NY Crowd Tries Out <i> Way</i> -West Side Story

“Is this as loose a gate as I hear it is?” queried a late arriver at the New York set on the Paramount Studios lot.

“Yes. If you can walk, you’re in,” was the response.

Houghton Mifflin Co. had sent more than 1,000 invitations celebrating the book premiere of “Saturday Night Live: The First 20 Years” but had graciously conceded to the inevitable “Can I bring my friends?” calls and given up worrying about the invitation’s printed request to “present your non-transferable ticket at the door.”

There was plenty of room for all on the triangle block of faux New York avenues and plenty of food at the street stalls and booths--from pretzels and popcorn to crab cakes and pasta. There was plenty to drink and plenty of music to dance to, provided by the Motown Rockets band.

The American Booksellers Assn. crowd, many still wearing their name tags--because parties are business, too--seemed happy wandering the streets (where windows were lit up with “Saturday Night Live” reruns), exchanging appropriate remarks with Wide End or Samauri Warrior impersonators in the crowd or watching Blues Brothers performances.

Real stars of either the book world or Hollywood were in short supply, however, though Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, co-authors of the upcoming “Pretty Boy Floyd” from Simon & Schuster, stopped briefly and someone claimed to have spotted Amy Tan.

Hollywood-based A. Scott Berg, biographer of “Goldwyn” and now in the fourth year of research for a book on Charles Lindbergh, said: “I like these events because I have lots of friends in publishing and when they come here I get to see them all at once.”

Berg believes the chastening experience of going to the ABA convention site, where a writer’s work is but one among a multitude, is good for authors. “It lets us know what we are up against,” he laughed.

Berg and McMurtry had both been at Friday night’s New Yorker magazine party at Morton’s--a cocktail party for the in crowd (no name tags here), which could easily have occurred in Manhattan, though a few Hollywood faces did pop up amid such Establishment publishers as Stephen Rubin of Doubleday, Sonny Mehta of Knopf and Harold Evans of Random House.

Evans’ wife, New Yorker editor Tina Brown, was “back home with the children,” but the magazine’s West Coast bureau chief Caroline Graham provided the stand-in glamour, hosting along with publisher Lawrence Burstein.

“I got invited because I guess I’m sympathetic,” said actor Julian Sands, in town to begin work on a Paul Schrader movie--working title “Witchhunt”--about the blacklist era. An avid reader, Sands says he can’t imagine reading a book on a computer because “I don’t own one.”

McMurtry, owner of three rare-book stores as well as being a best-selling author, still works on a manual typewriter so he seemed another unlikely candidate to be discussing the new technical age, one of the hot topics at the ABA convention.

However, Michael Viner and Deborah Raffin clearly understand that the sooner you step into the future the better you do: Their audio book company, Dove, is booming.

“We’ve been asking stars to choose their favorite authors to read,” said Raffin, explaining that Glenda Jackson has just recorded Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” and that Ben Kingsley has taped several H.G. Wells classics.

By 8:30 p.m. the party had reached its peak, and the crowd was beginning to move on to other meeting-and-greeting spots. “I’m staying on the phone calling taxis,” a New Yorker assistant announced, as those out-of-towners who hadn’t rented themselves convertibles for the weekend needed to leave in traditional New York style.