Hey, Don’t Look, but Isn’t That ...

There was the time I cut off two-time Oscar winner Jack Lemmon in traffic.

This was in Beverly Hills, at the intersection of Roxbury Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard. Lemmon was going south on Roxbury, making a right onto Santa Monica, and I was heading north, driving through the intersection--but in a left-turn-only lane.

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I saw this older man yelling at me, but it took me half a block before I realized: That was two-time Oscar winner Jack Lemmon! Angry, as if I were a thumb-sucking nuclear power plant manager in “The China Syndrome” or the upstairs neighbor with the barking dog in “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.”

What can I say? I was thrilled.

Star sightings in Los Angeles are so common for natives that we use them as conversational shorthand, the way people in cities with real weather talk about snowstorms or hurricanes or heat waves. In Los Angeles, we don’t say, “They’re predicting a foot of snow by the weekend.” We say, “I saw Cameron Diaz having lunch at Joan’s on Third Cafe.” Or: “Guess who I cut off in traffic today? Two-time Oscar winner Jack Lemmon.”

But what do we mean? That our lives are empty and that running into a celebrity gives us meaning (by this reasoning, if Lemmon and I had gotten out of our respective cars, I would have said, “Mr. Lemmon, you ... complete ... me”).

And yet, this is what makes a good star-sighting such a local perk: The fact that our lives, by their very nature and rhythm, have intersected with the life of a celebrity means we are them, in some small way, because we eat at the same breakfast place and cut each other off in traffic. Right?

“It’s sort of like a merging of realities,” says Matt Maranian, 35, co-author of “L.A. Bizarro,” the 1997 guidebook to the “obscure, the absurd and the perverse in Los Angeles.” To Maranian, the power of a star sighting occurs in that moment when “someone that you never really considered to be real in the first place” suddenly appears before you.

I know exactly what he means. For instance, I once looked at a vacant apartment in West Hollywood with fellow prospective renter Soleil Moon Frye, a.k.a. Punky Brewster.

Maranian, who is working on a spinoff of his interior design book “Pad: The Guide to Ultra-Living” (Chronicle Books, 2000), lived in Los Angeles from 1984 to 1999 before decamping to Brattleboro, Vt. He divides his star-sighting experiences in L.A. into various categories. They include:

* Spotting Someone Who’s in Disguise and Being the Only Person or One of a Very Few People Who Realizes It. “That happened to me with Michael Jackson,” says Maranian, who saw Jackson in Tower Video on Sunset Boulevard, in West Hollywood. The pop star was wearing a short Afro wig and sunglasses. This was at night. There were bodyguards throughout the store. Jackson bought Disney videos, Maranian says. There was also the time Maranian was pretty sure he saw Ann-Margret shopping at a Ross Dress for Less in the San Fernando Valley, wearing a head scarf and sunglasses.

* Bathroom Sightings: Comedian Richard Lewis, “Growing Pains” star Kirk Cameron.

* When They Talk to You First: Maranian was sitting at an intersection in his 1967 persimmon orange convertible Barracuda. “I was in a really horrible mood, and I heard him yell from the car next to me. “Him” was Tony Danza, admiring Maranian’s car. “I’ve always liked Tony Danza since then,” he says.

* When You See Someone and React to Them First as a Person, Then Realize It’s a Celebrity: On Sunset, “Cher was getting out of her car and putting money in a meter. I first saw her arm and thought, ‘God, that woman has a really ... ugly tattoo.”

All of these categories prove a larger point: A good star sighting just happens. “Years ago, I was waiting for an elevator alongside Demi Moore on one of the garage levels of Beverly Center,” says a friend. “She said to the stretch limo driver, ‘If the baby cries, just page me.’ We rode into the shopping center together, and off she went shopping.”

As this example shows, a good star sighting entails seeing said star in the wild--trying to parallel park, say, or “haggling over vintage jewelry and being really mean about it.”

