Gossip & Glory : Two guys from nowhere, John Nichols and Lance, are out to become Hollywood’s hottest rumor brokers, and get famous in the bargain.

The first thing Lance noticed was that the paparazzi’s flashes weren’t popping.

He had just arrived at one of those aggressively lavish post-Grammy parties, and Lance, one of two Hollywood Kids who’ve made it their business to gossip, was up to the occasion. A tiny Wilma Flintstone and an itty-bitty Betty Rubble were pinned to his hat. The words beat boy dashed across his jacket like Chinese calligraphy. Leopard spots dotted his vest and a glass-encrusted cross dangled from his neck.

No one cared. Co-Hollywood Kid John Nichols was by his side, decked out in camera-ready makeup and glass buttons shaped like tiny globes.

But for all their attention to flamboyant detail, Lance and John sailed through the entrance of the Four Seasons Hotel to a chorus of, well, nothing.

This did not please them.

“They don’t think we’re stars yet,” Lance sniffed.

Just you wait.

John Nichols and Lance, who never uses a last name (“like Flipper”), have taken a number on the long line to fame and fortune in Hollywood.

Who cares if those eternal commodities are infuriatingly elusive? The boys have taken a do-it-yourself approach to hitting the big time in this limousine-loving town.

When they met, they were mere waiters at a Moroccan restaurant in Palm Springs. But after a couple of frustrating years as Hollywood waiters and out-of-work actors, a friend pinpointed their true talents: “You guys are the best gossips. Why don’t you become the Hedda and Louella of the ‘80s?”

You wanna be a gossip columnist? Dish the dirt in your own eponymous, Xeroxed “ragazine.” You wanna be in pictures? Produce your own witty, campy show for the raw arena of public-access cable television. Then sit back and watch the party invitations pour in.

Party invitation, anyway.

“It’s not ‘in’ to get invited to (just) one party,” Lance was saying as he scoped out the still sparsely populated rooms at a Grammy bash thrown by the MCA media machine. “It’s ‘in’ to get invited to three others. But we’re not that greedy.”

Maybe so. But they’re certainly custom-made for a place like Hollywood, where nearly anyone can be a celebrity if he just wants it badly enough, and fame can be as easy to don as falsies from Frederick’s of Hollywood.

Of course, fame is tight with gossip. Which puts the Kids at a precise point in the Hollywood food chain, dispensing early-warning tidbits that can be picked up by the national tabloids and waft east to New York, where professional gossips make them official.

And the MCA evening was still full of promise. The Kids had arrived unfashionably early to chart their territory and get the business of snacking out of the way. In one room, a selection of wood ear and enoki mushrooms beckoned. In another, a large woman in a chef’s toque heated up tortellini on demand. Lance, the cattier half of the Hollywood Kids, surveyed the women in shrill sequins parading from shiitake table to sorbet station.

“The worst dressers are always the early ones,” he said dryly. No matter. The Kids knew the stars could hardly be expected to show up before 9. So then, why were the paparazzi zeroing in on a tall brunette in a floor-length white gown--and clearly ignoring the Hollywood Kids?

“The girl in that Dynasty dress, she’s a nobody,” Lance said, then trotted off to check out his hunch. “A nobody,” he harrumphed on his return.

Beyond the general mission of dishing Hollywood, the 30-ish Kids (they won’t say for sure) practice a division of labor.

“He’s the Crystal,” says Lance. “I’m the Alexis.”

Lance is all knife wit. John, with his blond surf’s-up hairdo and all-American smile, is full of compliments.

Later, John will politely grill the hat-check girls and ply them with small plates of chicken, tantalizing as the unlikely combination of blond hunk/Jewish mother.

“Is he famous?” they will ask.

“Love your lipstick,” Lance says to a scrawny rocker in black studded leather, bare chest, long poufy blond hair and coral lips. The rocker introduces himself as Vinnie from Pretty Boy Floyd. Even more tantalizing, he turns out to be a fan of the Kids’ defunct cable show.

“Do you get any fun Hollywood gossip?” Lance purrs, tucking a gold lame calling card between Vinnie’s fingers, which are tipped in red nail polish.

