Media Share 9/MEDIASHARE_09.ISO/mag&info/e_form11.zip/OVERBYTE.EXE/STEIN.DOC

Text File | 1992-09-16 | 31KB | 477 lines

                    BEN STEIN FINALLY CONQUERS HOLLYWOOD

                               By Louise Carr


                   Ben Stein has just landed a new job, and he's very
          excited about it. "It's my first long-term commercial deal,"
          he says. "I'll be starring in a whole series of promos for
          the Arsenio Hall Show."
                   Hold the phone. Is this the Ben Stein we think it
          is? The  onetime Washington insider/lawyer/Nixon
          speechwriter Ben Stein? The Wall Street Journal/Barron's/New
          York Times Op Ed financial and political columnist Ben
          Stein? The author of a dozen books on everything from drug
          dealing to money management Ben Stein? The former Hollywood
          hot property/bosom buddy of Norman Lear Ben Stein?
                   What we have here is a story of survival and change,
          of someone making it through the egregious 80s in a way
          nobody could have predicted. My three favorite transition
          stories of the last ten years are 1.) the movie publicist
          who became a past-life therapist, 2.) the Episcopal priest
          who now works for Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, and 3.) the
          amazing saga of Ben Stein - which of the three offers the
          most in terms of both life lessons and laughs.
                   Lots of people actively dislike Ben Stein: for his
          Nixon connections, past and present; for the leering sexual
          overtones of some of his writing; for the ease with which he
          seemed to move between the worlds of Washington politics,
          New York journalism and Los Angeles show business, dropping
          names in his wake like an elephant in a circus parade.
                   His success was seen by some as the triumph of the
          nudnik - which is about as close as Yiddish gets to the concept
          of the truly annoying nerd. When he and Joan Rivers got into a
          high-profile legal pissing contest in 1989, over a tacky
          column Stein wrote under a pseudonym for GQ, folks who up
          until then would rather have admitted to herpes than to
          being Rivers fans flocked to take her side.
                   Even the writing he is most proud of - including
          a pioneering piece in Barron's that was praised by James B.
          Stewart in his book "Den of Thieves" as one of the harshest
          and most-talked about indictments of Michael Milken - lost
          some of its glitter when Milken leaked to Spy Magazine a
          letter in which Stein offered his services to Drexel
          Burnham as a sort of moral ombudsman.
                   For these people, the news the Stein now makes most
          of his living playing an annoying science teacher on "The
          Wonder Years" and impersonating a variety of other nerds in
          commercials for everything from cameras to Western Union
          might seem like some sort of divine comeuppance - proof that
          somebody is keeping score after all. For the rest of us,
          it's yet another reminder that life still writes the best
          sitcoms of them all...

                                ***************

                   I first noticed the new Stein during that memorable
          Gorbachev-Yeltsin town meeting on ABC last year, when a
          familiar figure rose from the audience to ask a question: a
          younger, taller, handsomer Henry Kissinger with a
          distinctive voice that combined an upperclass nasal honk and
          the drone of a smoke alarm. A credit appeared under him as
          he spoke: "Actor Ben Stein." And next day in the L.A. Times
          came a quote that was the essence of the Ben Stein I knew:
          "Only in America can somebody like me who worries about
          paying his Mastercard bill and the rats in the dry wall of
          his Malibu house go on TV and question world leaders."
          (Notice the way that, even in a soggy real estate market, he
          inserted a plug for his address.) The piece referred to him
          as "a regular on The Wonder Years television series." I
          remembered hearing that he got the gig after he backed into
          a small but memorable part in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day
          Off. But did he really think of himself as an actor these
          days?
                   Over lunch at Granita, Wolfgang Puck's latest greasy
          spoon next door to a Hughes Market on Pacific Coast Highway,
          on the kind of polished gold day that banishes all doubt
          about why we live in Los Angeles, he brought me up to speed.
          The place was packed: nobody here cared that the stock
          market had just plunged 106 points for no apparent reason or
          that a few miles to the east merchants in Beverly Hills were
          standing in their doorways, wringing their hands like Greek
          peasants. Ben didn't make a reservation ("the line was
          always busy"), but after a small fuss we were shoehorned in
          to a table next to four women of the region.
                   "Have you noticed that the women here, although many
          are beautiful and probably many more are rich, never fully
          smile?" asked Ben. "The edges of their mouths always turn
          down - I refer you to our neighbors - as if to say 'I'm
          holding something back; you'll never catch me being fully
          happy; and if you try anything I'm going to wallop you.' I
          think it's largely genetic: there's nothing more frightening
          in Southern California than the face of the 10-year-daughter
          of a wealthy man. The face of fucking Joseph Stalin was not
          as tough and mean as that face."
                   Okay, Ben - you're still a keen observer of the
          social scene and the female sex. But what is this "actor"
          rap all about?
                   "All I know is that's it great to be able to spend
          the whole day reading arguments about default rates on junk
          bonds, as I'm doing for a book on Milken, then go out for
          yoghurt and have ten college kids say 'Bueller! Beuller!'
          and ask me for my autograph."
                   This from the guy who once was such a hot
          writing/producing property that he had 15 TV and movie deals
          cooking at the same time, who took meetings the way other
          people take Tums and did more pitching than Orel
          Herscheiser? "I now believe acting is by far the best job in
          Hollywood, and that everyone else who earns more money and
          has more job security is doing the shitwork. I sometimes
          wonder why the entire population of the world doesn't come
          to Hollywood to act."


