The smart set entertains thoughts of revolution
By Zoe Heller
ONE of the more curious aspects of LA life is the way in which a certain sector of its middle class is constantly trying to prove the city's cultural standing. The disinterested visitor is likely to find all sorts of things to recommend Los Angeles - beautiful scenery, nice beaches, a pleasant climate and of course the specific, vulgar charm that comes with being Entertainment Capital Of The World.
But the would-be bohemians of the city want you to know that LA also boasts a thriving life of the mind. One highly suspect factoid often used to substantiate this idea has it that Los Angeles represents "the largest book market of any city in the United States". If I had a dollar for every time I've heard an Angeleno say, "People think all we do here is watch movies, but actually we are voracious readers", I wouldn't be flying Economy any more. I don't know, perhaps Angelenos do buy a lot of books. (The vast "libraries" of those movie star mansions in Bel Air have to get filled somehow.) But it is definitely a step too far to claim - as people inevitably do, every time one of the city's gruesome dance groups is putting on a Tribute to Spring - that the LA arts are "as good as anything you'll find in New York".
The attempt to position LA as a cultural mecca has recently received a big boost from the advent of Arianna Stassinopoulos's radical Brentwood salon. The LA Times ran an article about this new intellectual forum the other day, citing it as "precisely the sort of cultural and artistic resource that the city is often accused of not having". As fate would have it, just a few hours after I had read this article, a friend of mine called to say that he had an invitation to the next Stassinopoulos gathering and would I like to go with him? This particular soiree, he explained, was being held to celebrate a new book about Pinochet by the Left-wing journalist (and Arianna's dear friend) Marc Cooper.
Leftist chums are, of course, a relatively recent phenomenon in Stassinopoulos's life. It was only a few years ago, you will remember, that she was being hailed as one of the Boudiccas of America's Right wing. In 1994, when she was still married to the billionaire Michael Huffington, she essentially ran his $30 million campaign to become Republican Senator for California. But Huffington lost the Senate race to the Democratic incumbent, and shortly afterwards he and Stassinopoulos parted ways. He publicly declared his homosexuality and joined the Democratic Party. She abandoned Washington for California and repositioned herself as a populist progressive.
You have to hand it to her; the woman is a lightning-quick study. In her new revolutionary incarnation, Stassinopoulos rejects both the Democrats and the Republicans as equally corrupt and regards civil disobedience as the only way forward. Her latest book, published during the presidential campaign, is Overthrow the Government. On the home page of the overthrowthegov.com website, you will find a cartoon image of Stassinopoulos at a cocktail party, tossing a complacent male voter over her shoulder.
The vast neo-gingerbread mansion that is the Stassinopoulos residence was all lit up when we arrived on the appointed Tuesday evening. We handed over our car to the valet parkers, crunched up the drive and rang the musical doorbell. We were, it seemed, horribly early. Inside, Stassinopoulos was whisking about attending to domestic affairs with her housekeeper and the retinue of canape servers were still changing into their butler and maid outfits. We stood at the bar and chatted with the other premature arrival - a handsome but phenomenally dull Texan who wrote scripts for a Fox sitcom. After a while, I began to want to escape the Texan, so I pretended to need the loo.
The downstairs guest bathroom was a pretty snazzy affair with a sunken Jacuzzi and paper towels arranged in little fans, as if it were a hotel restroom. In order to get to it, I was delighted to discover, you had to pass through a vast, walk-in closet stuffed full of the hostess's clothes. Judging from the number of extremely expensive, brightly chequered, woollen skirt suits, this was the graveyard for Stassinopoulos's redundant Republican-wife costumes.
I stayed in the closet for quite a while, checking out the Right-wing schmatte and when I emerged, the party had got going. Roughly 200 people - a weird mix of highly groomed Hollywood types and considerably less groomed bien-pensant types - were milling about eating stuffed vine leaves and spannokopita. At some point, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening turned up and made one or two vaguely royal circuits of the living room. "Warren," people kept saying as they leapt into his path, "you don't know me, but I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time about . . ."
Personally, I didn't enjoy many intellectual exchanges. For some reason, I kept being approached by young women wanting me to introduce them to eligible men. It was rather sinister. I'm all for playing Cupid, but there is something a bit galling about having twenty-somethings assume, just by looking at you, that you are one of those raddled, giggly old trouts from an Austen novel, whose sole remaining delight in life is brokering the romantic liaisons of the junior set.
Still, Beatty had a harder time, by the looks of it. As I was leaving, some very tenacious old fart had managed to collar him and was sharing his dreary thoughts on Ralph Nader. Beatty had a slightly panicked look in his eye and kept making Must Be Moving On gestures, but the man wouldn't take the hint. "Now about this Stassinopoulos woman," he said when he'd exhausted the Nader issue, "can we trust her?"
"Oh yes," Beatty said, nodding furiously, "she's uh, very much a woman of the Left." Then, capitalising on the momentary distraction caused by a passing tray of miniature raspberry tarts, he turned and fled.