She wrote the book on almost stardom

It’s easy today to be almost famous. Semi-stardom is never more than a YouTube moment away.

But there was a time when almost fame involved scratching and clawing and give-give-giving. And even then -- even after you, say, tap-danced your toes off and got into the same child-acting school in the Valley that Helen Hunt once attended and hustled to auditions and then dropped out of Cal State Northridge and hung out on Sunset Boulevard and waited tables and did a test centerfold shoot for Playboy that didn’t appear until 20 years later, but still, there you were, shivering in a corset -- what did it get you?

If you’re Stacey Grenrock Woods, a pretty funny tale.

“I just wanted to be noticed,” Grenrock Woods, now 38 and well past the almost-fame thing, explained on a recent weekday afternoon.

A slender, sweet-faced writer and comedic actress -- she looks a little like a young Diane Keaton and was once cast as a teacher on the WB’s churchy hit “7th Heaven” -- she was lounging, as usual, in the Los Feliz apartment she and her husband, a musician, have rented for seven years.

She did eventually score some gigs that were noteworthy by late-’90s standards. She was the talent booker at the storied Viper Room. She was an early player on “The Daily Show,” interviewing people who danced with their cats and made statues of the Blessed Virgin out of dryer lint. She had a recurring role on Fox’s “Arrested Development” as Trisha Thoon, the TV newscaster. Then, four years ago, she became a contributing editor at Esquire magazine, where she is the resident sex columnist.

In other words, as with so much in L.A. (lives, freeways, lighted matches in brush-fire season), one thing sort of led to another. This month, Scribner released her comic account of her adventures, “I, California: The Occasional History of a Child Actress, Tap Dancer, Record Store Clerk, Thai Waitress, Playboy Reject, Nightclub Booker, ‘Daily Show’ Correspondent, Sex Columnist, Recurring Character and Whatever Else.”

If that sounds like the sort of “California” book title that tends to come straight outta Manhattan (and in fact, she said, the title was mostly her New York publisher’s brainchild), the text is that rarest of California stories -- the kind written by someone who actually is from here.

“I never thought of myself as a typical Californian,” said Grenrock Woods, who was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley and who has never lived farther away from her parents’ Sherman Oaks home than Mt. Washington, just east of downtown L.A. “I don’t go to the beach and I’m not tan and I’m not particularly mellow. I try to be, but I’m not. The people who actually are from California aren’t probably what people expect us to be.”

The book isn’t typical either. “It’s not about agents and producers,” she said. “The people who come here do that -- the Gold Rush people -- but not the regular kids who grow up in California.”

This, of course, doesn’t mean those regular kids don’t dream of stardom as much as the next person, which is the running joke of Grenrock Woods’ memoir.

“I’ve never known what it’s like not to want to be famous,” she writes, in a chapter on her childhood entitled “A Mile in My Jazz Shoes.”

“For me it came in mildly: in Sherman Oaks, in the amber hours after dinner when the family lolled around the TV and took to their pacific doings: needlework, telephoning, watching ‘Ironside,’ dreaming.

“I wanted only to entertain.”

That quest took Grenrock Woods through years of dance and acting classes. (“Once one commits to a life of show business,” she writes, “time is measured not in seconds, minutes or hours, but by the consistent pulsing of your miserable, hot toes from inside Capezio jazz shoes.”)

The big break never quite came -- she apparently failed to “pop,” in child-actor parlance -- but still, by her early teens, she recalls, her older sister was complaining that “I flipped my hair and spoke of agents and auditions, and bragged about hanging around the set of ‘Silver Spoons’ with my friend Julie, who was friends with Ricky Schroder.”

And the yearning lingered, even when she became old enough to drive her mom’s Celica over the hill and onto the rock-and-roll streets of Hollywood.

