Stars, Pols in a Race to the Bottom

Weighing down one side of my desk is the just released federal budget proposal. On the other is the much lighter yet far more compelling farewell to Hollywood written by New York Times Tinseltown correspondent Bernard Weinraub in which he argues that Los Angeles is a meaner place than the Washington he once covered. As a matter of hometown pride, I won’t stand idly by and let Washington be insulted. I’ll put Karl Rove up against Mike Ovitz any day. When has Ovitz ever told gays to get lost? When has Ovitz taken insulin from a diabetic?

Weinraub’s gripe is that Hollywood is a savage place where the glitterati have vastly more money than the reporters who cover them, unlike Washington, where we live among and mingle with our subjects. Weinraub is upset that moguls are no smarter than he is but have such a better life. He was so embarrassed by his 2-year-old Buick that he would cruise around for a parking spot near Orso to avoid the shame of having the valet, or a lunch companion in a Mercedes, see it. (I routinely hand off my ’94 VW Golf without a thought as to what the undersecretary of Commerce thinks.)

Weinraub finally pulled himself out of the gutter by marrying Sony Pictures honcho Amy Pascal (she came with a Range Rover and a house in tony Brentwood). But he doesn’t feel better. Everyone accuses him of a conflict of interest (except, oddly, his editors). He finally gave up the movie beat a few years later, only to be hurt anew when his pal Jeffrey Katzenberg would no longer join him at Locanda Veneta to dish over pasta.

Weinraub seems to believe that Washington friendships are more enduring. Does he think President Bush has former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill over for weekends at Camp David? O’Neill’s dead to Bush. I doubt Bob Woodward and George Tenet are chummy. Hollywood may be cruel, but Washington has only two studios and to be close to one is to be hated by the other. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay makes it his mission to defeat high-ranking Democrats and then see to it that they never lunch, or lobby, in this town again. You can intermarry only if you are Andrea Mitchell covering the State Department and your husband, Alan Greenspan, is an inscrutable monk operating out of the black hole that is the Federal Reserve.

Weinraub ignores Hollywood’s compensations -- the weather, glamorous parties and gift bags. At the really big parties in Washington, journalists park their Buicks at distant satellite lots and hop shuttle buses to events where the prize is getting within earshot of Dick Cheney mumbling about fly-fishing. That’s if we’re invited at all. At the inaugural balls, reporters were like unaccompanied minors, sequestered inside pens, let out only if an official minder came to chaperon.

We do get things that look like Hollywood gift bags, but that clearly don’t match up. In one week, I got a blinking rhinestone flag, a pocket copy of the Constitution and some chocolates etched with the Ford logo, rendering them unsuitable for re-gifting. Major swag here is a fruit basket from a “proud desert democracy.” Around the same time, starlets nailed thousands of dollars worth of goods at Sundance and the Golden Globes -- iPods, digital cameras, Mont Blanc pens and Chopard watches. Minnie Driver reportedly picked through her chum, saying she wasn’t going to lug around anything worth less than $6,000, foreshadowing the day perhaps when stars will accept only cash.

When Hollywood comes to Washington, they de-glam the gift bags. At a recent Creative Coalition party, the treat was a bottle of water, mints and a pamphlet describing the building where the party was held.

In Washington, the big gift bag is the budget. Its peculiar genius is to give the most to people who already have everything, much like Hollywood. Occasionally, proles get Catherine Zeta-Jones’ bag by mistake, as when the prescription drug benefit turned out to be worth $724 billion, not $534 billion. If Bush took one tax cut out of his gift bag, Social Security could be solvent for the rest of the century.

Is Hollywood meaner than Washington? Reading Bush’s budget, I don’t think so. Reading it alongside Weinraub’s column, the lesson I take away is how much perspective a person can lose living in either town.