If Vinnie calls, his gossip may be heard by more than 150,000 people on KPWR-FM (Power 106) radio during morning drive time, Mondays and Fridays, or in one of the emerging magazines the Kids dish for--New York’s Paper, Movie Line and the English screen monthly Empire. Their outlets are select at the moment because this is 1990, which is, in Kid reckoning, high time they hit the big time.

And you start to hit the big time by dropping things that are small time. For the record, anything that doesn’t make real money is small time, and that includes the free biweekly Hollywood Kids magazine, which vanished in December at a circulation high of 15,000.

The Kids had dropped their callow cable show seven months earlier, although the 40 episodes they filmed are enjoying a second coming on public-access channels nationwide.

Back at the Grammy party, it is finally time to be chic. Director Oliver Stone pads by in Nike tennis shoes.

“He’s famous. He can get away with it,” says Lance. Lance offers a quick lesson in the rules that govern the famous and all those other people: “If you’re famous, you can be fat, rude, pushy, crude, hunchbacked. If you’re not, you have to be thin.”

Famous people who are thin even though they don’t have to be are appearing at the party--among them Pia Zadora, who burbles on about her 5-year-old daughter’s pedicure: “She said, ‘I want a different color on every toe. We’re stars right now, right Mom?’ I said, ‘Honey, I don’t know about you. Pay your dues.’ ”

Pay attention. An instant friendship is forming, Hollywood style. A week later, when the Hollywood Kids throw themselves a party at Bar One, Pia Z. sends a large cake with her abbreviated name on it, although she is nowhere to be seen. For now, though, Pia invites the Kids to a dinner honoring former President Ronald Reagan, where actors Shelley Winters and Chuck Norris will eat veal, and Pia and her starlet child will sing with a 40-piece orchestra.

This makes the Kids very happy. It is their first invitation to an “old A” party, defined by Lance thusly: “the Charlton Hestons, the Sammy Davis Jrs., the Jimmy Stewarts.”

No mere party invitation this, Pia’s gesture will nudge them that much further along on their five-year quest, a mission that has transformed their lives--the enormous and humbling task of infiltrating Hollywood.

“I want to sit in Joan Collins’ living room and have tea with her,” says Lance, his blue eyes widening in earnestness. “I want to go to the movies with Cher. They’re on Mt. Olympus, they really are. It’s not phony to say that.

“Their faces are 40 feet wide on the screen. They have the MGM Grand plane. They don’t have to wake up at 9 o’clock and go to an office and sit there and type. They don’t have to wait in line, although some of them do. They get diva-like, throw tantrums, slap cops. They’re at Grammy parties. They’re in a limo. . . . They’re getting the best drugs. It’s all stupid, but it’s so important and I admit it and I want it.”

Mr. Macho Movie Star had better put a muzzle on his notorious mother’s mouth, because she’s been overheard telling everyone, “My son can’t act and he can’t write, but he sure can make money.” Sounds like this mother-son relationship could get pretty rocky!”

--Movieline, March, 1990

If it’s a long way to the top, it’s that much longer when you’re starting out from the anonymous suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. Lance, who did just that, does not look back kindly on the experience:

“I don’t want to bring my parents into this. They’re boring. They’re like Donna Reed and her husband. They were, like, totally un-show business.”

Somehow, Lance’s Lockheed engineer father and homemaker mother managed to produce a small child who enjoyed dancing in front of the television and lip-syncing to commercials.

“Being an only child, you know, I got dropped off at the movies a lot. I was, like, ‘I want to get out of this world I’m in and go into that one.’ ” Lance relocated regularly, cutting class at Canoga Park High School for as much as a month at a time.

“As I got older, I realized you have to study and become a trained actor. Then, I went to acting class and hated it all. I didn’t want to emote as a chocolate chip cookie. I didn’t want to do Shakespeare. I wanted to be a movie star, not an actor, whereas everybody in the class wanted to be serious actors and not movie stars.

“I said, something’s wrong here.”

John’s father was a contractor who often uprooted his family. Born in “Susan Anton country”--Yucaipa, just east of Riverside--John spent his youth in California, Idaho, Arizona and a Southwestern state he said was strictly “off the record. I don’t want to be associated with that. That’s why I moved away from it.”