                                ***************

                   Because he is so used to playing both sides of the
          emotional street, in his conversation as well as in his
          columns, Ben Stein appears to appreciate as well as anyone
          the ironies attached to his change of status.
                   In "Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights," a diary
          published in 1988, he asks his agent: "When I came out here,
          I was a pretty hot item. Deals all over the place. New kid
          in town. Now I can't get arrested. What's going
          on?"    Reminded of that comment a few weeks after our Granita
          meeting, he elaborates: "For my 33rd birthday in 1977, I had
          a party at Mr. Chow's in Beverly Hills. We took the private
          room upstairs. My guests were [super agent] Michael Ovitz
          and his wife, [producers/studio execs] Richard Roth and
          Sherry Lansing, Norman and Frances Lear, Joan Didion and
          John Dunne, [ace lawyer] Tom and Ellen Hoberman, [producer]
          Al and Sally Burton. I don't think that any of those people,
          except for Norman Lear and Al Burton, would accept an
          invitation from me for a party now."
                   That kind of acceptance, and its loss, is obviously
          very important to him; it turns out that Stein told the same
          anecdote to the Washington Times last year. In a recent
          column for The American Spectator, he talks about the way
          his "former pals who are now studio heads cut me dead when
          they see me at Morton's."
                   But what you have to keep in mind when you hear or
          read Stein saying these things is that this is no ordinary
          Sammy Glick out of NYU Film School or the mailroom at
          William Morris, whose horizons are like some Saul Steinberg
          painting of the world with Beverly Hills at one end and
          Universal City at the other. Ben Stein is the son of Herbert
          Stein, one of America's leading economists, an adviser to
          Republican Presidents. He grew up in Washington (Carl
          Bernstein was a high school chum), went to Yale Law School,
          worked as a lawyer for the FTC, wrote speeches for Richard
          M. Nixon, had a memorable career at The Wall Street Journal,
          and then was wooed out to Hollywood by Norman Lear. In
          between his acting assignments, he still lectures at
          Pepperdine Law School on ethics, champions the rights of
          small stockholders for Barron's, and is at work on three
          serious books.
                   Still, his fall from what he perceives as Hollywood
          grace casts a heavy shadow. "I would rather be good at that
          kind of thing - pitching, selling, putting projects together
          - than at being a writer, working alone," he says. "I'm
          convinced that most of the joy, profit and satisfaction in
          life come from being part of a group. The only group I ever
          felt comfortable in since I left school was working for
          Nixon. I still count those people among my closest friends."
                   The group which looms largest in Stein's life these
          days is the 12-step program which he joined about four years
          ago. (He described it as Alcoholics Anonymous in a Newsweek
          column, but now says he'd rather not mention it by name.) "I
          started going because I was being beaten to shit by many
          things in my life - work, litigation, excessive use of
          prescription tranqulizers," he explains. "And it has become
          a big, big part of my life. I go to meetings every day when
          I'm out in Malibu. I go because it gives me serenity -
          because life is a scary, screaming jungle full of danger,
          defeat and pain, and I cannot cope without asking for God's
          help.
                   "Right after World War II, Sartre said to Camus,
          'Why don't you join the Communist Party?' And Camus said,
          'Because I don't feel committed to the Communist Party.' And
          Sartre said, 'Join, and then you'll feel committed.' That's
          what happened to me. When I first met people in the program
          and read the 12 steps, I doubled over with laughter. I
          remember saying, 'This is a confidence game - and a cheap,
          crummy one at that.' It isn't; what it has done is given me
          a new circle of friends who don't worship money, at least
          not explicitly, who don't worship themselves, who consider
          you a success if you go through your day without tormenting
          yourself, without poisoning yourself."
                   Stein can also be more critical of the program. In a
          recent American Spectator column, he wrote: "In the meeting
          we all talked solemnly about ourselves and how much
          attention we had to pay to ourselves and how we had to be
          good to ourselves and protect ourselves and ask God to
          protect ourselves and ask everyone else to be interested in
          ourselves. An Iron Law: those who complain the most about
          not taking enough care of themselves are taking far too much
          care already..."
                   The meetings are clearly important to Stein because
          of something he mentions often - loneliness. He is separated
          once again from his wife, Alexandra, whom he met and married
          when they both were young lawyers. They divorced and then
          remarried, but now she lives with their adopted
          four-year-old son Tommy in a house in the Hollywood Hills.
