Life of the Party

Swifty Lazar didn’t invite me to his Oscar night party Wednesday for the 17th consecutive year I have been in L.A., but I don’t care anymore. I have found other amusements.

Until this year I have avoided accepting any other invitation for that evening on the chance that old Swift would decide it might be amusing to introduce a ribald proletarian viewpoint into a room full of cool celebrity glitter.

When, however, he once more didn’t call I said to hell with him and his fluttery collage of showbiz swans and accepted an invitation to party with Real People, not the least of whom was the famous Lobster Man from Mars.

The party was hosted by the T. W. McGarrys of Encino. She is in public relations and he is a fellow columnist.

It all started rather poorly, actually, when earlier in the day I stopped by a liquor store to buy a bottle of Night Train wine as a gift for the host.

Night Train, in case you didn’t know, sells for about a buck-eleven and is meant to be opened at street temperature and consumed directly from a bottle still in its brown paper bag. I was bringing it as a joke. To the best of my knowledge the host, though Irish, does not drink from brown paper bags.

When I asked for the wine at a liquor store, however, the manager observed me with the cold detachment of a moray eel and said he stocked neither Night Train nor any substance remotely similar to it. I remember he was tall and very clean and his bald head glistened under the store’s neon lights.

I, on the other hand, am short and rumpled. I had been writing at home and it was still hours before the party so I saw no need to be shaved and shined. I was wearing my favorite ragged cords and a mustard-stained “I Love Bellflower” T-shirt. My hair was matted and my beard a stubble. I felt like Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen.”

The McGarry party was a blend of many types, including a cluster of good-looking Frenchmen the hostess had found wandering the streets, a man in jeans, sneakers and no socks who apparently thought he was Don Johnson and a teen-age girl who said, “Oh, wow, Tracy Nelson” and “Oh, wow, Christian Slater,” when her contemporaries were featured during the Academy Awards presentations.

Since I have scant interest in anyone younger than 28, I didn’t ask who Tracy and Christian were, though I wish them well in pursuit of their no doubt brilliant careers.

There were several television sets going in the house but the noise of the party itself was such that it was only faintly possible to hear who was winning what. Swifty and Mary Lazar would not have allowed that kind of din at their soiree during the awards ceremonies, but Real People are loud and full of high spirits. One halfway expected at any moment they would break into a lusty peasant song.

I was able to hear, however, when someone pointed to a person wearing a baseball cap and thick glasses and identified him as the Lobster Man from Mars. I thought it was a joke, like the Night Train wine, but learned later that he was an actor who really did play the part of the Lobster Man from Mars in a movie of the same name scheduled for release this summer.

His name is S.D. (Doc) Nemeth and he’s played in maybe a dozen science fiction films, a milieu perfectly suited for someone with thick glasses, an other-world Sean Penn smile and a laugh that only dogs and journalists can hear.

You might remember him as Zit the hunchback in “Sinister Flesh” or onstage as Dr. Victor Frankenstein in “I’m Sorry, the Bridge is Out, You’ll Have to Spend the Night.”

I was delighted to have a celebrity in our midst, though sad to say I do not recall seeing either his movies or his play. “Sinister Flesh,” the story of a mad scientist’s search for immortality, sounds a little familiar, but there comes a time in one’s life when everything seems familiar and everyone begins looking like either George Burns or Michelle Pfeiffer.

Doc Nemeth is a refreshing difference because he resembles neither of them, and in gratitude I am going to make it a point to see him in “The Lobster Man from Mars.”

“Come to the preview if you can,” he said. “I may even wear the lobster costume.” Then he laughed. As he did, I could hear a glass shatter in another room and somewhere someone died under mysterious circumstances and a wolf howled in the Transylvania woods. Who needs Swifty when we’re having this much fun?