Now, Gentle Readers, On to the Matter of Hollywod Manners and Commerce...

The following letter was found several weeks ago in a Federal Express box placed on the desk of a New York publicist who had gone out to lunch and who has asked to remain unidentified. (The air bill was missing). Besides this letter, which is written on paper of mid-19th century manufacture, the box also contained decrepit galleys of three books: “Hello, He Lied--and Other Truths From the Hollywood Trenches,” by Lynda Obst; “The Vipers’ Club,” by John H. Richardson, and “Hit & Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood,” by Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters. The condition of the galleys is puzzling because the titles are current this season.

This letter is addressed to Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of “Two Years Before the Mast” (1840). Dana sailed for Southern California in 1834 and spent several months there, gathering and preserving hides for the Boston leather trade. To the topmost galley in the box, “Hit & Run,” a note was pinned. (The pin had rusted, discoloring the note and the title page of the galley). The note, in Dana’s hand, said only: “Delivered to me, 5th Oct. 1835. Santa Barbara. RHD.” How these galleys could possibly have come into Dana’s possession and why he never mentioned them in “Two Years Before the Mast” remains a mystery.

The author of this undated letter was a man named Justus Beryl, a Princeton-trained philologist--i.e., linguist--and correspondent of George Eliot and Victor Hugo among many others. Beryl spent the better part of his career working on a glossary of American slang, which was never published. He disappeared in 1877, age 61, while researching the patois of oyster men on the Chesapeake Bay. His wife Eleanor is said to have burned his notes and scattered the ashes--as though they were her husband’s ashes--in the waters of Lake Champlain. She moved to Sarasota, Fla., and never remarried.

The text of Beryl’s epistle to Dana is here reprinted in full.

My Dear Dana,

Your letter came in the afternoon post last Thursday. It would be ungracious not to thank you for the extraordinary privilege of examining these books--if only I could be certain that it is a privilege. Rumor of your discovery had penetrated even to this remote village, and rumor, for once, did not exaggerate. What are we to think of such things? To steady my mind I have been rereading Sir Thomas Browne’s essay on the ancient custom of urn burial. He observes--using what is, for him, not an extravagant metaphor--that even America lay buried for thousands of years, remaining in the urn unto us. Yet who could imagine that America should contain not only its rude and as yet undelineated fate but also these artifacts, which give the appearance, against all reason, of belonging to a year lying more than a century in the future?

I cannot envy the men who must sift these texts for evidence regarding the material civilization of that distant and till now unimaginable year. Still less do I envy the men who must riddle out the meaning of your stumbling upon these relics of the future in that future’s past. It would be easier to believe that this is all a hoax. Yet how many discoveries that later proved genuine have been called a hoax at the time of their first publication?

You say that you have consulted me first as a philologist and second as a man of reason. Philology shall wait upon reason in this instance. After Reynolds had gone, I carried the box into my study, removed the books and, when I had once ceased wondering at their physical appearance, began to read. As I read, I made notes, but soon I laid down my pen and merely read. (Eleanor tells me that she carried food to my chair and that I ate, while reading, but I have no memory of it). The text--for I have almost come to think of these three books as a single work--presented many difficulties to my understanding, some of them insuperable, and yet I read with an appetite that felt at times like salaciousness. Indeed, when at last I had finished reading, my first act was to walk into the hall and study my reflection in the mirror that hangs there. Outwardly, I had not changed. I tell you, it was a relief, and it was a relief, too, to watch the dawn waken this retired corner of the 19th century, where a future such as these books suggest disturbs the dreams of no one but myself.

You assert in your letter that the fact of these books’ existence in no way confirms the factuality of their contents. That is certainly the case, from a purely logical point of view. But they are so consistent among themselves, and the same figures--Tom Hanks, Michael Ovitz, David Geffen, Peter Guber, Jon Peters--appear so often that I cannot help being persuaded that these books portray a world which actually existed--or shall exist, as I should have written. One must, of course, set aside “The Vipers’ Club.” Of the three, it is the only avowed work of fiction. I was struck by the rather hectic clamor with which its author, John H. Richardson, insists upon the fictionality of his novel. “This book is a work of fiction,” he writes. “Although I put a few real people into brief scenes, the things they do and say are also fiction. The rest of my cast is made up. Really . . . . It’s not even a roman clef. Okay?” Mr. Richardson is either deluded regarding the persuasiveness of his narrative skills, or the inhabitants of “Hollywood” are indeed as facile and graceless as the characters in “The Vipers’ Club,” or the audience for which that novel is intended can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction. Perhaps there is some truth in each of these possibilities?

