Sometimes, the Face of Fame Is Just the Fellow Next Door

The procession of faces flashing across our television screen meant nothing to my daughters. They were watching the Academy Awards to see real stars--like Drew Barrymore and ‘N Sync--not these ancient Hollywood icons being honored posthumously.

Then they saw the face of a man they knew . . . not from movies or videos, but from birthday parties and backyard barbecues.

It was Jessica’s Grandpa Abe.

To the cinema world, he was Abraham Polonsky, a talented screenwriter and director who was blacklisted for 20 years--and once dubbed by a congressman “the most dangerous man in America”--for refusing to testify before Congress about his Communist Party affiliations.

But to our family, he was simply Abe, a funny, kind, irreverent man who charmed my daughters and delighted me every time we had the good fortune to be in his company.

We’d come to know Abe when his granddaughter and my oldest daughter were elementary school classmates. His daughter-in-law, Iris, and I became friends, and she invited us often to their home. And always, Grandpa Abe was there, with funny stories, probing questions, the tender comfort of his 80-plus years of acquired wisdom.

It was years before I realized we were in the company of a bona fide Hollywood presence. And it wasn’t until his death last fall that my daughters learned of his fabled history. Even now, they can’t quite reconcile the reality of the Abe they knew with the concept of celebrity.

“You mean our Abe was famous?” my 9-year-old asked incredulously, as Polonsky’s face faded from our TV screen last Sunday. “And all those times, I could have gotten his autograph. . . . “

And I felt my own concept of celebrity shift, as I considered how often, how unknowingly, we wander into the path of Hollywood’s elite.

*

It is a part of the patina that gives Southern California its glow in the eyes of Midwestern natives like me, who tend to view Tinseltown, from a distance, as a place where celebrities are as ubiquitous as palm trees.

How’s the weather? Felt any earthquakes lately? What movie stars have you seen? . . . Those still are the oft-repeated queries from my friends and family back East.

For years, the best I could offer was a onetime meeting with the late jazzman Scatman Crothers, whose path I crossed in a Van Nuys stationery store.

Then I stumbled into a scenario that cast in stone the notion that we are bound to rub shoulders with the rich and famous, just by virtue of calling Southern California home.

My cousin and his wife were visiting from Cleveland. Their first request: a tour of Beverly Hills. I warned them it was not what they imagined; there would be no celebrities cruising the streets. But no sooner had we parked the car and headed off down the street than we encountered pop diva Tina Turner, making her way toward us briskly.

Wearing sunglasses, she was laden with shopping bags and perched on heels so high they must have hurt her feet. But she graciously consented to a picture with my star-struck relatives.

And as that photo made the rounds back East, our city’s reputation was sealed: Los Angeles as a place where the most mundane of activities can bring you face to face with a star on the street.

The guy squeezing past you in the gym bleachers, toting snacks for his daughter’s basketball team? Heartthrob Andy Garcia.

The fellow lined up across from you, recording your kids’ lap times at the local track meet? Sinbad, the comedian.

And the rumpled guy on the sidelines at the high school football game--baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, hands cupping his mouth as he yells at the team? That would be Denzel Washington.

It is a revelation for those of us who see celebrities on the silver screen and imagine lives more grand than these. They barbecue in their backyards on Sundays, shop for shoes and stationery, coach their children’s track and football teams.

They may be stars in Hollywood, but on their home turf they are no more, and no less, human than we.

*

It was a tender, rambling monologue . . . the kind you might hear from your sentimental Uncle Ray at dinner, after he’d had a little too much to drink:

His art is meaningful, Warren Beatty told us, as he accepted a lifetime achievement award from the academy. But most important is his family.

“Who’s he?” my youngest daughter wondered, as we listened to Beatty laud his favorite people--his children, his wife, his child-to-be.

“He’s a very famous movie star,” I told her, ticking off some of his best-known movies.

She shrugged off that image. “Well, he doesn’t sound like a famous movie star,” she said. “He sounds like just a dad.”

And so Warren Beatty is “just a dad” to her. And Abe is just a grandpa, sorely missed.