This whole thing started with an email exchange last Summer. It went like this:

She: “I watched “Chasing Amy,” with Ben Affleck and Joey Somebody—lesbian falls in love with guy, guy is finally OK with her woman-past but finds out that she has slept with men before—she had led him to believe that he was the first. It ends messily with a gay sub-plot introduced, and in the end no one’s happy. At least it wasn’t a Hollywood ending.”

Me: “You do realize, don’t you that every time you say something like that you are insulting my husband, and our friends, relatives, colleagues, and me for that matter? Hollywood makes a lot of movies. With a lot of endings. This may have been a good one or a crummy one, but it was a “Hollywood” ending. The end of Citizen Kane was a Hollywood ending. Not to mention Schindler’s List.”

After a feeble protest, she conceded that point. Hard not to, I suppose but she made a couple of documentaries once (miserable little productions embarrassingly badly done in every way imaginable and some not) so she’s a “film-maker” (Artiste) and Hollywood is (yawn) the antithesis of Art. Art meaning really lousy boring interviews in this case, in self-conscious black and white. Two 30 minute jobs with nauseating camera angles.

Hollywood, she tells me conspiratorially, is casting couches and drug addicts, petulant stars and producers with cigars. (I’m not kidding.) Hollywood (to/in which she had never been) is something she knows about because she’s “in the business” too. (The documentaries, remember, and she was once a secretary at network in New York for a couple of months. She knows, she tells me “how movies really get made” and the kind of people who make them. She knows because her ex-husband, a lawyer who had the good sense to divorce her as soon as possible, was on TV once in Boston.

That’s Boston, you understand, which unlike LA, is a cultural center. Granted, it’s pretty easy to miss LACMA and Pepperdine and the LA Philharmonic and most of the other cultural/educational centers in this town, tucked away as they are away from the tourist traps, but it’s pretty hard to overlook the Getty or UCLA, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re ever here, actually in town.

But I kind of liked her in the beginning - we got on in a sort of junior-high girlfriends way - my having to dig a bit to resurrect that particular persona, but it was fun for awhile. A head-clean. So in the end, after a bit of tedious wrangling that looked like stimulating repartee at the time, I invited her down to LA to see for herself.

My husband is the former head of three major motion picture studios and with forty-plus years in the business, I figured he could (as he has done so many other times with larger-souled guests) illuminate the magic, the immense achievement, the amazing, blazing talent, people, process, heartache, glory, common sense, loyalty, teamwork, stardust, discomfort, sacrifice, misery, innovation, imagination, discipline, money and guts it takes to make a movie - a real one. The kind she and her friends pay money every week to see so that they can go home and write smug little cheap-shot emails to each other.

So we host this houseguest, this administrator at an Ivy League College (let’s call it Princeton because it isn’t) to which she keeps referring as “my school” for a (god how could we be so stupid?) week. She never went to Princeton, or any other Ivy, you understand, she just works there. I’ve never heard any graduate of Princeton refer to it as “my school” but why should that annoy anyone? Even if inserted too often, too irrelevantly, in too many sentences. Even coupled with the continuous use of “my town, my group (a so-called literary society which is not, in fact, hers) and my bath, my dinner, my hotel. Like, it’s never “I think I’ll take a bath now” or “get back to the hotel”. Always my, my, mine. Still, let’s not be small.

It’s only that territory seems to matter a bit more these days and all these pseudo-genteel “mys” start to look like passive aggressive little pisses on the perimeters of unearned territory. Anyway, we take her to meet our friends -who just happen to be some of the most famous names in the business - producers, directors, actors, movers, shakers, idols, talent. Real talent. But friends of ours, first and foremost.

And to our consternation, each time we greet them and turn to introduce her, she moves in front of us before we can utter a word and with a rapier-like movement thrusts her hand out like a weapon, grabs theirs, and says aggressively and coyly at the same time, “Hi I’m Erin - I’m the one you don’t know.” And she sandwiches herself between our friends and us, awkwardly, rudely, uncomfortably.

But then this is Hollywood - no one has any manners, do they? Our friends’ eyebrows lift over her head - sharp, surprised and not altogether pleasant looks pass between us - and, even while they murmur some gracious reply, the corridor of communication begins to narrow. We try to open it again over dinner. It doesn’t work.

The main word during the meal is “I.” She writes for the local paper in her little hamlet, population 400, so she’s a writer too. Knows the heat of a deadline, she explains chummily to several Academy Award nominated (and winning) writers, directors and producers over several hours at each of several $500.00 + meals we treat her to. She never even picks up the tip. Not once in seven days. Not even at Starbucks. Not that we would have minded if she hadn’t insisted, in fact predicated her visit on the promise that we’d let her take us to dinner one night. Or lunch. But then, you don’t need to keep your word to Hollywood people.

She wasn’t exactly a boor, despite her putting her shod feet (and worse- don’t ask me to explain) all over our butter-soft goatskin sectional my husband had sent over from Italy when he was there doing a picture. We didn’t mention that it cost more than she earns in a year, (or would cost more than she earns in a month to repair) but she didn’t remove her feet or stop straddling the back of it the first time we asked, politely - responding only that she “always sits on couches this way.” Mentioning that it was very delicate and very expensive to repair of course merely confirmed her suspicion that money is all Hollywood people think about.

I don’t mind the commentary on my judgment, from my real friends. I deserve it. I don’t mind the “Have any more friends you want us to meet, Harrison?” which inevitably pops up at social gatherings these days. Despite the reputation built by outsiders for outsiders, Hollywood professionals (real Hollywood, real professionals) don’t like frauds. Or, as one prolific screenwriter friend pointed out, “little semi-liars.”

She wasn’t exactly a liar, despite the way she changed her stories depending on audience - sometimes with such a head-spinning volte-face that we’d all look at each other and blink. She wasn’t exactly an ingrate, despite the fact than all of her references to us in the dinner conversations with our friends were small petty jibes in an attempt to be cool. (“But Harrison, I was just kidding!) She wasn’t even all that irritating before she came down here. Must have been Hollywood. It does that to people, you know.

~

Oh - You know the saying that “those who can, do”?

It’s probably true, largely. But you know what?

Those who can’t, shouldn’t try.

They really shouldn’t.