And yet because Mr. Richardson attempts in “The Vipers’ Club” to depict behavior of a kind that is only summarily described in “Hello, He Lied” and “Hit & Run,” it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the character of that behavior. I have in mind not only the material indulgences of these sybaritic men, but also their emotional indulgences; the manner, for example, in which Jon Peters tears his colleagues’ shirts into shreds, comes to blows with actors, leaps on desks and seems perpetually to be screaming. This, despite his rather interesting remark: “Fortunately, my 19 years in the beauty shop served me well. I am used to dealing with temperament.”

Can one judge, merely from the evidence in this novel, the cataclysms a society must have suffered to reach a state of such apparent social debility? I think not. (And yet, as you remark in your letter, reading these books has dealt a fatal blow to your faith in the natural progress of civilization--a faith I have always found naive and arrogant and for which I have often upbraided you. I am only sorry that these books were able to force upon you an unimpassioned skepticism regarding the course of human history while my most pressing and cogent arguments were not).

It is apparent to me that within the society of “Hollywood” the border dividing public behavior from private emotion has been obliterated. Every civilized man and woman knows only too well how rough the country of one’s feelings looks to oneself--how dark the rage, how disconsolate the grief, how intemperate, even, the lust. Yet it remains our duty--to each other and not merely to ourselves--to try to live not in a wilderness of passion, a wasteland whose creatures suffer internal and external discord, but in an open, settled, cultivated landscape, among persons who feel a responsibility to conduct themselves decently, civilly, because they must, perforce, conduct themselves in public. Civility is a struggle before it becomes a habit. Eventually, civility becomes an instinct, though it is as easy to erode as it is difficult to establish.

Yet how differently these matters are arranged in “Hollywood”! Consider the example of Max Fischer, the vituperative producer in “The Vipers’ Club,” or that of Jon Peters, who is, with his partner, Peter Guber, the predominant subject of “Hit & Run.” These men--Fischer and Peters--appear to inhabit a society where civility means only unwelcome restraint, where, in effect, the normative value of the adjective “public” has somehow been erased. For these men passion--which means, alternately, rage and precisely focused self-interest--is a tool, an instrument. (The effect of this passion, this bullying, on their inferiors is, by the way, a cringing conceit that a gentleman would not tolerate in the least of his servants).

Philosophers and men of science have often wondered what purpose the emotions serve--to what end we feel joy or hatred or envy. These men--Fischer and Peters, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Guber--can never have felt the force of that question. They know what purpose their emotions serve: any purpose they wish.

“Never go to a meeting without a strategy,” advises Guber in that peculiar treatise--or is it a primer?--titled “Hello, He Lied.” It is my settled conviction that emotions without strategy are what people who do not inhabit “Hollywood” are presumed to feel. Lynda Obst, who once worked for Guber, counsels her readers against shedding tears at their place of employment, not because doing so might result in a loss of dignity but because shedding tears is ineffective as a means to an end. (The sagacious, linguistically eclectic Mrs. Obst, who is, as she herself admits, a punisher of metaphors--”Like an escalating marital rift,” she writes, “these meetings dangle perilously on the precipice of collapse unless a grand synthesis is quickly found.” One cannot help noticing that thought, like weeping, is also strategically valueless in “Hollywood.” In a world where emotion prevails, thought is too quiet an instrument to be of much utility. Thought, after all, is demonstrative only to the thoughtful.

I am unable to guess what a “movie” was--(or shall be. Damn the confusion!)--except to conclude that it is a theatrical fabrication of some sort--like and yet unlike a play--erected upon the foundation of a “property,” which, if I have not misunderstood, may be, at times, a synonym for a book. (Is it possible, too, that the convergence of a “director,” a “producer,” and a “star” may preclude, for a time at least, the need for a “property?”) If I were to judge “movies” by what I have learned about books since I was an unlettered child--and the evidence is lacking to decide whether books or “movies” are the more debased by such a comparison--there is no premise more certain to result in meretricious sentiment than the search for purity by those who have perverted purity to their own ends. Any person who grows sentimental about redemption--as the men and women of “Hollywood” seem rather cynically to do--has plainly not been redeemed. In my experience, most people who pray to be redeemed by grace do so because they cannot endure the thought of being redeemed by rigor.

