Empress Has No Clothes? Yawn

We were flying home to Los Angeles on American Airlines when my wife nudged me with an elbow, handed over the American Way in-flight magazine, and rolled her eyes. Actress Sharon Stone, it seemed, was insulting me.

I took a look at the cover story, which shared Stone’s travel tips on Los Angeles and helped promote her new movie, “Basic Instinct 2.”

Like many celebrity experts on L.A. life, Stone seems to rarely venture east of the Sky Bar. What people don’t know, she tells the world, is that “the real L.A. is such a lovely place, and the people are so kind, the real people. But you have to be here awhile, and you have to become part of the real community and give of yourself to be in it, to be of it.”

Apparently these real people can be located in the cabana dining area at the Peninsula Hotel, on the Bel-Air Country Club golf course, the Beverly Hot Springs spa, and at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Stone likes to hang out at the coffee shop and enjoy the array of international newspapers available in the gift shop.

Which papers? They’ve got, in Stone’s words, “everything from the International Herald Tribune to the New York Times to, if you must, the Los Angeles Times.”

If you must?

I couldn’t help but take it personally that someone of her international stature -- if you missed it, she was just involved in Middle East peace talks -- was insulting my employer.

And it’s not just me she knocked. Stone seems to be suggesting that multitudes of Times readers don’t have very good taste. I saw no option but to call her and ask for an explanation -- and also to see if she had some pointers on how we can improve the product.

I knew to be careful, though, because she hasn’t been particularly kind to newspapermen. In case you’ve forgotten, Stone was once married to San Francisco Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein. As a Father’s Day present a few years ago, she sent him into a cage at the Los Angeles Zoo with a Komodo dragon who promptly tried to chomp his foot off.

Cheryl Maisel, Stone’s publicist, sounded utterly annoyed by my phone call, as if I had rung up England and asked to speak to the queen.

Maisel had not seen the American Way article, but didn’t hesitate to suggest that Stone’s comments might have been taken out of context.

I told Maisel I wondered if Stone was ticked off because I had written about the incident at the zoo, revealing that Stone hadn’t even paid admission or made a donation, according to zoo officials.

“I think that’s ridiculous,” Maisel said in a perfectly snippy, condescending tone. She said she would call Stone and get back to me, but it didn’t have the ring of truth.

I drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Stone told the magazine she likes to breakfast. But the gift shop clerk said she hadn’t seen her in years.

That same clerk told me, by the way, that the publication you hold in your hands is a brisk seller.

When I didn’t hear back from Stone, I wondered if she might be on another Middle East peace mission. Sure, it might not have been traditional diplomacy when, on a recent trip to Israel, she said she would “kiss just about anybody” if it would bring peace, but, hey, nothing else has worked.

It was a sharp departure, to say the least, from talk of the West Bank withdrawal, and Stone’s World Peace Tour 2006 served as a reminder that there is daffy, and then there’s Hollywood daffy.

But she at least got to the heart of what Arabs and Israelis are really thinking about.

“People are just sitting there,” Stone said on the same trip, “going, like, ‘I don’t care what she’s saying, I don’t care what she’s saying, I just want to know, does she get naked in the movie? Is she naked? Nude nude nude naked? Do I see her boobies?’ ”

I was prepared to rush rush rush to see the movie and find out, but I thought I might miss her call.

Where could she be?

It’s possible Stone is not in a winning mood these days. Her offer of kisses for world peace doesn’t seem to have ended the bloodshed. Then there was the little gossip item about her flying first class on a trip from New York to Los Angeles while her child and nanny flew coach. But to be fair, Stone reportedly ventured back among the real people at one point to check on her child, if not to pass along tips on cabana dining at the Peninsula Hotel.

She may be in hiding after the performance of “Basic Instinct 2,” whose meager box office returns suggest that contrary to Stone’s suggestion, nobody wanted to see her boobies.

The review in her beloved New York Times, which also ran in the International Herald Tribune, called it “a disaster of the highest or perhaps lowest order.” The review added, “Acting always involves a degree of self-abasement, but just watching trash like this is degrading.”

If Stone calls me back, you think this would be a bad time to ask if she’d like to make a donation to the new elephant exhibit at the zoo?

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.