In her living room, the decor of which might be described as late-century starving artist -- couch, coffee table, chair, TV, abstract oil painting by Grenrock Woods herself (whose father is a retired commercial artist) -- she and her husband noted that the proximity to celebrity is in some ways a motif of the whole Valley, which for generations has served as a sort of show-business bedroom community.

“It’s like the suburbs with a dash of Hollywood,” said Kenny Woods, a guitarist and record producer who once toured with Beck and who grew up in the more pedestrian L.A. suburbs around Whittier and La Mirada. “I worked in a video store in the Valley once and our clients were, like, Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman. Gene Hackman! People you’d never think would be in Sherman Oaks renting videos.”

“Remember? The first Gary Shandling show was set in Sherman Oaks, and people would drop in, like, ‘Oh, here’s my neighbor, Tom Petty!’ Well, Tom Petty used to shop at the record store where I worked,” Grenrock Woods chimed in.

But that milieu, she noted, was only one confusing influence among many. There was the middle-school teacher who embarrassed her for telling the truth in her English class journal. There was the Playboy photographer who got her to pose at age 20 for a centerfold that the magazine then rejected. (The soft-focus photo from the humiliating session remained unpublished until her book was announced, whereupon it suddenly materialized in this year’s July issue. “I don’t care, it’s just boobs,” she says, “and it’s from a long time ago, like 18 years ago -- um, feel free to play that down.”)

There was the druggie boyfriend who lived with the lead singer of a punk band. (“Crack was smoked,” she writes, “there were rock stars.”) There was the Viper Room, where the manager, who had known the druggie ex, hired her after their breakup -- a place where she wore black, smoked cigarettes, barely tolerated the weird rise of “swing” music and eventually was promoted to the lofty status of booker and keeper of the guest list.

“She was snobby and uptight,” Woods said fondly, remembering their first meeting through a circle of musician friends. “But somehow, we got to talking, and I realized that she was very intelligent and insecure, and it was all a big charade -- that she was really, really funny and quick and much lighter and jovial than her image.”

“People always think I’m mean,” she said. “I have sort of a mean face.”

“She used to have this, like, dissociate-ive alter ego she was pushing,” Woods said. “But the person you get in the book is more who she actually is.”

A friend who edited the now-defunct Bikini magazine mentioned that he was looking for writers. “I said, ‘I went to college. I can write.’ ” In fact, she said, she had dropped out of Cal State Northridge after six years of alternately making the dean’s list and skipping finals to, for example, go catch Keith Richards playing solo at the Palladium.

“I told him I wanted to write an article about all these crazy things I’d seen for sale in the Recycler,” she remembered. To her astonishment, the editor took her up on the offer. That day, she said, she ran into Woods and blurted out her panic. “He said, ‘It’s OK, I’ll drive you around. We need to go to Saugus? It’s over there, I’ll take you.”

“It was our first date,” Woods recalled.

The article was published, and it was funny. And it was noticed by an independent producer doing a pilot comedy show for MTV. It was to be a sort of spoof of “60 Minutes,” she said, and when the producers learned she could also act, they let her do a film version of the piece she’d done for Bikini. The show didn’t get off the ground, she said, but the pilot was seen by Comedy Central executives, who hired her for the “Daily Show” team.

That gig lasted for five years, ending by mutual agreement as the show veered more toward an East Coast political viewpoint while Grenrock Woods’ interests drifted ever more toward writing and her life in L.A. By now, she and Woods were also married.

Jobless, she cast around again. . “The moral of the whole book is get yourself a good SSRI,” she joked, referring to an episode involving her discovery of antidepressants and therapy.

She launched a humor magazine, L.A. Innuendo, with fellow humor writer Richard Rushfield (now an entertainment editor at this newspaper) and freelanced wildly before being signed by Esquire to write a humorous sex column, which she continues today. And with each step, she said, her own story became clearer.

“I don’t think I want to be famous anymore,” she said, laughing. “I’m myself now. And that self is normal in some ways -- and not at all in other ways.”