Colliding with the stars

In our town, the incensed driver shaking a fist when you run a red light could be George Clooney or Zooey Deschanel. That person in line with you at Intelligentsia in Silver Lake doesn’t just look like the bassist in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he is the bassist in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But we’re cool: We don’t stare; we hardly ever cross the line that divides Them and Us. Until it’s unavoidable. What follow are true adventures in Tinseltown.

Bringing up baby

By Mary Heffron Arno

I don’t mean to be a name-dropper, but I honestly think of Arianna Huffington as a friend even though I haven’t spoken to her in person for almost a decade.

At one point, when our lives crossed in Los Angeles , we saw quite a lot of each other. When I was pregnant with my now 13-year-old twin sons, we even had a “date” to a screening of “Bulworth.” Those were the days before Arianna drove and before I had a cellphone and, at one point, while I was trying to park, she handed me her cell and instructed me to talk to one of her daughters to prove that Mom, divorced, wasn’t out with a man.

After the film, Arianna introduced me to her good friends Warren and Annette. Annette had recently given birth, and she put her lovely thin arm around my enormous girth and whispered in my ear to come with her to a quiet corner, where she would tell me how to survive being a working mom. I followed her and leaned toward her cool alto voice to hear the revelation of how she remained so slim, so perfect, such a babe.

“A swing-shift nanny,” she breathed.

“Huh?” I thought. It must have translated to a stupid look on my face.

“Someone,” she continued, “to take over from the day nanny and ease into the night nanny.”

“Aha,” I agreed in the recesses of my brain. The stupid look must have morphed to “Oh, right, I get it now,” prompting the beauteous professor Annette to continue.

“And in the meantime …”

I waited expectantly.

“The pregnancy massage.”

By now, I was rapt. I stared into her pulchritude, counting the tiny creases around her eyes. “I have the most marvelous person,” she continued. “I’ll give you his number. Where do you live?”

Oops. Could I fake this one? Name a street that would keep her thinking we had anything in common? Better just get it over with.”The Valley,”I said.

“Oh.” She smiled, bringing up more wrinkles that somehow didn’t detract from her loveliness and managed to convey simultaneously sympathy and disinterest. “I don’t think he goes there.”

She walked back to Warren and Arianna and out of my life.

Mary Heffron Arno just finished her first novel, “Thanksgiving.” [email protected]

Cher’s blue period

By Diana Wagman

I was brand new to Los Angeles when I got a job in the children’s book department at long-gone Hunter’s Books in Beverly Hills. I had followed a boy to L.A. The boy didn’t work out, but the job was good, and Gladys, my book-obsessed boss, was a wonderful inspiration. I wanted to write novels. It would be almost 20 years before I succeeded.

One day, a woman and two assistants came in. The woman wore a floppy brimmed hat and dark glasses, a big sweater and loose jeans. It was obvious she was “somebody.” Her long black hair was the giveaway. It was Cher — beneath the disguise.

She trailed through the store, and to my great surprise and excitement, she wandered into the children’s section. Gladys immediately took her break. That left me. Cher looked at shelf after shelf of books and then stopped before our special series. This was a collection of classics,”Peter Pan,””The Swiss Family Robinson” and 28 more titles, each beautifully bound in a deep blue leather with gold lettering.

Cher considered. She took off the dark glasses and stood back and looked at the volumes, arrayed like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, back when there was such a thing. Finally she nodded. She wanted them. All 30. They were very expensive books, but I figured she could afford it. I rang them up; someone paid. I handed a stack of 15 to each assistant.

“Your kids will love these,” I said. She looked at me blankly. “Or other people’s kids,” I backpedaled.

She put her head back and stared at me down that long Roman nose. “No one’s going to read them,” she said. “The color is perfect. They match the couch.”

Back then I was shocked and outraged: The books would be wasted. Now that I’ve lived here so long — worked in film, had kids at private school, heard everyone else’s stories — it almost seems normal.

Diana Wagman is the author of the novels “Skin Deep,” “Spontaneous” and “Bump.”