          Ben also owns a condo in the Shoreham Towers in West
          Hollywood, where he sleeps when he has to be at an audition
          or a taping session early in the morning. But his chief
          residence is what he calls "the cheapest house on decent
          geology with an ocean view in Malibu".
                   It is in fact a very pleasant three-bedroom,
          two-level house, past Zuma Beach and the Trancas Market, up
          Encinal Canyon and into a short street where a panorama of
          shore and sea below  sucks your breath away. There is a
          framed Duke of Wellington signature on one wall; a call
          sheet for "Ferris Beuller's Day Off" on another. In the
          bathroom hangs a framed page from TV Guide - a "Cheer" for
          Ben's "honest and funny" portrayal of Mr. Cantwell, the
          boring science teacher on "The Wonder Years." On another wall
          is a large color shot of Ben with five handsome young women
          with great teeth: they turn out to be past and present
          assistants. A rubber likeness of Richard Nixon hangs from a
          peg in the living room. On the morning of his 47th birthday,
          on a deck with new blue-and-white striped chairs which his
          son can spill cereal on during his frequent visits, Ben
          Stein shines his shoes, plays a tape of Martin Luther King's
          "I Have A Dream" speech to get him up for a lecture at
          Pepperdine, and talks about how he got into acting.
                   "My friend Michael Chinich, a casting
          director, asked if I'd like to do an off-screen voice for
          'Ferris Bueller's Day Off.' When I started reading, the
          student extras laughed so hard that  John Hughes decided to
          put me on camera. He knew I'd been a teacher, so he asked me
          to improvise 10 minutes of talking to a class. He didn't
          tell me to be funny, and to this day I still don't quite see
          why what I said was funny. But when I finished, everyone
          burst into applause. Matthew Broderick came up to me
          afterwards and said, 'Man, I love your work. Do you ever
          work in New York?' I still can't get over the idea that
          acting is considered work. The only hard part is hitting
          your mark while talking - the rest is as natural as eating.
                   "From that movie, I got some commercials, then a
          regular gig on 'The Wonder Years,' then more commercials, a
          continuing part in the syndicated series 'Charles In Charge,'
          small parts in movies like Soapdish. And I just finished
          doing my first dramatic role - a really nasty trial lawyer
          in a CBS show 'The Human Factor.' I love it, but it could all
          come to a crashing halt tomorrow."
                   Never one to waste a thought or an emotion, Stein
          works  both sides of the acting street in recent American
          Spectator columns. In one, while a group of actors are
          waiting to audition, an actress looks at him and says to the
          group, "Can you believe this guy is still having to get
          screened by casting directors before he can see the
          producers? At his age?" Ben explains that he's not entirely
          an actor, it's more of a hobby. "I write mostly about ethics
          in finance... Still, her words stung. What was I doing
          there? What a jive concept to be an actor, seeking and
          getting rejection five times a day from total strangers."
          Another time, without even having to audition, he is cast in
          an ABC pilot as a guy in the State Department who knows all
          about foreign countries. "This redeems everything," writes
          Stein." Now I get to play the kind of character I might well
          have been in real life on TV. Usually I actually just play
          who I am, which is supposedly better than just being who I
          am. Anyway, it pays much better to act as someone you are
          rather than just be who you are."
                   The conversation moves to Ben's father and his
          influence on the younger Stein's politics. "A lot of my
          political thinking about the free market economy has been
          influenced by my father," Ben admits. "But he has also been
          influenced by me. His attitude toward the poor and homeless
          has turned around, and he now agrees that this country needs
          what I call a spiritual Marshall Plan." Ben says that his
          own first stirrings of Republicanism came very early: he was
          on the side of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the televised
          Army/McCarthy hearings in 195?. "And I always loved Nixon,
          because I always saw him as the kid on the playground being
          beat up by bullies; he cried and they kept beating him up."
          Ben took the pro-Nixon side in a high school debate, long
          before his father worked for him. "The most depressed I've
          ever been was in the months after Nixon's resignation," he
          says. "I used to sit in my office playing a tape of his
          resignation speech over and over and crying."
                   Even when Ben broke with Nixon over the Vietnam War,
          his parents were understanding. "My father was working as an
          economic adviser at the White House in 1970 when some
          friends and I came down to Washington from Yale for a huge
          peace march. We stayed at my parents' house, and my mother
          made us sandwiches for the march. It was my father who won
          me back to Nixon, who convinced me that Nixon wasn't a