That would be Barbra Streisand, as spotted at the Santa Monica Airport by Jacqui Hyland, an actress and native Angeleno who shares her own sightings and posts others’ on her Web site, accessed via www.livejournal.com (search word: celebysightings).

Hyland lives in Brentwood, the tony Westside hotbed of show business. Among her anecdotes: Meryl Streep, eating at a Souplantation; Brendan Fraser and Brad Pitt, seen separately at the Brentwood market Vicente Foods; Monica Lewinsky (back when people cared), shopping at a clothing store on Montana Avenue, also in Brentwood.

Hyland admits to feeling a little queasy about posting her sightings, given the potential for aiding and abetting stalkers. And she knows there’s a fine line between sighting and staring. “I’ve learned to affect disinterest,” she says. “But the truth is, I’m staring at them, and then on the other hand I know these people are hounded and hunted.”

Indeed, looking for stars is a low-end sport relegated to trash-can-rummaging paparazzi, celebrity autograph seekers and the otherwise obsessed. Nor are we talking about the rubes who shell out money to sit in exhaust-spewing tourist buses as they rattle through town, carting around the naive.

Because we don’t really need to find them, you see. No, they find us, and sometimes they’re in character when they do.

One friend saw Ben Stiller in klutz mode, hanging on for dear life on a speeding Stairmaster at Crunch on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Another friend says she was once returning to her Beverly Hills office building after lunch, holding the door open for her lunch-mates.

“I noticed just as the last of our group entered the building that there was a man approaching a few yards away. He saw that I was holding the door open and assumed a slow jog. He was wearing Ray-Bans and a Lacoste shirt, and he seemed to be smirking. I held the door for him, joking, ‘How do you like that?’ He filed past, lowered his glasses, gave me a friendly once-over and replied, ‘I like it.’” Jack Nicholson.

You can make money off these stories. “The bigger the star, the better the sighting,” says Janet Charlton, gossip columnist for the tabloid the Star, who says she uses 30 or 40 reliable spies to feed her items. And what makes a good sighting for Charlton’s purposes? “If the star responds back to whoever you are, [that’s] the best kind,” she says. “But if you catch them doing something interesting, that’s good too.”

But all of that sounds too ... too effortful, as if these people matter to us. Because frankly, we see them, see them all the time, and yet we really don’t care. We so don’t care. In fact, watch us watching them: There’s the flash of recognition and excitement on our faces, followed by the forced nonchalance, the returning to the business at hand, followed by the compulsion to steal another look. Just one.

And what if they turn out to be look-alikes? A seasoned sighter knows the difference. Yes, that was Jack Lemmon in traffic, and Punky Brewster on the stoop.

Because we have to tell everybody, all of our friends, nattering on about seeing Ellen DeGeneres at a Bristol Farms or Jason Alexander, in a “Seinfeld” sweatshirt, at the dog park.

It’s a particularly L.A. habit, which is why I called Sandra Tsing Loh, writer, radio commentator and general chronicler of most things eccentric in L.A. Loh referred me to her semiautobiographical novel “A Year in Van Nuys” (Crown Publishers, 2001), about a writer struggling on the fringes of fame and self-esteem. In one scene, Sandra, her sister and her husband, Ben, go to the Hollywood Bowl, where they sit in a box, eating their picnic dinner, surrounded by a gaggle of “‘70s era B-list celebrities” (e.g. Morgan Fairchild, Susan Anton). This touches off the following discussion:

Sandra: “There’s no place for Weird Celebrity Sightings like the San Fernando Valley. Melrose, Benedict Canyon, Malibu: Forget it. It’s all gated communities, industry pool parties, people putting their best front forward. But if you want to see celebrities being themselves, Van Nuys is the hotbed. If you’re a celebrity who has either fallen so far--or, to put a positive spin on it, who is so comfortable with your own self-image--that you’re living in Van Nuys, well, you just don’t care who sees you!”