Driving Mr. Hockney

By D.J. Waldie

The writer Lawrence Weschler was invited to All Saints Church in Pasadena in 2005 to talk about the evils he had found in the Bosnian war and what little good had come from it (which he wrote about in “Vermeer in Bosnia”). Weschler knew the painter David Hockney. Weschler also knew me. He invited both of us to hear his talk.

I reminded Weschler that I do not drive, but I could get to Pasadena and back again by bus and train and on foot. Getting there took two hours and 30 minutes.

When the talk ended that evening, Weschler stopped me before I started for the Gold Line. He told me that he’d arranged a ride at least as far as the train station. And so I was introduced to David Hockney.

Hockney had come to Los Angeles in 1964 for many reasons: our light, our freedom and our unrestrained mobility. He bought a car almost as soon as he arrived from England, taught himself to drive, got his license within a week (they were giving them away, he said) and began to see Los Angeles as we all do — from behind a windshield. From that perspective came the photomontage “Pearblossom Hwy.,” which Hockney called a picture about driving without the car being in it, and the panorama “Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio” and other Los Angeles landscapes through which the sinuous line of a highway runs.

By the time I met Hockney, though, he had given up driving (and was soon to return home to Yorkshire). I had given up driving in 1966 after a few unhappy months behind the wheel and a minor traffic accident. So it was Hockney’s assistant who drove us from the church parking lot, Hockney sitting next to him in front. I sat in back.

Our not driving, the condition of public transit and place of cars in Los Angeles — that’s what we talked about in the 10 minutes it took to get to the train station. We were briefly strangers together; two mild, polite, older men in conversation about an essential aspect of Los Angeles that both of us now knew at one remove, only as passengers.

Our conversation was the talk of those who are dependent on other people to negotiate a way home. But there was something more, in retrospect, to the windshield view of half-deserted Pasadena that we shared, a gap between us and the street that was enforced by the surrounding glass, the optical illusion of Los Angeles that makes some of us — including celebrities — doubt where we are and our place here.

I was dropped off at the top of the stairs at Lake Avenue that lead down to the tracks. I rode the Gold Line back to Union Station, the Red Line into downtown, the Blue Line to Long Beach and a cab from Long Beach back home.

It took three hours.

D.J. Waldie’s newest book, in collaboration with Diane Keaton, is “House.” He is a contributing editor for The Times. He blogs at KCET UpDaily.

Jailhouse confidential

By David Kipen

Ihad only recently found myself necking with my first-grade teacher, so I was already in the habit of expecting the unexpected. This was around the time I used to manage the Nuart Theatre. I’d zero out the cash box around midnight, count it into a heavy bag with a lock on it, walk to my Uncle Dick’s old Buick Slylark, drive the few blocks south to the First Interstate branch on Olympic and make the cash drop.

I should mention that I’d been rear-ended not long before. The Skylark’s buckled, unlatchable trunk lid blocked the sightline from my rear-view mirror, so a mechanic had pried it clean off for me. As a result, my trunk looked more like a rumble seat. I’d called in to the garden lady on KCRW — public radio had a lot more niche programming in those days — and asked about suitable plantings. She recommended succulents. Dubiously inspired, I planted a bed of ice plant where the trunk used to be.

Turning your trunk into a planter isn’t illegal, of course, but one night after the cash drop, it was excuse enough for a cop in a passing squad car to run my plates. In those days, I was not the incredibly mature man I am now, and my tags had expired. In my rear-view mirror, I could see the red-white-and-blue cherries of the cruiser, twinkling through the ice plant.

Next thing I knew, I was booked, fingerprinted and placed in a holding cell of the West Los Angeles jail. There in the cell, a pleasant-looking young man raised his eyebrows at me in mild surprise.

Not enough people know this, but there is a right thing to say when you unexpectedly recognize a public figure. If possible, I think, you should compliment them on something that not enough people have appreciated. Coming up with a compliment should not have been hard for me that night: I was looking at Christian Slater, and I had liked him in more than one recent movie.

Never mind whether an impromptu career appreciation would have been appropriate in a holding cell of the West Los Angeles jail. Instead, I did something stupid. Rather than coolly thank him for “Heathers,” my hyperventilating brain got stuck on “Just wait till I tell everybody about the night I spent in jail with Christian Slater!”

