Players at Their Own Game : THE CLUB RULES: Power, Money, Sex, and Fear--How It Works in Hollywood <i> By Paul Rosenfield (Warner Books: $19.95; 352 pp.) </i>

Paul Rosenfield’s anatomy of Hollywood is the latest in a long line of books which have sought over the years to codify the beguiling behavior of the natives into a coherent set of rules. It’s a daunting task, made especially so because the finest example of the genre--in my opinion it hasn’t been surpassed to this day--was written over 40 years ago.

In 1946, an anthropologist called Hortense Powdermaker decided to apply the same field techniques she had used to study Melanesian tribes in the Southwest Pacific to the exotic inhabitants of Los Angeles. The result of her studies, “Hollywood: The Dream Factory,” is a seminal work.

Like all conscientious academics, Powdermaker prefaced her observations with a statement of her qualification as a detached scientist. “Most important,” she wrote, “was the absence of any desire on my part to find a job in the movie industry or to become a part of it. This was unique for anyone living in Hollywood for a year.” And, one might add, it’s just as rare today to find an entertainment journalist who doesn’t have a screenplay or a job application sticking out of their back pocket.

Besides being free of ulterior motives, Powdermaker was also immune from Hollywood’s bright lights and the heady aroma of celebrity. To her, “the handsome stars with their swimming pool homes were no more glamorous than were the South Sea aborigines exotic. All, whether ex-cannibal chiefs, magicians, front-office executives, or directors, were human beings working and living in a certain way, which I was interested in analyzing.”

After a year of field work--she conducted some 900 interviews--Powdermaker observed that although Los Angeles was indisputably connected to the mainland, the natives persisted in regarding themselves as an island race. Just as members of the Melanesian tribe could not imagine living anywhere else and were fearful of going beyond their own small community, so the inhabitants of the movie colony seemed “to enjoy and receive a certain security from being only with people like themselves.”

Hortense Powdermaker thought of the movie community as essentially tribal; Paul Rosenfield sees Hollywood as a club. It’s a fair enough premise, and Rosenfield appears highly qualified to follow it through. He’s been treading the Hollywood beat for almost 20 years, ever since he began at the Los Angeles Times as a clip-and-file boy for Joyce Haber, whom he describes as “the last heavyweight gossip columnist in modern Hollywood.”

“The Club Rules” is broken down into five sections ostensibly dealing with topics such as Money, Ego, Sex and so on. Each section is divided into chapters, most of which are personality profiles and many of which I suspect Rosenfield originally wrote as character sketches for the Los Angeles Times and then adapted to fit the thesis of his book.

Rosenfield has a talent for getting people to confide in him, and he wisely allows his subjects ample space to say their piece. In a nicely revealing moment, for example, Jane Fonda admits she resents people who are negative and bitter about corporate demands. “Work within the system or be quiet,” she counsels. “Corporate pressure has always been part of the game. The only people who moan are the people who can’t play.” It’s one of the more illuminating comments in the book, and it is especially apposite because it comes from a woman who was once a leading icon of the anti-establishment.

It is in these cameos that the real pleasure of “The Club Rules” is to be had. Unfortunately, when Rosenfield attempts to bind them into his overall thesis, everything starts to fall apart. In order to achieve some kind of unity, he resorts to two devices, neither of which work very well. Firstly, each chapter is prefaced by an almost unreadable paragraph which supposedly places the personality in question within the context of the Club.

Jennings Lang did not get in because Walter Wanger shot him between the legs. Or because he had a thing about Wanger’s wife, Joan Bennett. (Although he did.) Or because he had a thing about Joan Crawford. (He did that, too.) Jennings Lang got in because he practically created MCA-TV for Lew Wasserman, and it made them both rich. Joan Bennett did not get in because of her marriage to Walter Wanger, but because her sister Constance Bennett was practically the first bankable actress in the club. Constance Bennett got in because. . . .

Secondly, Rosenfield ends each chapter with a Club Rule. To codify behavior in a place where it has been famously said that there are no rules save that no one knows anything, is an enormously ambitious exercise and one that Rosenfield has failed to execute with any success. What he calls “rules” are really personal observations, and questionable ones at that, which need far more argument in their support than he is prepared to give.

This is all the more frustrating because lurking within the body of the book are several choice quotes which might qualify to be considered as “rules.” For example, Art Linson confides to Rosenfield that the true secret is that “the writer is the real deal in Hollywood.” Or Neil Simon’s advice: “Be one thing, like a writer, a director, or an actor. In show business, people get sidetracked. So if you are one thing, you stand a shot at succeeding. Don’t scatter yourself.” But Rosenfield lets these little gems pass by without discussion. What we get instead is Club Rule Fifteen: “To succeed in the club, and last, you need more than one dimension.”

To his credit and unlike so many of his peers, Rosenfield has been content to be a watcher rather than a player or a member of the club, and in writing for the Times he has had ample opportunity to watch and to listen. But although he has enjoyed a prime position to observe Hollywood at work and at play, he cannot claim, as Hortense Powdermaker could, to have done so dispassionately because, quite simply, Rosenfield is a lifelong fan of Hollywood and its denizens.

By his own admission, he has always worshiped the people about whom he has written. Even 20 years ago, he was so enraptured by Hollywood that he offered to work for Joyce Haber for free. “Had I any money at all,” he confides early on, “I would have paid her. The job was the best gift I ever got.” And almost 20 years later, after interviewing Dawn Steel in her office, he is still so transfixed that he “barely got home without hyperventilating; she has the intensity of a star.”

This is not an attitude appropriate to a cool dissection of corporate power, a task which is especially trying for Rosenfield because, as he tells us, he has never reported on the business side of Hollywood. In fact, he admits he has no interest in and has never understood money, “even remotely.”

And therein is the problem with “The Club Rules”: the fact is that, for all his erudition, Rosenfield is not really interested in modern Hollywood and how it works. His heart is back in the 1950s, which is why he has a chapter on Edith Head but almost nothing on Mike Ovitz.

As much as he knows about Hollywood and the way it works, Rosenfield cannot distance himself sufficiently from his subject to deliver what the title of his book so boldly promises. “The Club Rules” implies that we are to be treated to an anatomy of power in Hollywood, a Baedeker’s guide to how the system really works, even a manual on how to make it. But what Rosenfield actually gives us is something very different.

What he delivers is a highly personal memoir of an unrequited love affair intermingled with a collection of sketches, some highly entertaining, of two dozen or so of Hollywood’s more colorful characters. At one point in his narrative, Rosenfield laments that his indiscretion will so offend his subjects that they’ll “never let me watch their antics again.” But I suspect he is safe from their rancor because, in the end, he doesn’t really have the heart to turn against the objects of his adoration.