It is time for me to retreat, however, from this rather disordered scattering of thoughts on the page--there is the progeny of reading these books!--and to depict, insofar as I am able, my more general hypothesis about the nature of “Hollywood.” Allow me to note, before I enlarge upon this hypothesis, that “Hollywood” is a word that seems, according to the usage prevailing among these authors, to be almost infinitely extensible in meaning. There is a single exception: as a noun--the name of a town or an industry or a cabal--”Hollywood” is never used ironically. When employed as an adjective, however, its significance is often ironic--as in the oft-repeated phrase “by Hollywood standards.” No matter what the context, the presence of the word “Hollywood” in this phrase is clearly intended by these authors to negate the meaning of the word “standards.”

Late in the evening of my second day of reading--it was Saturday night or early Sunday morning--my study grew warm, and I fell into the disordered sleep that Eleanor usually blames on cigar smoke or brandy. Suddenly I awoke with a nagging conviction lodged in my mind. I knew a world that closely resembled the world of “Hollywood” as it is described in these three books, yet I could not put a name to it. (The only names that seemed to remain in my head by that time were Hanks, Ovitz, Geffen, Guber and Peters.) After I had spent perhaps a quarter of an hour idly racking my brain, Eleanor came into the room, her own rest encumbered, she explained, by the memory of my frowning, darkened countenance bent over the pages of these books, which she has begun to call “the pseudepigrapha.” I briefly described to her the features of the world in which I had been immersed. “It sounds,” she said, “like ‘The Beggar’s Opera.’ ” She looked at me with something less than compassion and said, “If you are not going to sleep, then you might at least try to illuminate your reading properly.” With that, she turned up the gas lamps, which had gone dim, and walked out of the room, closing the door quietly behind her and leaving me with the very reference I had been trying vainly to recall.

I need not rehearse “The Beggar’s Opera” for you, of course. [Editor’s note: This play may be more familiar to modern readers in the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill version known as “The Threepenny Opera.”] The parallel between the London society of thieves and cutpurses portrayed in John Gay’s plan (and exemplified by the arch-criminal Macheath) and the society of “Hollywood” depicted in these three books seems obvious, at first glance. Like criminal London in the early 18th century, “Hollywood” is apparently an underworld, a society that traffics with the respectable world and imitates its organizations, while at the same time inverting the values upon which they are based. Consider, for instance, Lynda Obst’s account of one of the hierarchies by means of which “Hollywood” stratifies itself. It seems to her quite natural that in that town, “many are willing to lie, cheat and steal for any opportunity.” What, then, distinguishes those who rise in “Hollywood” from those who do not? Superlative lying, cheating and stealing? Mrs. Obst’s answer surprised me: “The greater the mogul, the shorter the attention span.” This is curious, is it not?

“Hollywood” is indeed a strangely egalitarian and a strangely inegalitarian society. Like the gangs of Macheath’s London, it is open to enterprising youth--particularly those with short attention spans and violent, if self-conscious tempers--though all the while insisting on its exclusivity. As it happens--again one thinks of “The Beggar’s Opera”--no antecedent in life is too strange to debar one from “Hollywood.” For example, you may recall the passage in “Hit & Run” in which a “director” named George Miller, who was trained as a physician, diagnoses Jon Peters, a “producer” who was trained as a ladies’ barber (thereby confirming Mrs. Obst’s analysis of the relation between mental concentration and power). Peters, Miller opines, is “genuinely thought-disordered. The mind can’t focus very clearly on one issue.” Not only has this state of mental disarray never impeded Peters’ career, but it also has been a positive boon.