As a result, I have little to no idea what it was like to spend a night in jail with Christian Slater. I only know what it was like to sit in a cell and anticipate telling people about spending a night in jail with Christian Slater, which is less interesting.

We chatted briefly — about what, I have no idea. I do remember that Slater was nicer than I would have been in his place. “He was nice” isn’t very juicy, I know. But the cops kicked us both before I got to ask him what Winona Ryder is really like.

Here’s the lasting lesson from the whole megillah: The next time you find yourself in accidental close quarters with a public figure, a) talk to them or you’ll kick yourself, and b) actually listen to what they say. Never start savoring the anecdote, I vowed that night, until it actually happens.

Celebrities have avoided me ever since.

David Kipen, founder of the bookstore Libros Schmibros, is editing a history of Southern California told through diaries and letters. [email protected].

The reading A-list

By Lynell George

Many shopping mall face-lifts ago, I had a job in a bookstore in Century City. Because of its location — just up the street from 20th Century Fox and a quick jog away from several big talent agencies (ICM, CAA) — our store was something of a waiting room and a rest stop for the famous, pausing between other life transactions.

I was never very adept at recognizing “famous” faces, but we were frequented by the sort that forced a second look. Ray Bradbury would wheel up in a rush on his bicycle, lean it against the wall by the door and dash inside. I helped Sidney Poitier pick out gifts, almost tripped over Gene Wilder in the health section. Lots of comedians passed through too; “Laugh-In’s” Dick Martin; Jim Nabors; Marty Allen greeted me with a “Hiya, dream girl” over and over when the musical of the same name was up at the Shubert Theatre just across Avenue of the Stars.

Most of the time the stars came and went without a second glance. Customers and staff maintained the nonchalance of Angelenos used to detouring around movie shoots and willing to respect the notion that there should be some transaction-less spaces, even in city so focused on sealing the deal. I’d slide purchases across the counter, tell the famous face to “come again.” Sometimes, a patron might quietly remark, “That was Joan Collins, wasn’t it?”

Some of the stars might have preferred more fanfare. I remember my co-worker Dan asking a blond at the counter, “Two forms of ID, please,” when she pulled out a checkbook. She dealt him a “you’ve gotta be kidding” look. It was Bo Derek and, as I recall, she left the books on the counter.

Mostly both sides stayed behind an invisible wall. But sometimes that wall dissolved.

At Christmas, we’d be hit by terrible crowds; the store was so narrow it was hard to “ring and wrap” without the line getting out of control. One of my clearest memories was a very compassionate — and always patient — Patty Duke-Astin, who, eyeing the barrage, offered to come back behind the counter and help wrap. And she meant it.

Another time a clerk I’ll call Lily was working the counter with me in the long lull after the lunch rush. Lily was a vividly avid Rod Stewart fan. She frequently wore some Stewart-related talisman — T-shirt, a tiger print something (this was the year of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”). That day Stewart strolled in, discernible even by me, with his disheveled rooster/mullet. When he hit the door, he locked eyes with Lily. There was an overlong pause that almost felt like stop motion. Lily began to cry. Silently. In one gesture that looked like a dance move, he turned and hit the door. Lily went home early.

To my surprise, I learned even I wasn’t exempt. I was startled one evening to see the great jazz singer Carmen McRae browsing with a child I took to be her grandson. They brought a stack of titles to the counter, and before I even realized I was breaking my nonchalance rule, I spoke. I told her, quietly, how much her music meant to me. She, not known for tolerating frivolousness, paused, and I had a flashback of Rod Stewart running out the door. But she smiled and said thank you — surprised, I think, at the avidness of a 20-year-old. And to my surprise, she offered me an autograph.

In that moment, I understood that sometimes star transactions aren’t always taking but can be, in the right moment, an act of heartfelt giving, a moment to pay (and accept) the sincere acknowledgment of a gift — a long-ago performance, a keepsake piece of art, a three-minute vinyl track — particularly in the land of surface interactions.

Lynell George is an L.A.-based freelance writer and an assistant professor of English/journalism at Loyola Marymount University.