Ill Never Work in This Town Again
Hollywood Memoir Tells All, And Many Don't Want to Hear
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March 14, 1991
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Julia Phillips was so certain her memoirs would offend the Hollywood Establishment that she entitled them "Y'all'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Once more." Just when she walked into the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel on Mon afternoon, she was graciously ushered to a quiet booth with a commanding view of that day'due south wheeling and dealing.
"I moved a king for you today," the maitre d'hotel told her, nodding toward an Asian human a few tables away. The woman who with her husband and partner Michael Phillips produced some of the almost memorable films of the 1970'southward, including "Taxi Driver," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "The Sting," beamed, expressed her appreciation, and presented her benefactor with an autographed copy of her volume.
Elsewhere in Hollywood, though, where Ms. Phillips's profane, no-holds-barred recounting of that heady era has get a main topic of conversation, the reception has non 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'one thousand a fraud today?' " Ms. Phillips said, every bit she nursed a vodka. "That'south about ninety percent of the boondocks, which is why they've been so fearful and and then nasty." Volume Goes Where She Doesn't
Though Ms. Phillips, the beginning woman to win an Academy Award equally a producer, may herself be barred from the executive suites and restaurants she once frequented, her new book, published past Random House, is definitely non. "It's the fastest-selling title in the 15-year history of this store," 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 accept sent their gofers to option upwardly a copy of "You'll Never Eat Dejeuner in This Boondocks Again" tin be happy with what they read. Ms. Phillips said that more twenty people signed releases or affidavits after reading their portrayals and that some passages were removed on communication of lawyers for her publisher. But the material that remains is the stuff of a Hollywood publicity agent'due south nightmare.
Goldie Hawn, ane of the chums Ms. Phillips collected after she won her Oscar in 1974 for "The Sting," has the "cute laugh and the centre made of stone" just is "borderline dirty, with stringy hair -- all the time." Paul Newman is "seriously weird" and "has holes in his head." Of the novelist Erica Jong, whose "Fear of Flying" Ms. Phillips tried to brand into a moving picture, she says, "It is remarkable how much she looks similar Miss Piggy when her face is in repose."
Warren Beatty, on the other mitt, is so "priapic" that when he learns Ms. Phillips has a teen-historic period daughter, he suggests "what about you and me and your daughter," to which Ms. Phillips said she replied, "Nosotros're both too sometime for y'all." She quotes the producer David Geffen as calling her one-time all-time friend Steven Spielberg "selfish, cocky-centered, egomaniacal, and worst of all -- greedy," and adds that she thinks information technology is "a pretty good description." Farther Harsh Words
Ms. Phillips's toughest shots, however, are reserved for Mr. Geffen and the other moguls who actually run Hollywood. Mr. Geffen, who owns $780 million worth of stock in MCA and produces films, plays and records, is the "well-nigh coin-obsessed person I know," the "Donald Trump of Show Business organisation," with a "collagened face" that makes him look similar a "middle-aged infant." The superagent Michael Ovitz is "the Valley viper," who deigns to business concern himself with events in the outside globe "only if there is a 2-movie bargain for one of his clients."
Aaron Spelling, the television powerhouse whose contributions to Western culture include "Charlie'due south Angels," "was obsequious to the indicate of condign one giant tin can of Crisco, he was so oily." The producer Ray Stark, long the ability backside the throne at Columbia Pictures, has "jagged, yellowing teeth" that "emphasize the molelike aspects of his demeanor."
A spokesman for Mr. Spielberg said the director was "totally involved in shooting" his new movie and would have zip to say about the volume. The spokesman, Marvin Levy, added: "There's not a lot anyone can say. She'southward an interesting lady."
Mr. Geffen'southward office did not render a reporter'south phone call for comment. Simply 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 next month, blames "the suits" for what she called Hollywood'south "meanness, ruthlessness and nastiness in the 80'south, which wasn't there before.
"There were games earlier, in that location were a lot of players before, only in that location wasn't this abrasiveness and lack of breeding, as my mother would say. When I started, there were people who wanted to do great things." She Sees Trouble as Social
That supposed decline of standards explains, she says, her de facto adjournment from chic restaurants where Hollywood luminaries like to conduct business over dejeuner. In the onetime days, "you would be in a booth similar this, and right adjacent to you would be a guy yous had fired," she recalled. "The whole drama was: How are people going to deport in public with those who anybody knew they were at war? Everybody was gracious."
Nowadays, in contrast, "it has reached the point where people who are offended by my book have to seek to accept me banned from restaurants because they are afraid they are going to encounter me and don't know how they are going to deal with it."
Ms. Phillips, who grew up in a family of intellectuals in New York and graduated from Mountain Holyoke College, doesn't spare herself either, specially on the subjects of romantic entanglements after her divorce from Michael Phillips and her use of drugs. The nighttime she and her husband won their Oscar, she confesses, she was high on "a diet pill, a small corporeality of coke, two joints, six halves of Valium, which makes iii, and a drinking glass and a half of wine," a level of consumption that soon would exist exceeded, and derail her career.
On another occasion, she snorted cocaine at a business coming together, laying it out in lines on the tabular array in front of nonplused motion-picture show executives. Eventually, she became a freebase aficionado, walking away from a partnership with Mr. Stark after he was unable to provide her with an function that had a private bath in which she could cook and smoke her drugs. In the 1980's, she produced only ane motion-picture show, "The Beat," and that was a flop. Healthier Addictions
Ms. Phillips said she was still an addicted personality, but "now I'1000 addicted to writing and exercise." She is writing a novel whose starting bespeak is the material she was forced to cut from her memoirs for legal reasons, and hopes to make enough money to "move to the south of French republic." She besides said, with some amusement, that she has had an inquiry from a managing director interested in acquiring the moving picture rights to her memoir.
"The giant Hollywood U-turn is starting to happen," she said. "My friend Sue Mengers" -- an amanuensis who Ms. Phillips describes in the book as "evil" and encumbered by "fat thighs" -- called over the weekend and said, " 'Love, I predict flick offers in 3 weeks.' In a supreme burst 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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