Revenge of the Scorned
JANOS, LEO
Revenge of the Scorned You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again By Julia Phillips Random House. 573 pp. $22.00. Reviewed by Leo Janos Author, "Crime of Passion"; co-author, "Yeager";...
...But she prefers to locate the blame elsewhere...
...For a while she actually teamed up with Helen Reddy's ex, Jeff Wald, as nasty a piece of work as the town had known since Otto Preminger...
...The whispers about Julia were soon an open secret: She had blown her film career up her nose...
...In perhaps the most revealing (about Julia) passage in the book, she describes the time she and her director went out for dinner: "When dinner was over and we had said our goodnights, we got back in Steven's car...
...When I finished reading Julia Phillips' book, I took a long, hot shower...
...Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, Hollywood's two biggest, shrewdest, most suspicious stars, liked and trusted her...
...Here, for example, is how she recounts a dinner meeting with actress Kathleen Turner: "Her features are rather more pug than they register on film, and her top teeth are done badly...
...By the time the last was released, however, Julia and Michael had split up, and Julia was history as far as Hollywood was concerned...
...The big distraction from my mission to charm her is that her nose is running...
...The upshot was that in 1972 JuliaPhillips became the first woman producer to win the Academy Award for best picture...
...Her attempted revenge is the 573-page poison pen tome called You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again...
...Jul-ee-a that was a real kiss...' Treasure it, pal, it's the one and only...
...We sat in silence for a moment while the car wanned up...
...One of her more complicated relationships was with Spielberg during the making of Close Encounters...
...Otherwise the guy was terrific...
...Oneofthemovies was called The Sting...
...former correspondent, "Time" magazine Back in the early 1970s, Julia Phillips was a sexy, funny and bright young film producer who wore designer clothes costing as much as a used car...
...He pulled away...
...Phillips seems incapable of sharing real intimacy...
...She became persona non grata at the major studios, and has pretty well remained so to this day...
...he looked frightened...
...Her coke habit wound up costing her most of her fortune as well as her reputation...
...In Hollywood everyone uses everyone else, and Julia was no exception...
...More silence during the drive to Burbank and I patted his hand in a comforting gesture before I got out of his car and intomine...
...Either the lady was wired for sound or she managed somehow through her drug mist to keep a diary...
...It is about as meanspirited and nasty as any book I've read not written by Jonathan Swift...
...She treated most of her relationships—including her marriage, apparently—as temporary alliances...
...For someone who was coked out from 1972 onward, Phillips displays a remarkable ability to recreate scenes and dialogue that certainly ring true to this former Hollywood correspondent...
...Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
...She commanded a hard-boiled, street-smart New Yorker toughness that seemed more than a match for the soft-bellied, sweettalking studio moguls she was up against...
...Or take her only in-person view of Sophia Loren: "When she entered just a while ago I thought, She is the most beautiful woman in this room, on earth, but as she gets closer, I can see a line across her forehead where her wig is not set right...
...Hollywood betrayed and discarded her, she feels, mostly because she was a smart woman operating in the tight men's club atmosphere of the studios...
...For no particular reason I put my arms around his neck and stuck my tongue in his mouth.We had a good long kiss...
...Those with whom Phillips was less tenderly acquainted fare little better...
...We turned to each other...
...I can see the snot dripping from her right nostril...
...A more disgustingly sleazy, selfindulgent, vacuous, and revolting cast of characters, though, is hard to imagine...
...Her cutting thumbnails on just about everyone of importance she had truck with are as shrewd as they are cruel...
...it shines in the flickering light of the candle in the center of my table at Le Dome...
...The Sting raked in more than $70 million, making Julia and Michael rich as sultans...
...Over the next couple of years the duo went on to produce one of the most controversial films of the decade, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, and another giant blockbuster...
...Much more important, so did a handsome aspiring director named Tony Bill, who threw in his lot with Julia and her husband Michael in the hope of getting a couple of pictures made that he had been working on with a young writer named David Ward...
...His glasses were tilted at a ridiculous angle...
...As her pursuit of sex became mixed up with her drug habit, a succession of tough tickets blew into her life, causing additional pain and grief...
...Of one she says, "He had a small dick and was a premature ejaculator...
...By the way, any young stud who tumbled into her bed should count himself blessed if he is unable to find his name in the book's index...
...being forced to deal with one another, they fully deserve the high salaries they receive in film land...
...She had been broomed off the troubled Close Encounters set by the studio bosses with the approval of its director, Steven Spielberg...
...Julia Phillips has plenty to be angry about—beginning with herself...
...The things a girl will do just to make a great movie...
...I drove home very fast and brushed my teeth twice before I went to bed...
Vol. 74 • July 1991 • No. 8