Like the members of Macheath’s London underworld, the inhabitants of “Hollywood” seem fiercely proud of their argot, which serves, as it does in all secret societies, to distinguish initiates from non-initiates. “A pitch is an idea,” writes Obst. “A development deal is a project; a script approaching the bull’s-eye during packaging is a script (quaint, no?) and after the green light it’s a show.” And how could it be otherwise? Where positions of authority are held in such fleeting fashion--where lying, cheating, and stealing are accepted means of advancement--how better to signify one’s proximity to the powerful than through the use of a rapidly shifting, evanescent series of passwords? Here, perhaps, may lie the utility of the short attention span that Mrs. Obst detects in moguls. Access to power is controlled by those already in power--that is axiomatic. Hence, all of “Hollywood” tries to keep up with the inevitable linguistic fluctuations brought about by the perpetual distraction of those in power. For a philologist, especially one, like myself, who has made a lifelong study of colloquial speech, this is a delightful circumstance. But for those “Hollywood” residents who occupy the outer circles of power, it is yet one more occasion for an unwitting display of gaucherie, in a town where gaucherie is worse than imbecility.

It is a fact, too, that “Hollywood” is enamored of its whores, as are Macheath and his men in “The Beggar’s Opera.” Or, rather, while Macheath’s gang is enamored of actual whores, “Hollywood” is enamored of the idea of whores, for instance in a “movie” called “Pretty Woman.” When an actual whore and madam, Miss Heidi Fleiss, for instance, is flushed among the residents of “Hollywood,” they react with cool disavowal. (Here is a conundrum for you: Which is more debased? A society that defends its whores when they are threatened with arrest? Or a society that abandons them?) There are, I think, several reasons why “Hollywood” prefers the idea of whores to courtesans in the flesh. The most important of these reasons, plainly inscribed in each of these three books, is the fact that whenever possible, the inhabitants of “Hollywood” always choose to discuss a “deal”--a business transaction--rather than an emotional or sexual bond between human beings. (One detects in “Hollywood” a curiously prurient prudery entirely different from our own. We do not fear emotional ties, but the body disarms us.

For them, the body is a tabula rasa--a slate readily wiped clean.) The mere idea of a whore also leaves open the possibility of sentimental redemption in a way that a living, breathing, shopworn street- walker tends, by her very existence, to refute. (As an aside, I found myself wondering whether Miss Heidi Fleiss, in her role as procuress, more nearly resembled a “producer” because, like Guber and Peters, she was so seldom present at the scene of her productions.)

Despite these correspondences, the analogy between “Hollywood” and the world of “The Beggar’s Opera” is imperfect, but instructively so. The criminal gangs of 18th century London--even Macheath’s fictional gang--lived by a harsh internal code, an unrelenting tribal law. The punishment for failure or betrayal, a punishment administered by the gang itself, was necessarily swift and brutal. And, at the end of nearly every criminal career, even Macheath’s, the public executioner waited patiently to claim his victim. Yet in “Hollywood,” to speak only of the internal code by which that society seems to regulate itself, failure and betrayal are routinely punished by promotion, by the bestowal of wealth far beyond the imagination of the people these authors call “the masses” (whoever they might be). That, in my opinion, is a telling difference between 18th century Cheapside and 20th century Beverly Hills. The inhabitants of “Hollywood” --insofar as I am able to judge from these three books--love to claim a reputation for toughness. But where there are no real penalties--and there are none in “Hollywood”--that reputation is merely a fantasy. Despite the proliferation of bullies and whores, despite the belief that intimidation is a form of reasoning, “Hollywood” is not an underworld at all. It is merely a town full of people who love to pretend that they inhabit an underworld and who are sentimental about their own vices. What other conclusion can one draw from the pages of these books?

I must confess, my old friend, that I find myself overtaxed by the contents of these volumes, my peace sorely preyed upon. I have inured myself to the volatility of human language--to the transient violence with which human life is often extinguished. I have tried never to idealize, in my own thoughts, the condition in which most of humanity lives. It is impossible for a man to walk through the streets of New York City or London or Paris without being accosted by scenes of the most degraded humanity, of suffering so intense, and yet so easily relieved, if only someone would attempt to relieve it. Yet how does it happen in this distant future--where the material griefs under which we suffer have, it seems, been largely removed, where the opportunity for true civility, for true civilization seems so great--that men should take such open pride in vulgarity, in childishness, in deceit--in behavior that would not secure them a hearing even among common laborers in our own time? To my mind, that is a mystery fully as great as the existence of these books at all. I am not surprised by it, but I mourn the fact nonetheless.

I shall write again as soon as my head gives up its ceaseless throbbing. Your friend,

Beryl

Postscript: Why do you suppose these people were so fond of Jane Austen?