          villain."
                   His feelings about his father also make for good
          columns. In one, a producer in a bungalow at the Beverly
          Hills Hotel - "an emaciated man reading a newsletter about
          gold bullion" - says to Ben during a pitch meeting, "You
          look familiar. You look like that economist Herbert Stein.
          Do you know him?" '
                   "He's my father," I said. "That's why I look like
          him. Knowing him by itself would not have the same effect."
                   "That's what I like about you, boychik," the
          producer said. "You're well-spoken. That goes pretty far in
          this world. You're well-thought and well-spoken..."
                   In another column, Ben goes to Washington to testify
          before a Senate subcommittee about bank deregulation. "This
          is the first time that I'm on a panel with my father, the
          braino economist," he writes. A Tennessee Congressman
          snidely asks if Ben is testifying as an economist or as an
          actor, and the elder Stein reprimands him: "My old Dad
          grabbed his microphone and said, 'The fact that a point has
          been made forcefully does not in any way mean that the point
          is false or mistaken.' I was really happy. How many boys of
          46 get to have their fathers stick up for them at a
          Congressional hearing?"
                   Now comes a sticky question - Ben's relationships
          with and attitudes towards women. His first book in diary
          form, called "DREEMZ" for the license plate on the Mercedes he
          drove when he was making a splash in Hollywood, is full of
          casual sexual encounters, and some women who have worked
          with him in the past have described him as a kind of sexual
          crocodile, always ready to make a move. "It's true," Ben
          says now (although he denies anything that might seem like
          sexual harrassment in the workplace, and offers phone
          numbers of former assistants for verification.) "The most
          important thing in my life used to be being around pretty
          girls. Girls were my first drug, even before tranquilizers.
          Now, I'd say there's no girl in the world more beautiful
          than Trixie, my German short-haired pointer. Spy Magazine,
          which alternates between reviling me and begging me to write
          for them, once referred to me as 'the Lothario of Hollywood
          women.' When I protested, they said, 'We meant to say
          Boswell - not Lothario.'"
                   But time has slowed his conquests. "There's a saying
          in the 12-step program that once you start believing in God
          and in ethical principles, it totally ruins your drinking.
          I've found that it also totally ruins your abilities as an
          effective seducer, an exploiter of women. The last several
          times I've been in a romantic or potentially romantic
          situation with a woman, I've looked at her and thought,
          'Would I rather spend a couple of hours with her or be
          carefully reading the Wall Street Journal?' Every day in the
          Wall Street Journal, I learn something new and different.
          And when I'm done with it, I just fold it up an put it in
          the trash."
                   He would like to be able to do the same thing with
          the unfortunate column he wrote for GQ under the name of
          Bert Hacker about Joan Rivers' supposed lack of feelings
          when her husband died and the letter to wrote to Michael
          Milken in 1988. On the Rivers matter, settled with mutual
          apologies and a payment by the magazine, he says, "Of course
          I regret it unbelievably. I shouldn't have written it; it's
          not my usual line of endeavor. I heard the story from
          several people, passed it on to GQ, and they begged to me to
          write it up under a pseudonym."
                   His defense of the Milken letter is more spirited.
          "On the same day I wrote to Milken, I wrote to a couple of
          other places - Morgan Stanley, the Yale School of
          Organization and Management - also offering my services to
          talk about ethics. My motivation was to try to learn from
          them whether they were giving their young people any ethical
          instruction. One of Drexel's lawyers at Cahill, Gordon - a
          young guy just out of law school, dating a girl who worked
          for me - had seemed to be genuinely puzzled when I suggested
          to him that the firm might have some ethical obligations. He
          told me lots of juicy stuff about Drexel; then when he found
          out I worked for Barron's he threatened to kill me with his
          'raw hands.' I spoke to someone above him at Cahill, Gordon,
          saying that I didn't want to make trouble for him but could
          he please stop threatening me? They thanked me for not
          writing about it and asked if they could do me a favor in
          return. I said, 'Get Milken to talk to me.' They said to
          write to him and they'd back up my request. So that was also
          very much on my mind when I wrote the letter. I should have
          made it very much clearer that I wasn't looking for a job
          there. The other people I wrote to wrote back saying either
          yes or no, but I didn't hear anything from Milken until
          January, 1990, when Spy ran the story. They only ran a few
          lines from the letter, not the last part which made it clear
          I didn't intend to stop writing about him."

