Purse Strings Loosen for Violin Benefit

We felt like Gwyneth Paltrow in a costume drama, which left us with one question: Where’s our Golden Globe?

Alas, we had to manage without it Monday evening. We were among a cast of dozens enjoying a private concert in the cavernous living room of Eli and Edye Broad. Oh, yes. Did we mention that we were listening to Itzhak Perlman?

“Since the money is for the Israel Philharmonic, I said to them, ‘Anything over a million dollars, I’ll do it,’ ” said Perlman, who was accompanied by pianist Janet Guggenheim. “I don’t come cheap.”

Indeed, the tariff was pretty steep for the unusual benefit dinner, but, hey, a philanthropist has got to eat. Fifty of the largest donors to the new West Coast branch of the American Friends of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra Violin Fund were thanked with entrees of Spago’s wild, striped bass with parsnip puree in an art-filled gallery of the Broads’ Brentwood manse. The donors had earned their bass by helping the group come close to its $2-million goal. Which only left a measly $150,000 to go.

“There’s just a small deficit,” Susan-Bay Nimoy announced post-bass. “Leonard and I would like to start off by pledging an additional $25,000. Who else is going to stand up?”

In as long as it takes to say “crepe purses filled with chocolate ganache,” the bill was zeroed out. The support group, which also includes Vidal Sassoon, Irwin Winkler, Steven Spielberg, Ginny Mancini and Jonathan Dolgen, is bankrolling the purchase of 15 fine violins for musicians who are recent emigres from the former Soviet Union.

“They’re very poor,” said Perlman, music director of the philharmonic. “They’re playing on miserable instruments, and this really helps improve the basic sound of the orchestra. You can’t even describe how important it is.”

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Spielberg and his latest star were walking arm-in-arm down the media gantlet at the Directors Guild on Monday when she suddenly looked up into his eyes. Her own were slightly damp.

“I was thinking about the town that I came from and how far I have come in these 53 years,” she told him. “It’s just unbelievable.”

Renee Firestone’s journey from her middle-class home in Uzhorod, Hungary, into the caldron of the Holocaust and out again is one of the tales told in October Films’ “The Last Days,” the third documentary produced by Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation and the first for theatrical distribution.

The film, directed by James Moll and produced by June Beallor, premiered with the usual trappings--the stars, their paparazzi shadows, the clinking glasses. For the headliners of “The Last Days,” who include the only Holocaust survivor in Congress, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), the Hollywood hoo-ha was a stark and welcome contrast to their reasons for being cast--so they could tell their stories of surviving part of Hitler’s “final solution,” Germany’s attempt to exterminate Hungary’s Jewry at the end of the war.

Reliving her story for the cameras “was one of the most painful things I have ever experienced,” said Firestone, an Auschwitz survivor who’s now an educator about the Holocaust. “But now that it’s done, I am most grateful to Steven that he gave me this chance.”

Spielberg returned the compliment. “I salute the courage of these survivors to have allowed themselves to return to Hungary, and to the killing fields, and to have survived a holocaust of the memory, which is something that takes almost blind courage to allow yourself to do.”

Irene Lacher’s Out & About column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Page 2.