Author Bret Easton Ellis: Writing His Own Rules

The doorman cannot contain his excitement. Reading through the New York Post, he has found one of his tenants mentioned in a gossip column.

“Oh, Mr. Ellis!” the doorman calls out to a chubby-cheeked young man who looks like a worn-out altar boy in his navy blazer and conservative tie. “You’re in the papers again!”

Bret Easton Ellis looks slightly embarrassed and breaks out in a nervous blush. But he hurries over to the doorman’s desk to see himself named in a brief paragraph about the so-called “rich and famous folk” who attended a surprise birthday party for Robin Leach.

He dismisses it with a shrug. “That’s really weird. I don’t even know how I got spotted. I was in there for five minutes with a friend of mine, in the back of the room, in a corner and in the dark.

The Special Problems

“But,” he says to the doorman, “I’m not one to pass up a free drink or a free meal.”

“And listen,” he says to the reporter at his side. “Don’t make it seem like I’m in the columns every week, because I’m not.”

Ah, the special problems of the rich and famous young writer, especially one who penned his first novel “Less Than Zero” while still a freshman at Bennington and who, at 23, had his second book, “The Rules of Attraction,” published this month.

No matter how many times he poses in Armani for Interview magazine, no matter how frequently Jane Pauley interviews him on the “Today” show, no matter how many books or original screenplays he sells to Hollywood, Ellis manages to let everyone know that he’s just the same Bret behind those Wayfarers, the self-described “urban neurotic” and Los Angeles native who has been living on the lower East Side of Manhattan for the last six months.

“What’s the good part about all this? Knowing that I’ll be able to make a living off of writing,” he says.

“The bad? Being mistaken for a shallow, coke-snorting bimbo zombie from L.A. who happened to get his diaries published and land on the best-seller list.

“And having to explain myself to people who meet me for the first time and say, ‘Oh my God, you’re nothing like the character in the book. Have you, like, not gone to the beach in a long time?’ ”

The fact is that Ellis’ life style is so upscale that it more closely resembles a junior stockbroker’s than a writer’s. His large studio apartment, which he moved into in April, is in the fashionable American Felt Building and comes complete with wraparound terrace, varnished wood floors and 20-foot ceiling.

The spacious white room also has a trendy minimalist look--starkly bare walls and the sparest of furnishings of a bed, a drafting table, a high-tech stereo system, a dining set of white patio furniture. And a very large television, turned on to MTV.

“Lately I’ve been thinking of moving,” Ellis, the so-called spokesman for the MTV generation, confides between glances at a Genesis video. “It’s too sterile.”

And neat. Like his coat and tie--a leftover from days at the private Buckley School. There’s none of the clutter, the chaos, the kitsch usually associated with a writer’s lair. There are stacks of books by the bed: “One Hundred Years of Solitude” atop “Fletch” atop “A Farewell to Arms.” And there is a typewriter, though it’s nowhere in sight.

While Ellis penned “Less Than Zero” on the floor of his L.A. bedroom, his work habits are more conventional these days. He writes at the drafting table from late morning to early evening. But the muse within him is coaxed out “only by a lot of pacing, flipping through magazines, getting the mail and opening the fridge a hundred times. Finally, by nightfall, I get stir-crazy and have to get out of the house,” he says.

On this particular day, Ellis grabs a raincoat and umbrella and plunges into a summer downpour. He negotiates the streets like a Manhattan native: crossing illegally at lights, dodging the bumper-to-bumper traffic, sidestepping the ankle-deep oily brown puddles that have formed at every curb.

“I feel so much safer in New York than Los Angeles at the moment,” he says. “When I first heard about the freeway shootings, I thought it was a wild plot the Department of Motor Vehicles concocted to get people to drive safer.”

Too Late for Favorite Restaurant

After a leg-stretching walk, he turns in at a Formica-and-chrome coffee shop. This place wasn’t Ellis’ first choice. But it’s too late to grab lunch at his regular spot, “a very stark nouvelle cuisine place that reminds me of Southern California. You know, pizza with goat cheese. A lot of endive and arugula.”

He stakes out a booth and orders a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato. After a couple of bites, he searches for a napkin to mop up the grease that’s dripped onto his fingers. “Uh, I don’t come here for the food,” he says.

Why come to New York at all? “Because I couldn’t stand being the only pale guy on the beach again,” he quips.

Actually, he moved here in March to be with his Bennington buddies, most of whom are writers or musicians. “After going away to college for four years in Vermont, a lot of my ties and friends in L.A. had kind of drifted off. I also wanted to give New York a shot. See what it was like.”

