in others...
...You are not God...
...She's also a single mom...
...When I was a junior in high school (speaking of drinking) I came home drunk for the first time in my life...
...my editor from Barron's, the unbelievably witty Jim Meagher...
...The whole subject makes my head spin...
...my old law-school pal, Roz Fink, a real character...
...0 56 The American Spectator February 1995...
...The script woman, a beautiful young thing, inspects some prop chemicals nearby and tells me in a soft voice, "When I was in high school, I helped my teacher clean out the chemistry closet...
...We finished doing our thing, and started on our still pictures (I told you this was a fairly big campaign), and the producer, wonderful Claire Hartman, pulled me over and said she had to talk to me about something...
...my super agent and guardian, Marcia Hurwitz, and her musician hubby, Richard...
...I noticed another group of obviously not Jewish kids shouting Happy Hanukkah in drunken voices...
...I sometimes think that the whole reason the Republicans won by such a landslide is simply that Americans are saying, "Make it like it used to be...
...It has me watching a Bunsen burner brew 52 The American Spectator February 1995 coffee while at the same time talking about how important it is to get your early news from WMAR...
...But I love my room...
...Yes, I am 50...
...It's got a homey, friendly feeling about it...
...Every so often, one of the kids says "Bueller, Bueller," and I smile obligingly...
...I really think I never had a clue what it meant to be a man until I had Tommy...
...Filled with possibilities...
...How I laughed at their acts, especially the dramatic actress "Nattily Attired," and their imitation of Edward R. Murrow...
...Also Lowell Harriss, my fabulously good college econ teacher and a U. of Chicago classmate of my parents...
...4) Invest in your health...
...I was in the bosom of friends and family who had known me all of my life...
...He had several glasses of wine at lunch and then a port with coffee, and The American Spectator February 1995 55 was happily buzzed as we walked back toward the Rockefeller Center...
...Yes, one branch of government is in Republican hands, but there's still the Executive, the fourth estate, the academy, all in the firm grasp of people who basically like to make trouble for normal people...
...My father is the worst, really bad...
...But for now, I love them...
...The Democrats have shown that they can't or won't do it, so now you Republicans will have a shot...
...Then we walked around Rockefeller Center and then to the China Grill and then back to the Republican Women's Club...
...Friday I 'm in New York...
...my dear buddy, Joel Block...
...How stupid can you get...
...Then, I went home, and thought of my Trixie...
...I did not know you were a TV star...
...Where I could ride a bike into town at the age of eight, and my parents were sure I would be safe...
...And for my little angel and my big wifey and my dogs and my wonderful sister...
...At a neighboring table, but not part of our group, was Seinfeld, and then at another table Ted Forstmann, probably one of the only people that Seinfeld envies...
...It's a warm evening, and there are knots of kids out and Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Malibu, California...
...It didn't really seem to make much of an impression on him...
...Spiritual means, that's the only way...
...My father told me a few years ago: live pmdently...
...It's cheap and clean, and right across from Rockefeller Center...
...There is no praise from Caesar that matches hearing your little 54 The American Spectator February 1995 boy use the same phrases you use...
...Then, to sleep, to dream of how much fun I'm going to have tomorrow when I do my commercials for WMAR, the local TV station that's shifting from CBS to ABC...
...But how can a kid brought up with gunfire and rats and a mother on drugs ever get any organization in his life...
...After thinking about that, I went back to bed and slept for a long time...
...Another is making more money gambling than he ever did working...
...It came from his brain and his word processor and his dot-matrix printer (because he's the kind of guy who does not just run out and buy a laser jet just because everyone else has one): (1) (This one I learned from you...
...Afterwards, I bought a cinnamon roll (another sin against correct eating) at acinnamon-roll stand...
...I got to hold the woman in my arms, sweep her off her feet, and even got to say my favorite soap line, "Quiet, Vicki...
...As I get older, I become more and more convinced that the problem of disorganization in human life is overwhehning...
...I guess that's an anti-Semitic thing...
...I talked to her for a long time...
...I took Ginger, the beautiful substitute dog, the best present I ever got from Alex, for a walk...
...Yes, there is the Russian mafia...
...This time I really started to sob, so I had to hide in my dressing room and calm down...
...She's a great sister...
...Simple food made by loving, caring hands...
...Lunch with my wonderful pal Lothar, a well-to-do Englishman whom I met years ago at a party of wealthy people where I did not belong...
...There was a can of arsenic powder...
...I like Baltimore...
...Only a freak of nature...
...I love just listening to the voices of my colleagues...
...The wife actually pulled aside a stewardess to complain that "It's disgusting that business class has to use the same loos as coach...
...I'm just not a Hollywood kind of guy...
...Friday M y birthday...
...That man just opened his door when cars were driving by on a busy street...
...But then he died not long afterwards and I always felt bad about it...
...There is no touch that means as much as when your little boy reflexively takes your hand when he comes to the street corner...
...Nothing makes you happier than when your son asks you to tell him a story...
