PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES : Beneath the Flag of a Ravished People, True Glitz

Here is the Honorable Nancy Bretzfield at home in tight jeans, soft brown boots, blonde hair around sinewy shoulders. Long, thin legs kick onto a huge glass table laden with gewgaws. Nancy Czar Bretzfield, star of “Wild Guitar” and “Winter a Go-Go,” of toothpaste and Miss Clairol ads and juvenile skating competitions, is also honorary consul general of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

It is an exquisite juxtaposition: the widow, rich and sharp, representing 110 million Muslims beset by monsoons and wretched hunger on the banks of the savage Ganges. Nancy Bretzfield nearing 50 has the look of a young girl, carefully slender and well-tended. The Bangladeshis age quickly, as men and women do beneath pain and want. “These people always have a smile on their face,” says their consul general. “There’s always hope there.”

It is not quite clear how her late and much older husband, Sam Bretzfield, became Bangladesh’s honorary consul. Until his appointment he had never been to the country. A businessman and garment manufacturer, his expertise was mainly in Asia, where he met and wooed the golden Nancy Czar. That was shortly before his then-wife’s party for his 50th birthday at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ah, brittle fortune: divorces, settlements, children, new beginnings and, 14 years later, a lingering death.

The phone rings often in the Bangladesh Consulate, a small, dark office in Nancy Bretzfield’s large house in the Hollywood Hills (“I need to build on a thousand square feet for a master-suite dressing room . . . otherwise, this house suits me.”) People call for visas, information, help. There have been calls from Bangladeshi-born legal U.S. residents, rounded up in some immigration sweep, taken to holding tanks to be deported “back” to Mexico: the cruel realities of not being golden and not being rich. One Bangladeshi was even driven off to Mexico and left there, according to Bretzfield: one brown skin being much like another, presumably.

It is not quite clear, either, why Bretzfield inherited her husband’s post on his death. The head of state who appointed her, Gen. Hussain Mohammed Ershad, is currently under house arrest. “Oh, you know those countries,” says the honorary consul. “Sam would turn his back on certain things--like corruption.”

Bretzfield looks the world in the eye: a straight, knowing gaze. It is hard to find common ground between threadbare Bangladesh and the glowing Bretzfield. The old, strong Polish bones stand out in her fleshless face and she carries still the limber grace of a would-be figure-skating champion, the look of the adventurer who set up a factory to make jeans and, later, luxury backgammon sets in the poor backwaters of South Korea.

But in the midst of the floor-to-ceiling glass, the shimmering rugs and encrusted Chinese court robes hanging in her living room, it is hard not to see the ghosts of 64,000 Bangladeshis--Saddam Hussein’s other hostages, the ones who returned not to television lights, celebration, psychiatric help, but to desolation. Their meager belongings were stolen in Kuwait, stripped away in Iraq; they were herded into empty warehouses without water, food or medicine, while the world protested about Westerners trapped in luxury hotels. They were remittance men, toiling in the scorching desert sun, building roads, sleeping in hard, concrete shelters, makeshift ditches, sending home their savings from, what, $100 a month, maybe? And this little marked the difference between survival and want for their families in Bangladesh.

Who can forget the sight of prewar Kuwait and the other oil emirates: in lines along the roads, the never-ceasing labor of stick-thin workers, hitting the unforgiving soil with primitive tools as oil wells nod without sleep. Stick-thin? For lack of sleep, food, gentling, the same “thin” in search of which those in the Hollywood Hills pay $100 an hour to trainers and nutritionists.

Just another black joke, another irony of the haves and have-nots brought to mind by the flag of Bangladesh hanging in a corner of a prime property above Sunset Strip.