You Will Never Work Again in Hollywood Book
Hollywood Memoir Tells All, And Many Don't Want to Hear
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March fourteen, 1991
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Julia Phillips was so sure her memoirs would offend the Hollywood Establishment that she entitled them "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again." But when she walked into the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel on Mon afternoon, she was graciously ushered to a tranquility booth with a commanding view of that day's wheeling and dealing.
"I moved a male monarch for you today," the maitre d'hotel told her, nodding toward an Asian man a few tables abroad. The woman who with her husband and partner Michael Phillips produced some of the most memorable films of the 1970's, including "Taxi Commuter," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "The Sting," beamed, expressed her appreciation, and presented her distributor with an autographed re-create of her volume.
Elsewhere in Hollywood, though, where Ms. Phillips'southward profane, no-holds-barred recounting of that heady era has go a primary topic of conversation, the reception has not been so kind. She has been threatened with lawsuits, ignored by business concern associates she has known for 20 years, and banned, she said, from the favorite dining haunts of the Hollywood aristocracy, none of which has surprised her.
"These are all people who wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, 'Are they going to find out I'm a fraud today?' " Ms. Phillips said, as she nursed a vodka. "That's about 90 percent of the boondocks, which is why they've been and so fearful and so nasty." Book Goes Where She Doesn't
Though Ms. Phillips, the first woman to win an Academy Award as a producer, may herself be barred from the executive suites and restaurants she in one case frequented, her new book, published past Random Business firm, is definitely not. "Information technology'due south the fastest-selling title in the xv-yr history of this shop," said Glenn Goldman, owner of Book Soup, a bookshop on Sunset Boulevard with a large Hollywood clientele.
Very few of the actors, directors and producers who have sent their gofers to pick upward a copy of "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again" can exist happy with what they read. Ms. Phillips said that more than than 20 people signed releases or affidavits later reading their portrayals and that some passages were removed on advice of lawyers for her publisher. But the material that remains is the stuff of a Hollywood publicity agent's nightmare.
Goldie Hawn, i of the chums Ms. Phillips collected after she won her Oscar in 1974 for "The Sting," has the "cute laugh and the heart fabricated of stone" just is "borderline dirty, with stringy hair -- all the time." Paul Newman is "seriously weird" and "has holes in his caput." Of the novelist Erica Jong, whose "Fearfulness of Flying" Ms. Phillips tried to make into a movie, she says, "Information technology is remarkable how much she looks similar Miss Piggy when her confront is in repose."
Warren Beatty, on the other paw, is so "priapic" that when he learns Ms. Phillips has a teen-age girl, he suggests "what about you and me and your daughter," to which Ms. Phillips said she replied, "We're both too old for y'all." She quotes the producer David Geffen as calling her former best friend Steven Spielberg "selfish, self-centered, egomaniacal, and worst of all -- greedy," and adds that she thinks it is "a pretty skilful description." Further Harsh Words
Ms. Phillips's toughest shots, however, are reserved for Mr. Geffen and the other moguls who really run Hollywood. Mr. Geffen, who owns $780 meg worth of stock in MCA and produces films, plays and records, is the "nigh money-obsessed person I know," the "Donald Trump of Prove Business organisation," with a "collagened face" that makes him look like a "center-aged baby." The superagent Michael Ovitz is "the Valley viper," who deigns to concern himself with events in the outside world "but if there is a two-picture deal for ane of his clients."
Aaron Spelling, the television powerhouse whose contributions to Western civilisation include "Charlie's Angels," "was obsequious to the point of condign 1 behemothic can of Crisco, he was so oily." The producer Ray Stark, long the ability behind the throne at Columbia Pictures, has "jagged, yellowing teeth" that "emphasize the molelike aspects of his demeanor."
A spokesman for Mr. Spielberg said the managing director was "totally involved in shooting" his new movie and would have nothing to say about the book. The spokesman, Marvin Levy, added: "In that location's not a lot anyone tin can say. She's an interesting lady."
Mr. Geffen's role did not render a reporter'southward telephone call for comment. Just he told The Los Angeles Times, "People are balked that she would write such an ugly, mean-spirited book," and dismissed Ms. Phillips as "i of a group of people who had three successful movies, all prior to 1976."
Ms. Phillips, who will plow 47 adjacent month, blames "the suits" for what she called Hollywood'south "meanness, ruthlessness and nastiness in the 80's, which wasn't in that location earlier.
"There were games before, there were a lot of players earlier, only there wasn't this abrasiveness and lack of convenance, as my mother would say. When I started, there were people who wanted to do cracking things." She Sees Problem as Social
That supposed pass up of standards explains, she says, her de facto banishment from chichi restaurants where Hollywood luminaries similar to carry business over lunch. In the old days, "you would exist in a berth like this, and right side by side to y'all would be a guy you had fired," she recalled. "The whole drama was: How are people going to behave in public with those who everyone knew they were at war? Everybody was gracious."
Nowadays, in contrast, "it has reached the betoken where people who are offended by my book have to seek to have me banned from restaurants because they are agape they are going to run into me and don't know how they are going to deal with it."
Ms. Phillips, who grew up in a family unit of intellectuals in New York and graduated from Mount Holyoke College, doesn't spare herself either, particularly on the subjects of romantic entanglements after her divorce from Michael Phillips and her employ of drugs. The nighttime she and her hubby won their Oscar, she confesses, she was high on "a diet pill, a pocket-sized amount of coke, two joints, six halves of Valium, which makes three, and a glass and a half of wine," a level of consumption that soon would be exceeded, and derail her career.
On some other occasion, she snorted cocaine at a business concern meeting, laying it out in lines on the table in front of nonplused film executives. Eventually, she became a freebase addict, walking away from a partnership with Mr. Stark later on he was unable to provide her with an function that had a individual bathroom in which she could melt and fume her drugs. In the 1980's, she produced only one movie, "The Beat," and that was a flop. Healthier Addictions
Ms. Phillips said she was still an fond personality, simply "now I'm fond to writing and do." She is writing a novel whose starting betoken is the material she was forced to cut from her memoirs for legal reasons, and hopes to make plenty money to "movement to the southward of France." She also said, with some amusement, that she has had an inquiry from a managing director interested in acquiring the movie rights to her memoir.
"The giant Hollywood U-plow is starting to happen," she said. "My friend Sue Mengers" -- an agent who Ms. Phillips describes in the book as "evil" and burdened by "fatty thighs" -- chosen over the weekend and said, " 'Honey, I predict movie offers in three weeks.' In a supreme flare-up of masochism, that could merely happen."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/14/movies/hollywood-memoir-tells-all-and-many-don-t-want-to-hear.html
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