...They'll never be satisfied anyway...
...Where there was not one divorced family on my street...
...Attempt to do His will...
...On the way to the set, the driver told me about his Persian girlfriend (I love Persians), about his ambitions to move to L.A...
...After that, it's just every man for himself...
...Manhattan is packed to the gills with shoppers and visitors, and it was the only place I could find...
...I'm the lowest on the Hollywood food chain, a character actor, well known, but no star...
...There she was with a beautiful birthday cake she and John Parlato, the director, and Neil Potts, the crafts services man, had bought for me...
...But the real point is just how vital children are to parents, and how desperately vital kids are to their fathers...
...Forget the atheists...
...and become a director, about his car with 140,000 miles on it...
...Because kids out of school do not organize their lives to work or save or have security...
...Gangs...
...And get as much appreciation...
...10) The nuclear family (spouse and children) is invaluable...
...Don't hurt people...
...Why are our cities so depressed and violent...
...Anyway, this same saintly woman, my sister, is having a party for me...
...I don't want to get old...
...It amazes me that I've been in L.A...
...Now it's forty years or thirty years later, and the well-to-do boy is a famous writer, but he's dying of cancer, so he decides to murder the Welsh boy who humiliated him all those years ago...
...Lots of people eating their meals with their grandchildren and chilThe American Spectator February 1995 53 dren...
...Plus there is a lot of sadness in the land...
...and devoted, genius salesman Barron Thomas...
...and most of all, my strur and her husband, world's hardest working, most devoted family man, Melvin, and their two brilliant kids, Jonathan and Emily...
...I think I have more friends in Sandpoint, Idaho, than I do in L.A...
...Anyway, for some reason, this is all coming to me as I stroll along the pier in Baltimore at night in a fine mist...
...Soundadvice...
...I had a simply perfect Sloppy Joe made by a mother-daughter team of caterers...
...It was completely lean and delicious...
...It's humming...
...I love this life...
...I n the afternoon, I had a visit from Hilda, the nice woman who had a baby to help make it up to her mother that her brother was killed by the Nazis...
...That prompted me to tell him that I was going to be 50 in a few days...
...My parents were so understandably angry at me and unhelpful...
...There are lighting people, sound people, a hip-looking director named John Parlato, a pretty and capable producer named Claire Hartman, and a great—super-great—makeup-andcostume woman named Terry, and everyone has a sort of a Maryland accent, a Tidewater slurring of consonants...
...Are you a child or an adult...
...Her husband abandoned her...
...6) Be open to appreciate history's legacy of beautiful things...
...Those people are dirty...
...I have gotten to love being in Baltimore, a city that's really a very friendly large small town...
...A fter a nap, off to my sister Rachel's apartment in Brooklyn Heights, to attend a lavish party she's giving in my honor on my fiftieth...
...Jim Thompson, whose whereabouts I do not know...
...I love the feeling of being taken care of...
...Anyway, no point in making comparisons...
...People here are so kind...
...Help people...
...He grabs tighter to your lapels and says, "Put me down, you big daddy...
...Drugs...
...That's because they're all alcoholics...
...If I had, I would have behaved more respectfully...
...Hilda has come upon a difficult patch...
...I wandered from person to person and caught up on life...
...He would call me "Jeremiah," and for some reason that drove me absolutely crazy...
...I see," I said...
...I recall that we got horribly lost and someone hid my keys when I left the car to ask directions at a gas station...
...My parents and I talk mostly about what great hopes we have for the new Congress, and what sobering realities the Congress faces...
...Wednesday U p at the crack of dawn at the fabulous Stouffer, where a smiling man brought me my Wall Street Journal, my bacon (yet more forbidden fruit), and a grapefruit (which is very acceptable fruit...
...9) It is good to be a member of a team but not only a member of a team...
...I am from a foreign country...
...I went to sleep very happy...
...Great story," I said...
...Alex had bought me a sort of Caligari-esque birthday cake...
...I'm an Idaho/Brooklyn Heights/Washington, D.C./Arlington, Virginia/Silver Spring and Baltimore, Maryland kind of guy...
...In particular right now, I'm remembering how a boy in junior high school, at a hellhole called Montgomery Hills, used to tease me because my real first name is Jeremy...
...Now that I think of it, all anyone did in junior high was tease...
...I made some drug addicts near my room be quiet...
...Anyway, I inserted the "Quiet, Vicki" line, and the audience loved it...
...There were Al and Sally, my wonderful producer/sociologist pals who are great buds of Newt Gingrich through Al Toffler...
...I noticed that the lobby of our building was graced with a lovely Thai woman who was the concierge...
...How stupid can a man be to not want to spend time with his child...
...Yummy turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce...
...He's a very smart guy who really could have done anything...
...Let's just say I know the principals...
...Manypals from the New York area are there, plus Lothar, who has flown up from Nassau, where he lives...
...In the afternoon, I got to do a scene with a woman in which I play a soap opera character talking to another soap opera character about the new soaps on WMAR...
