Ahh, Satisfaction : Life’s Little Pleasures Often Come Loaded--With Guilt

You can find him loitering in the junk food aisle at Gelson’s, his eyes darting between nuts and pretzels, his hands rummaging among candy and cookies, his mind dreaming about a repast consisting of onion rings and Malomars.

This is no child seeking instant gratification, or a pimply-faced teen-ager who ought to know better, or even an obese adult with a serious sweet tooth. No, this is Piero Selvaggio, an urbane restaurateur with a well-educated palate, the owner of a Santa Monica institution--Valentino--that serves some of the finest food in town.

“I’m amazed when I catch myself munching and crunching--and that’s what I do--on a package of potato chips,” he says. “It is something I wouldn’t admit to my customers. They think I know only about Champagne and truffles.”

Selvaggio isn’t the world’s only closet junk-food addict, of course, nor is he the only one suffering from a weakness that he finds hard to comprehend and even harder to control. Although not all of us sneak Twinkies when nobody’s looking, most of us are fond of a few things that we can’t help enjoying even while our consciences are telling us they’re wrong, weird or just plain warped. Unlike the things we love to hate--Leona Helmsley, come on down!--these are the things we hate to love.

Call them guilty pleasures.

For Southern California automotive entrepreneur Don Prieto, it’s driving whiplash-inducing muscle cars that generate scads of horsepower--and pollution. “They use so much fuel that it’s kind of rude,” he says. “I love them even though they’re socially irresponsible.”

For Los Angeles hand model Bill Karp, it’s doing something that might damage his valuable mitts (which are insured for $1 million). “I have four horses and two Ferraris,” he says. “For me, to clean out the stables or to wash my cars myself--that’s a guilty pleasure.”

For prize-winning novelist Harriet Doerr, it’s not having any to confess. “I haven’t read a single book by Danielle Steel or Sidney Sheldon, and I’ve read only one book by--what’s that man’s name?--James Michener,” she says apologetically. “You probably find this hard to believe, but in my spare time, I always read books that I think are going to be good.”

Guilty pleasures can be harmless (sleeping late) or criminal (shoplifting), silly (watching bad movies) or sensual (too many to mention), mainstream (bowling) or bizarre (collecting cards advertising telephone sex--more on this later).

The common thread in all of these activities is that we enjoy them despite our better judgment. Not for nothing is the road to hell said to be paved with good intentions.

“People often do things that are intellectually repugnant to them,” says Walter A. Woods, a consumer psychologist in Carrollton, Ga. “We have an intellectual perception of things and then we have a sensory attraction to things, and the two don’t always meet. For example, I sometimes watch boxing. I think it’s a horrible sport, but it has a primitive kind of attraction.”

As guilty pleasures go, the most socially acceptable--and popular--is probably un-health food. We’re talking hard-core calories here.

For instance, Robert Trager, general manager of the Carnegie Deli in Beverly Hills, confesses that he can’t go to sleep unless he snacks on a glass of cold milk and Entenmann’s chocolate doughnuts. “It’s a ritual,” he says. “I have at least two a sitting. If I’m depressed, a whole box.”

Ken Frank runs an entirely different sort of establishment--the elegant French restaurant La Toque on Sunset Boulevard. But he, too, can be found grazing in some unlikely territory.

“On my days off, instead of heading for a swanky temple of fine cuisine, I like to eat take-out Chinese food or something barbecued in my back yard. I also go to McDonald’s with my son,” he says. “Their French fries are really good.”

Frank insists he doesn’t feel guilty when scarfing down a Big Mac, although he acknowledges that other people think he ought to.

Los Angeles poet Amy Gerstler ran up against a similar problem when she spent an immensely enjoyable summer reading Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled Mike Hammer detective novels.

“Most people reacted by saying, ‘Why are you reading that ?’ or by acting as if they’d caught me eating a giant O’Henry bar: ‘Oh, you had a craving for junk food, but you’ll get over it,’ ” she recalls. “They tried to make me feel guilty, so I started hiding it from them.”

By the same token, Tom Werman tends to soft-pedal his taste in music. By day, he’s one of the most successful heavy-metal record producers in the country. (His credits include albums by Motley Crue, Ratt and Poison.) By night, he’s a loyal subscriber to the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“I love classical music,” he says. “It makes me weep. It’s like attaching electrodes to my brain and pushing the morose button. I like to listen to New Age music, as well. I also go to zydeco festivals.”

Elsewhere on the split-personality front is Newbury Park product designer Chuck Pelly. One of his specialties is designing automobile interiors. One of his pleasures is driving with his feet on the dashboard.

“It’s totally sacrilegious. It goes against everything you ought to do,” he says. “I also like to sleep upside down in beds, with my head where my feet are supposed to be.”

Strange? You bet. Inexplicable? No way.

“The interest in forbidden fruit is almost universal. Everybody has the expectation that doing something forbidden is going to be exciting,” says Dr. Frank R. Young, a Glendale psychiatrist. “For me, it’s eating French fries and malted milkshakes every once in a while. If I gave myself permission to eat them all the time, I probably wouldn’t enjoy them as much.”

But when you’re talking Major Guilt, you’re generally talking sex, not food. Extramarital affairs have been around virtually as long as marriage, newer sexual activities are no doubt being developed daily, and, after all, the oldest profession isn’t writing self-help tomes for the chaste and virtuous.

Sex figures into the guilty pleasure practiced by Los Angeles author Mitch Sisskind, whose secret is a passion for telephone sex lines accessed through 976 numbers. Mind you, Sisskind doesn’t call these companies. He merely collects the cards stuck on windshields to advertise them.

“Originally,” he explains, “I was interested in collecting baseball cards, which I did, but then they took off and I was priced out of the market. Next, I started collecting lunch boxes, but the same thing happened with them. So what I decided to do was think of something that was so marginal that nobody would ever want to collect them.

“It’s hard to find them in good condition,” he says. “Just recently, I made a terrific find, and it was just where you’d expect it to be--in the gutter. I was ecstatic.”

A higher form of art compels Jim Miho to ignore his conscience. Miho, chairman of the graphic design department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, makes impulsive--and outrageously expensive--trips to see great art wherever it is. He recently spent $800 to fly to New York City for a Braque retrospective; he once sprang for a $300 cab ride in Japan simply to get a firsthand look at a 17th-Century lacquer box.

“I feel guilty about spending all that money,” he admits, “because I could give it to my daughter at Pomona College.”

Then there’s Rosemary Brantley, who chairs the fashion department at the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. She secretly delights in dressing down rather than up.

“On the weekend,” she says, “I’ll wear sweat pants that are too short and have holes in the knees, and a dirty sweat shirt, maybe backward, maybe inside out, too. Sometimes, I’ll wear shoes with holes in them, mismatched socks, no makeup. I would feel terribly guilty if somebody saw me.”

And what does she think when she sees herself in the mirror? “I don’t look in the mirror on the weekend,” she says.

Justice is blind. Guilt just keeps its eyes closed.