Toasting Starlet <i> and</i> Author

The Event: The Los Angeles book party for Fiona Lewis’ first novel, “Between Men,” hosted by publisher Atlantic Monthly Press, actress Kelly Lynch and producers Mitch Glaser and Art Linson, who also happens to be affianced to the author. The event took place at the West Beach Cafe in Venice.

Who Was There: Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Barbara Hershey and Jack Nicholson were among those who showed up for cocktails while Lewis signed copies of her reputed roman a clef. (The question is, will they read it themselves or send it out for coverage?)

The Voice Of Experience: “Fiona has seen and done virtually all there is to do in L.A. She’s worked with Polanski and DePalma, so she’s seen some interesting sets,” said Glaser.

Literary Illusions: Lewis is creatively modest in describing her opus: “It’s about sex and married men. Obsession, passion, sex and married men in Hollywood. I wrote what I knew.”

Quoted: “Just imagine if Jackie Collins were smarter, hipper and sexier,” said Lynch. “Fiona was a real starlet. She’s also one of the most well-read people I know. She’d be sitting on the set, waiting for her close-up in her pushup bra, reading Camus.”

East Meets West: Being a literary event, there were plenty of New Yorkers lurking about. How to tell them apart from the natives, at least aside from Californians’ breast implants? “It’s neckties,” said humorist William Hamilton, a former New Yorker himself. “Personally, I feel more comfortable in a necktie. I haven’t yet learned to swim without one.”

Delicacies: The shrimp, lamb chops and eggplant polenta were good, if not super-abundant. And one feels like a rube even asking, but is lox on raisin bread another one of those New York literary things, or did we Angelenos come up with that one ourselves?