I wanted to understand these people somehow. Not that I was fooled. I eavesdropped, I heard, I knew what they really thought of the press. One day at La Scala Boutique I overheard David Janssen telling someone, "Oh, he's a barrel of laughs if you want to bore yourself to death. But my wife likes to see her name in the paper. So we invite him for dinner once in a while." I understood. But even the journalist is part of the machinery here, and the machinery must be oiled at all costs. . . . Al Pacino calls from Jamaica to make sure you got the quotes right; he's worried. Jeffrey Katzenberg calls back "to make sure you got enough." Dawn Steel tells you three times in a half hour how young you look. Liz Smith lets you sit in her office and take down every word, but seems surprised you're there day after day. Lucille Ball gets angry if you are even five minutes late ("Traffic, honey, or what?"). Mike Nichols is a complete snob. Anne Bancroft gets offended when you offer to walk her home -- questions s was prepared for, but she's not prepared for you to walk her home. That's too close. . . .

But you do not print most of the above information because you know better. That's the radar you aim for -- the sense of knowing how far to go in a company town. . . . What Ray Stark says about Mike Ovitz isn't to be used in the hometown paper because the business managers and the children and the spouses and the lawyers and the service people, for god's sake, read it.

So you make people bright, or brittle, but you don't make fun for them or be mean. Because they remember every mention of every dribble of coleslaw sliding off the chin -- every slight mention of bad manners is remembered for years, and verbatim.

For many of these people identity itself comes from being mentioned in a column -- that's where their "character" lives, and stars. Always the right angle, please. The journalists -- the A journalists -- get the best two hours of a star's life.

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