When his family returned to California in 1976, John modeled and began making his own reasonably unproductive rounds of auditions. In 1982, he took his frustrations to the desert, where he met Lance. They worked as waiters in Palm Springs but soon it was back to Hollywood, waiters’ jobs and more dead-end auditions.

“It was, ‘Uh-oh, it’s the same again,’ ” says Lance. By then, they were considering the career option of taking over for Hedda and Louella.

Except that a third gossip maven arrived, a friend who worked in the mail room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which many have doubtless overlooked as an important source of information about the earaches of the stars. This did alter the partnership equation somewhat, Lance says: “Somebody said, ‘Why don’t you become the Three Stooges of gossip?’ ”

While Jimmy Rose (who later died) worked Cedars-Sinai, John and Lance went undercover as waiters at catered affairs. Or they’d call a florist friend and get gigs doing decorations for parties, then hide in the men’s room. They typed up their scuttlebutt, scrawled little pictures and Xeroxed 500 copies of their two-page “ragazine” at the hospital.

Until they got busted six months later.

Lance: “We served wieners to Zsa Zsa.”

John: “I had waited on a table and they told me about the Bo Derek movie ‘Bolero,’ that there were so many tight shots of nasty things that they had to cut it all to pieces, and that was one of the first items.”

Lance: “Jimmy had this thing, ‘Hey, kid. What’re you doin’ today, kid?’ He said, ‘Let’s call ourselves the Hollywood Kids,’ and it was a spark.”

John: “We weren’t doing it because we wanted to be gossip columnists. We did it because we wanted to become famous.”

Actually, the Hollywood Kids Present Street Gossip, the first incarnation of the rag, threatened to become infamous. All the gossip was, for want of a better word, gossip.

“We were getting ‘Jane Fonda has a face-lift’ and we were just printing this, and a lawyer friend said, ‘You guys are going to get sued,’ ” says Lance. “We were, like, ‘Oh, no! What are we going to do?’ ”

‘NO LIP’ DEPT.: What was that famous female comedian (No, it’s NOT Lucy!) doing at the plastic surgeon’s recently? Why, having her lips peeled, of course. Because there’s nothing funny about a female comedian with upper lip wrinkles!

--The Hollywood Kids, Aug. 11, 1987

The blind item, that unsung lawsuit preventive used to fine effect by earlier generations of gossips, was resurrected by the Kids under the coy rubric “Guess Who, Don’t Sue.”

Except that the Kids’ information-gathering techniques did not become any more sophisticated. That is, their idea of checking out gossip did not necessarily embrace actually calling the person being gossiped about.

Of course, the Kids’ more tepid items ran with celebrities’ names in immodest bold-face type. And even the blind items offered hints for the intrepid fan--a tidbit about a generic Mr. Brat Pack might end with a reference to his “charismatic sheen” (as in Charlie).

The Kids later solved the problem of getting the magazine printed by courting bus bench advertisers, who had already demonstrated a freewheeling approach toward buying publicity. This yielded a semi-bonanza in the form of a steady back-page ad from the maker of Uptime, an herbal stimulant that the Kids touted as the upper of the moment: “Cocaine and lazy are out! Uptime and natural are in!”

Readers and publicists dishing someone else’s clients were calling the “dirt alert” line in Lance’s West Hollywood home; stores along Melrose and Sunset and from the valley to the beach were clamoring for free copies of their ragazine.

Still, doors were not exactly flying open for the Kids, a problem that multiplied when they added celebrity interviews (“We think we could be the next Barbara Walters,” says Lance).

At first, publicists hung up on the Kids when they stumped for interviews. So Lance disguised his voice, posing as the Kids’ agent. And the publicists still hung up.

The Kids ended up interviewing people no one else was interested in interviewing any more--Mamie Van Doren, Tab Hunter--a school of celebrity that eventually did come to include stars of this decade.

The Kids would ask questions no one had ever asked celebrities before, cult-wooing questions like “What color toilet paper do you use? Do you ever use mousse in your hair?” And “What is the ‘1’ thing always in your refrigerator?” (“Cream cheese!” offered Lainie Kazan.)

