Thoughts From the Woman Behind ‘Her’

Laura Zigman sized up the row of wedding dresses at Barneys New York in Beverly Hills. “Elise would probably choose Vera Wang,” she said, holding up a length of lace and organza. “Nothing too outside the box, nothing tutu .... Something really simple, like a $25,000 dress.” Zigman was talking about the protagonist of her new novel, a bride-to-be. She mused on the subject of weddings. “Why is it bridesmaid dresses are always so ugly?” she asked before advancing her theory: “The bride doesn’t want competition.”

Competition between women is at the center of “Her,” Zigman’s novel about a woman who meets her fiance’s ex, a woman who embodies the sum of all female fears.

Adrienne is “of French descent (France, not Canada); a graduate of Yale (master’s in art history); an avid rock and mountain climber (Kilimanjaro, 1995); horrifyingly gorgeous ... and recently single,” the book begins.

Elise becomes obsessed with “her”--”the mother of all exes.”

“One minute I was taste-testing cakes, canapes, champagne; sniffing stationery; fondling tulle ... the next, I was stalking Adrienne,” Elise recounts. “This transition ... from bride-to-be to madwoman, was inexplicably seamless.”

Zigman, a former publicist for Knopf (now her publisher), was in Los Angeles to promote the book, the rights of which she recently sold to Julia Robert’s Shoelace Productions. Zigman previously wrote “Animal Husbandry” (Dial Press, 1998) and “Dating Big Bird” (Dial, 2000).

Her first book became the 2001 movie “Someone Like You.” When Zigman visited the set, she had just given birth. “I stood next to Ashley Judd and I felt like a different species,” Zigman said. “I asked the [costumer], ‘What is she--a size 2?’ and he went, ‘If even. She’s a size 0.’ That was the first time I realized there was a size 0.”

Women never stop comparing themselves to one another, she said, and movies and magazines feed the urge.

“The polls, like the sex surveys. ‘Who’s having sex and how much?’ ” Zigman said.

Add to that a long history of dating and exes, and you have the existential question of the 21st century: “How do I rate?”

“What did they do that was different, what was it like?” she said. “By the time you’re getting married, it’s a full-blown neurosis.” Zigman is blissfully out of the game. She isn’t married but lives outside Boston with her partner, Brendan Dealy, and their son, Benjamin, who is almost 2. So will Zigman ever don a Vera Wang? “We were talking about it but then the baby happened,” she said. “Now, it’s like: ‘Do you want the wedding or the new fence?’ ”

Risque and Classy

“We want to put the ‘V’ back in VIP,” said Ivan Kane, as he stood on the red carpet in front of his new club, Forty Deuce, Wednesday night.

Describing the lounge on Melrose, Kane relied on a small, well-used segment of his vocabulary: “risque,” “fantasy,” “sexy,” “sexy” ... “sexy.”

“We try to keep it down-and-dirty but add a touch of class.”

There are no exclusive, celebrity sections in the club--it’s all a VIP area as far as Kane is concerned. Nicole Kidman, Elisabeth Shue and even Barry Diller visited during preview parties for the club, he is quick to mention, but on Wednesday, the official opening night, most celebrities stayed away, possibly choosing the Lakers over the lounge, where a burlesque show takes place every hour.

Still, Kane was feeling good as he moved through the club, kissing and complimenting skinny, sparkly women in his path (“beautiful, sexy”).

The men got the thumb-locking handshake, and a few anointed got the bear hug. Every two steps, someone called out his name. Wherever Kane went, so moved the center of the party.

He found the decor and theme for the bar “in the dark recesses of my mind,” he said, “the dark side, like Star Wars.” He was becoming the Darth Vader of Hollywood nightlife, he said, and laughed.

At 11 p.m., he took the stage. Growing up in New York, he and his friends would “cut class to go to 42nd Street, Times Square. The strip clubs, like Metropol,” he said. “The name [of the club] is an homage.”

Following Kane, a woman wearing a pink satin evening gown with an embroidered black dragon, took the stage. Catcalls and whistles from the audience. As the dragon disappeared, the crowd--mostly couples and some singles--fell silent. A few men at the bar bit their straws intently. Nearby, a Britney Spears look-alike held hands with her date as she watched the show.

Actor Seymor Cassel, sitting in a red leather chair at the horseshoe bar, smiled.

“Ah,” he said. “I grew up with burlesque. It’s much more interesting to have an act to look at.” And, unlike strip bars, there’s no need for a flutter of dollar bills, he said, looking very content.

Cassel left--he had a golf game the next morning--and a crush of publicists entered.

Standing on the red carpet, a woman exclaimed to an arriving guest: “It’s a scene, it’s a scene.”

Quote/Unquote

“One night ... she had gone home, she’d been OK and then she had like a backslide and they had to go back into the hospital. I think it was around 4, 5 o’clock in the morning .... I said, ‘So you had to come back to the hospital, huh?’ And she said, ‘I missed the food.’ And we both started to howl.”--Carol Burnett to Barbara Walters in a “20/20 interview to air tonight on the death of her daughter Carrie of cancer in January and how humor helped them through the suffering.

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City of Angles runs Tuesday through Friday. E-mail angles @latimes.com.