So far, he likes it. But he grouses constantly about how expensive the city is, even though he’s one of the most highly paid young writers in the country right now.

“I don’t know if I can live here forever. I don’t know if I can afford it in a lot of ways.”

He doesn’t expect to go back home anytime soon. Well, maybe for Christmas to see his father, a real estate investment analyst who lives in Bel-Air, and his mother, a Sherman Oaks housewife. But only if he takes the three-night cross-country trip aboard Amtrak because 18 months ago he developed a phobia about flying.

“Actually, it was probably my book tour in England back then that scared the hell out of me, and not anything to do with planes.”

Ellis is not one of those people who talks about himself very easily. “I’m a firm believer in look at the art, not the artist. Just look at the writing, not the writer.”

But the story of his success is well-known: how he was discovered at Bennington by his writing professor, author Joe McGinnis (“Fatal Vision”); how McGinnis sent some pieces Ellis had written for class to Morgan Entrekin, then an editor at Simon & Schuster and now part of the new guard at Atlantic Monthly Press. Impressed, Entrekin told Ellis to get back to him if he ever had an idea for a novel. Ellis got one while home on vacation from college, and in 1984 he received a $5,000 advance from Simon & Schuster, which lauded “Less Than Zero”--the title comes from an old Elvis Costello song--as “this generation’s ‘Catcher in the Rye.’ ”

A Movie Version, Too

The first printing was set at only 5,000 copies. But the book took off immediately after publication. Ellis puts the latest sales figures at 70,000 in hardcover and an additional 200,000 paperbacks. And the movie version starring Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz comes out next month.

With a second novel behind him, Ellis is being touted even more strenuously as the voice of today’s under-30 generation, which he says makes him uncomfortable.

“All I know is that I’ve written a couple of books, and if people want to take these as examples of the Zeitgeist of what’s going on right now, then fine.

“It’s true that I’m writing about contemporary youth. But I’m also writing about a specific set of upper-middle-class, blitzed-out rich kids who have their own very specific rituals. The problem is there aren’t dozens and dozens of 23-year-old writers who are getting published. So people automatically assume that I speak for all. But I don’t pretend to be a sociologist.”

Ready for the Downside

And he is ready for the reviews to be mostly negative.

“I was warned by people who said, ‘OK, you better get prepared for the Second Book Syndrome’--which, as I understand it, is once you have a first book that is that popular and that big, then really no matter what the literary merit of this book, you will be the excuse to attack it.”

As the afternoon turns into dusk and the coffee shop starts setting up for dinner, Ellis abandons his greasy lunch in favor of a Diet Coke and an iced tea. He also abandons his flip, offhand way of talking to adopt a detached and analytical tone that is genuinely thoughtful.

“Critics don’t bother me. I’m not really writing for praise or anything. So good reviews don’t really excite me too much and bad reviews don’t threaten me.

“And there’s been so much publicity about Jay (McInerney) and Tama (Janowitz) and me that it’s kind of understandable how someone would want to do a deconstructionalist piece on us. But I don’t care. I don’t want to sound this blase about it. But I really don’t.”

Nor does he worry about getting older and outgrowing his status as a prodigy. If anything, he says he feels “relieved” about it. “There’s always the chance I’ll be washed up by 25. But, hopefully, I’ll be taken a little more seriously.”

He grins goofily when he thinks of the more absurd articles written about him, like “me and Whitney Houston in the ‘Up and Coming’ section of People magazine.” Or the ego feed of doing the “Today” show, “which is actually a nice experience. They know who you are and they’ve read the book. It’s not like they’re sitting there going, ‘Uh, you’re a pianist, right?’ ”

Still, he steadfastly refuses to be interviewed by Geraldo Rivera. And he won’t do Scotch ads. And he turned down a Los Angeles daytime talk show. “My agent was very adamant about my doing that. But when I found out I was going to be between a Tina Turner look-alike contest winner and some dogs that can dance, I said, ‘Absolutely not!’ ”

The check comes. He grabs it, and then remembers himself. “Gee, I forgot that the interviewer pays for lunch,” he says sheepishly, handing it over. “I should have suggested someplace expensive.” He’s back to that coolly ironic way with words he has.

At times, it’s hard to tell if he’s serious or joking. Like when he talks about his third novel, which probably will be published in 1989.

“I can say it’s definitely not a report about my experiences,” he deadpans. “It’s a narrative about a mass murderer.”

Richard Eder reviews Bret Easton Ellis’ “The Rules of Attraction” in Book Review.