The editorial brew came to include TV Trash Guide--a list of such can’t-misses as the 1979 flick “Just a Gigolo”--a picture page and an “in and out” list, in which they exercised their editorial prerogative to declare themselves “in” (“The Hollywood Kids . . . The Fashion Kids!”).

Nine months into their venture, they added the public-access show, conceived as “an adult Romper Room,” in Lance’s words. The Kids filmed their show at Century Cable in Santa Monica, paying $35 a pop. Lance wore an octopus wig with purple tentacles; the Kids ran around town with a cameraman and interviewed celebrities. Then they recycled the show on Los Angeles’ other public-access channels.

They knew they were getting somewhere when Merv Griffin recognized them at a “Dance Fever” party, even though Lance wasn’t wearing the octopus wig (“We’re chameleons,” says Lance. “We know when to change”).

John: “We were in shock.”

Lance: “And then we realized. . . .”

John: “What power public access had. . . .”

Lance: “What we had at our fingertips.”

Even though the show wasn’t “real television” in the Hollywood scheme of things, there were indications that the Kids were arriving: interview requests from Oprah Winfrey and Life magazine and that ultimate test of fame--enemies.

“You must get into the story that a lot of people hate us,” says Lance. “Stars hate us because we dish them. Publicists hate us because we dish their clients. You can’t be a gossip columnist and not have enemies.”

Of course, some people hate the Kids because some of their poop is precisely that--poop.

“Golden Girls” star Estelle Getty brands their “scoop” that she had trouble learning her lines “an out-and-out lie. Those two Twinkies ought to get their roots done because the dye is going to their brains,” she said.

Somehow, though, the Kids have managed to fend off any lawsuits, they say. Fun is fun, and their homemade approach to dish has lured its share of fans.

“These guys are the best because they’re completely uncynical,” says publicist Mitch Schneider, whose clients include rocker Ozzie Osborne and comedian Sam Kinison and who has worked for the Kids. “A lot of my clients are very edgy and they love these guys.”

Joan Quinn, a former society writer, observes: “When Andy Warhol started Interview, he started this newspaper so he could see free movies and get invited to parties, and I get the feeling these boys did the same kind of thing. They’re always real nice about it. They laugh at themselves.”

And don’t think for a moment that the Kids don’t have standards for rumor spreading.

“We don’t climb fences,” says Lance. “The Hollywood Kids are fun.” No AIDS gossip. “Death, no. Disease, no.”

And they don’t dish CEOs. “We want to work,” they say.

Gossip “do’s,” culled from sources at Melrose Avenue stores and restaurants like Patrick’s Roadhouse and Starky’s Deli, include such topics as plastic surgery. Says Lance: “Surgery is the best. Why hide it? We’re just going to find you. Liposuction, face-lifts, tummy tucks, breast implants. It’s so hot.”

Also welcome are “Betty Ford stories”--”It’s so chic now to be an ex-cocaine addict writing a book,” notes Lance--and that gossip classic, amour. The Kids take credit for breaking the Barbra Streisand-Don Johnson romance and the Madonna-Sean Penn marriage and divorce.

“We just have good Madonna sources,” Lance says with some pride.

The Kids finally did get that Hollywood must--a manager--after years of doing everything themselves. And these days, they’re working on that other Hollywood must: deals.

There’s one embryonic deal to do a TV gossip game show and another to be celebrity interviewers on cable. They want to cut a record and write a book, a guide to Hollywood or a trashy novel. And on May 22, they will play themselves on “Divorce Court,” plying lawyers with intimate gossip about a husband’s extracurricular activities. The Kids’ flirtations with TV, along with their work in magazines and radio, have helped to pay the bills.

But even their flashiest grabs for attention, their “cheap theatrics,” as Lance humbly puts it, will get you only so far in this town, partly because there are no scrappy daily tabloids like those in New York, which have vaulted their respective gossip columnists to national note.

And acceptance in Hollywood has, indeed, proved fickle.

As for the Kids, who yearn for the day when they are dished themselves, they become wistful when they think about that old devil Hollywood, all those celebrities they adore, who sometimes manage to make their acquaintance without saying, “Hollywood Who?”

“Even though we dish them, we still want to be accepted,” Lance says. “I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to be in the in crowd.”