Ben: “Like at Nat’s Early Bite.”

Sandra: “Nat’s Early Bite! Corner of Burbank and Hazeltine! It’s regular people, it’s tank tops, it’s thong sandals, it’s eggs, it’s toast. A regular there? Ike Turner. Why? No one knows. But it feels right, doesn’t it? You won’t see Tina Turner breakfasting in Van Nuys, but you will see Ike.”

Ben: “I just saw this one last week. Kind of a mystery one. At Art’s Deli in Studio City: Paul Williams and Wilford Brimley. Together again. Why? Even more odd: They left in a light blue metallic Ford Taurus.”

Thus we arrive at another important star-sighting axiom: Sometimes, the magnitude of the sighting is not commensurate with the magnitude of the star. Sometimes, it’s all about the context. There is this sighting, for instance, courtesy of writer and Malibu resident Merrill Markoe: Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, getting manicures side by side at a nail place in a Malibu strip mall. “It was the two of them, like some kind of Diane Arbus photo, and they were both having their nails filed,” she says. “It would have been equally good if they had both been sitting under hairdryers.”

But no setting is a bigger repository for random star sightings than the supermarket. I have personally known this since I was a boy and discovered that one of my heroes, Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, shopped where my mother shopped--at the old Shermart on Doheny Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard, on the borderline of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.

Nowadays, so many celebrities have infiltrated our lives at markets that the Gelson’s chain has a regular feature in its bimonthly employee newsletter called “Star Shoppers,” in which Gelson’s staffers contribute star sightings.

The coverage area of that publication, called Express Lines, stretches over the chain’s stores from Dana Point to Santa Barbara, says Benita Shaw, a partner in Grapevine Communications, which publishes Express Lines.

Coverage includes Mayfair markets, which are part of the Gelson’s chain. Not surprisingly, Shaw says, the Pacific Palisades Gelson’s sends in the most star sightings (the November-December issue includes Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston, Martin Short, Billy Crystal and Meredith Baxter).

The Dana Point Gelson’s, in the same issue, weighs in impressively with James Gandolfini, Chuck Norris and HoKu Ho, daughter of famed Hawaiian singer Don Ho, Shaw says. In recent months, the Valley has been represented, with Pat Benatar (the Northridge Gelson’s) and Lorenzo Lamas (the Tarzana Gelson’s).

And then there’s the Mayfair on Franklin and Bronson avenues in Hollywood, long a feeder market for young Hollywood living up in the hills (Heather Graham, Bridget Fonda and No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani appeared in the September-October issue of Express Lines).

Several checkers at the Mayfair report seeing A-listers Brad Pitt and wife Jennifer Aniston, Laurence Fishburne and Kevin Spacey.

“He’s very incognito; you never know who he is,” says Mayfair checker Dorothy Young, referring to Spacey.

Across the street, Rick Levy, co-owner of Victors, both the restaurant and the neighboring liquor store and deli, won’t name names. He’s too coy for that. Too coy and a little jaded. “Everyone in Hollywood is a celebrity; that’s the problem with Hollywood,” says Levy, whose great-grandfather started the business in 1929.

Beside, Levy says, they don’t make movie stars the way they used to. Yeah, yeah, but if Brad and Jennifer do their grocery shopping across the street, doesn’t it stand to reason that they come here to buy their fine wines, their turkey pastrami, their smokes? Levy won’t budge. “People who shop with you shop with you because they feel comfortable,” he says. Naming names, in other words, is bad for business.

So is identifying the eccentricities of a visit. Thus, a waitress at Lulu’s Cafe, near Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, talks of the place being surrounded by bodyguards when singer Marc Anthony dropped in recently. But the waitress doesn’t want to be identified. And she’s got to go: Luke Perry, in celebrity-issue baseball cap and scruffy face, is over at a side table, and he needs some service.

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Paul Brownfield is a Times staff writer.

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