                                 ***************

                   It's time for Ben to be off to the Pepperdine
          lecture a few miles down the road. The DREEMZ days of
          Mercedes and Porsches which were always breaking down and
          getting broken into have given way to today's sensible but
          still trendy white Acura sedan. In the Corporate Law class,
          Stein gets a few chuckles with his Ferris Beuller parody of
          a tediously-Socratic prof, then moves into a cogent and
          gripping explanation of why the Milken scandal was in a
          large sense a failure of lawyers. "It's very rare to meet a
          white-collar criminal who was stymied by unhelpful lawyers,"
          he says - explaining that he chose to talk about this
          subject at a school with strong religious ties "because
          what's needed now is some kind of new spiritual direction
          for lawyers."
                   His lecture is part of another side of Ben Stein.
          Jim Meagher, his editor at Barron's, sees him as a muckraker
          in the best American tradition of Lincoln Steffens and I.F.
          Stone. "Ben  is a muckraker not so much for the common man
          but for the small shareholder. He has written on the subject
          of fiduciary responsibility of corporate management, and
          he's opened questions and explored areas that very few - if
          any - other writers have done in the general financial
          press," Meagher points out.
                   Still, It's hard to reconcile this serious, moral
          Ben Stein with the one who eats at Morton's and appears to
          still worship at the Hollywood altar -  who could write
          recently about the movie business, "It made me shake with
          excitement in my freezing cold car. I am only a tiny player
          in the game. I have been beating my brains out against a
          cement wall here for ten years when I had lifetime job
          security in the East."
                   "I still have those same mixed feelings," Stein
          admits. "Hollywood, as some wise person said, is Heaven and
          Hell at the same time - Heaven for those who are succeeding,
          Hell for those who aren't. And it can be Heaven and Hell for
          the same person, who can be totally humiliated at 9 a.m. and
          be on top of the world with a call from his agent at 3 p.m.,
          saying 'Report to such and such a place to act.'"

                                    ***************

                   So what are we to make of this latest phase of Ben
          Stein's life? Is it a true Epiphany, or just some glitch on
          God's radar? His friend Al Burton, who has known him since
          the Norman Lear days, says this about his career: "I think
          what's happened is that Ben has replaced pitching and
          selling two shows to Warners with acting in two shows for
          Warners - and the pay is pretty much the same. My own
          feeling is that he protests too much. I believe he's doing
          very much what he wants to be doing,  although looking
          across the room at Morton's he may be occasionally
          frustrated seeing people who make seven figures a year while
          he's only clearing six. I don't think he's hurting for
          anything, including acclaim.
                   "I take and enjoy Ben with several grains of salt,
          and have since Day One," continues Burton. "Back in the
          1960s, I produced the 'Oscar Levant Show' for five years. You
          remember Oscar? He's the guy who once told Johnny Carson
          that he didn't want to go with the rest of the folks in his
          lunatic asylum on a day trip to Disneyland because he
          preferred his own delusions. Well, Ben says the same kind of
          outrageous things, sometimes just to make me laugh."
                   Here's another theory: acting as a substitute for
          the family life Ben might be missing. As usual, the clues
          are in the recent diaries: "When I first started acting, I
          made it a point to have as little as possible to do with
          other actors," Stein writes. "I had my reservations about
          them... Now, I love talking to actors. We all share stories
          about humiliating things that have happened to us while
          we've been treading the boards. We all know the words to
          Broadway musicals, and can sing along."
                   And then there's the idea of how the set of
          television show comes to be like a home: "It's a good home,
          too. There are no bills, no contractors, no crazed neighbors
          smoking crack and banging their heads against the wall, no
          books to write, no overdue articles..."

                                ***************

                   When Ben called to tell me about his Arsenio gig, he
          also mentioned the fact that there was an article of his
          that morning on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, about
          George Bush and Halcion. "As I was enjoying it in my
          kitchen," he said, "my dog Trixie - for the first time in
          her 12 years - shit on the kitchen floor, right next to me.
          It was as if she was saying, 'So much for you, Mr. Big
          Shot.'"
                   But don't be surprised if you read that same
          anecdote somewhere else before this article appears. Ben
          Stein hates to waste any part of his rich life - even the
          dogshit...


                                  ENDS

Copyright (C) 1992 by OVERBYTE