...I was wrong—as I so often am—to speak so badly about New York last summer...
...That was a miracle of human decency...
...Very often, they're extremely amusing folks...
...I like this advice a lot—except the part about not spending money...
...I have a lot of friends who drink heavily...
...She has a nineyear-old son who loves to play video games...
...Anyway, let it start with me...
...After she took my order, some of the other waiters whispered to her...
...The young woman who served it to me looked like a child...
...The crabcakes were delicious...
...God, it makes sense...
...I guess that's all an anti-Semitic thing, but maybe not...
...My friend Irving Kristol likes to write about how important fathers are to children, and he's totally right...
...My waitress was a German woman...
...We worked our way through a fine meal at Michael's, a publishing hangout on 55th Street where Bob Tyrrell used to eat years ago when it was the Italian Pavilion...
...He also said (and he was a smart guy), "I wonder how long it will be before doctors cure more people than they kill...
...I think maybe it's me who's out of step for not drinking...
...The great guru of free-market economics, Frank Knight of the University of Chicago, had a maxim: Never waste any time you could spend sleeping...
...Out the window, over Massachusetts Avenue, the spindly branches of November...
...At the party was my hero, Peter M. Flanigan, Navy flier, investment banker, former Nixon aide, and mover, who got me started as a White House writer years ago for RN...
...And what a great sister I have...
...5) Don't fight on every street corner...
...At Morton's...
...The last time I came here it was with Ace Warren, now a law professor at Harvard...
...It's not just selfish and mean and anti-social—it's self-defeating...
...What an idiot...
...After the party, Lothar and I took a cab back to Rockefeller Center...
...My mother went to college here for a time, at a place called Goucher...
...I am 50...
...2) Keep high aspirations, moderate expectations, and small needs...
...about, shopping, eating, laughing, and yes, probably teasing each other...
...A reader from the Midwest wrote me a letter asking how long it took to get over losing a dog that you really love...
...I don't blame my parents either, as I think of how I would feel if Little Perfect came home drunk, as he surely will one fine day...
...He also had a word of advice that explains much of modern behavior...
...Even today I get uneasy when people use that name...
...There is no Mercedes so shining as the look in your boy's eyes when he sees you walk in the door and hurls himself into your arms, clutching at you for dear life, and all the while saying, "Let me go, daddy...
...They don't look insane with ambition and anxiety...
...I still remember how furious I was...
...I think police should be paid as much as actors...
...You're so sensitive, and you can't take anti-depressants or anything...
...Do what it takes, but make America safe again...
...In a way, there is a civil war going on...
...I don't want to leave this world, not ever...
...Most important, I would love to have some appreciation of the police and how hard their jobs are...
...Where there was never violence worse than a fistfight...
...She and her boy have been living in her car, which is itself long overdue as a rental from a rent-acar company...
...I couldn't wait to hear what the sound men and gaffers were going to tell me...
...Thank you, God, for having such good friends in Baltimore and for letting me spend one more year with my parents...
...I have my own adages for middle age, including the vital advice that when time in this earthly life becomes short(er), then it's time to start thinking about the next life...
...Thursday T hanksgiving dinner with my Ma and Pa at the Cosmos Club...
...It's about a man who was a student at Eton years ago and was caned by a poor boy from a Welsh coal-mining family who was at Eton on a scholarship...
...Maybe that should be the constitutional amendment: make prayer compulsory...
...My first scene is set in a chemistry lab (surprise...
...There is no stock that can make your heart pound like watching your boy's eyes widen and glow as he sees you walk up to pick him up from school...
...Yes, there is random killing all over America...
...In his usual understated way—he is an economist, after all, not a circus barker—he entitled his list "Advice from H. Stein to B. Stein on his 50th Birthday...
...Still another one has jokes about Ireland...
...I have an idea for a novel," he said...
...But the people in my family all look very young until they die...
...I'm 20," the woman said...
...Wow, it's hard being a kid...
...She came back and said, "I am very sorry...
...Susan Sgarlat, who introduced me to my college girlfriend, the unforgiving Mary Just, who's now a big pal of Hillary...
...I, as a high school student in nearby Silver Spring, used to come here to the Gayetey Burlesque house and watch 0- ?. strippers and the comedians...
...It brought tears to my eyes...
...As I watched the sets getting shifted about, I thought of a basic notion: wherever I go, people older than 25 talk about how it used to be...
...The subway was and is immaculate compared with how it was when I was living in New York twenty years ago...
...Accept all subsidies...
...Jim Bellows, my great editor at the Herald Examiner, and his beautiful wife, Kevin...
...Anyway, my mother had already given me some really fine advice: "When we buy stock, we hope for the best, don't expect a lot, and don't cry if it goes down, and that goes for everything in life...
...my agent, Lois Wallace, a good person to have on your side...
...There's . . . no time for that now...
...Only the Welsh boy is now a famous judge, a Q.C., in London...
Vol. 28 • February 1995 • No. 2
