New York and L.A. Meet to Chew the Fat

There was a certain left coast / right coast rhythm to the New Yorker magazine’s dinner party Wednesday at Coco Pazzo: a New York-based mag celebrating its California issue, an L.A. crowd hosted by New Yorkers, a Manhattan restaurant’s Sunset Strip offshoot.

The magazine had invited “creative, brainy, enterprising people,” in Editor Tina Brown’s words, and a slew of them marched through the Mondrian’s lobby (lit by more votive candles than you’d see at Lourdes on Easter morning) to dinner.

Nobel laureate Edward Lewis, seated with actress Sela Ward, thought the dinner was “a wonderful way to get the art and entertainment world to meet with scientists.” David Hockney complained that he couldn’t smoke. (Don’t get him started on this.)

Michael Tolkin, who wrote the novel and the screenplay for “The Player” and contributed to the New Yorker’s California issue with an essay on L.A., said there are big gaps in everyone’s collective memory of Los Angeles that need filling.

“There’s no redemption unless there’s confession,” he said, in a line Johnnie Cochran might use if he were a prosecutor.

James Woods, who went to MIT, discussed free will with Caltech President David Baltimore. John Singleton, who was heading toward Robert Altman, said the dinner was a great place to troll for lecturers for the film class he’s teaching at USC.

Arianna Huffington praised the New Yorker because it “takes issues and makes them part of the cultural conversation.” Faye Dunaway echoed this by calling it “closer to literature than most magazines.”

No set program went with the dinner--it was all mingling for the sake of mingling--but there was a toast from Brown in which she described California “as a place that understood the 21st century before anyone else.” She had one line about New York being the capital of interpretation and California the capital of imagination that got an odd reaction from the crowd. It was hard to tell whether it was a thoughtful “ooooh” or a suspicious beware-of-New-Yorkers-telling-us-who-we-are “uh.”

Brown spoke to a 140-strong crowd that included Mike Medavoy, Brendan Fraser with fiancee Afton Smith, Jennifer Jones, the Getty’s Barry Munitz, Nobel laureate George Olah, Jon Bon Jovi, Al Ruddy, Fiona Lewis, Joe Roth, Dennis Hopper, John Burnham, architect Michael Palladino, Herb Ritts, Oliver Stone and Steve Martin, who wrote the issue’s end page.

It was a friendly, easy evening, and as it ended Brown said if it had been held in New York, there would have been “more bitching.”