So. Some of you may know that my Blackberry chose to end its short, turbulent life by jumping into my bath the other afternoon (I know that “afternoon bath” equals bragging – but I was so excited to sneak away!). Thug the Elder was at baseball practice (endlessly at baseball practice). Thug the Younger was at a playdate with a friend getting to know a new video game called Skylanders – which is basically short for “How else do I bankrupt Mommy, besides with the usual baseball bags, football cleats, Nike socks, etcetera.?”  This meant, dear reader, that I had an hour or so to myself.

Bath, Epsom Salts, hydrogen peroxide (I have germ, um, issues – you would, too, if you had two large boys living with you.) here I come.

My Blackberry didn’t leave a note. I thought I had saved it – I did everything I could. I used a blow-dryer on it, at low setting, I put it in a bag of rice (Thug the Y took issue with this – I asked him if he’d ever heard of “dirty rice”. I have an answer for everything…)

The rice got into all the Blackberry nooks and crannies – I didn’t realize there were so many – and, didn’t work. At all. I thought of taking it out and shooting it – but I realized a proper burial, and a working sim card, made more sense.

For the next two days, for one reason or another, I was not able to get to the ATT Store. And slowly, very slowly, I made peace with being out of reach. Was the school nurse trying to call me? Doubtful. Was there a work emergency? Hey, I’m a writer – I AM the emergency. I was reliving the early 90′s – without Madonna – and I was loving it. I felt more rested. My brain, without having to tap buttons incessantly, could relax.

Maybe I would live. Maybe I would even…enjoy being out of touch.

I’m going to try this – once a week I’m going to give myself a techno-break. I’m going to leave my phone at home (very hard for this helicopter mom to do) for a few hours.

But don’t worry – I’ll get back to you!

xxg

Yes, I know. Hormones is spelled incorrectly. Are you going to argue with me, a woman of a certain…certain? Because while yesterday I felt like jumping off a building and taking everyone with me, today I feel just peachy. No, it’s not a good hair day or even a good shower day. I had dinner with my book agent last night – let’s just call her GawJus – and while my lip quivered and I drank an adequate white Italian wine when what I really wanted was a buttery Chardonnay, she suggested I go to a fancy doctor with a silly name to check my hormones (at the low, low price of a new Lexus). I’ll let you know how it goes. Cross your fingers for me, and uh, the planet.

In the meantime, I finally sat down with my ginger animal cookies and milk and watched Girls on HBO – what I’m about to say is going to disappoint some of you – although others will feel validated (or not) – I really enjoyed it. I was prepared not to – affluent white girls, real daughters of real celebrities, whiny, self-involved, tattooed, blah blah blah. And yet, I fell into it like a warm bath. Maybe because the Lena Dunham character is just so demanding of my attention – whether you’d want to be responsible for having raised her or not. She’s appalling and yet, dare I say, empathetic. I like that she’s not perfect, nor perfect-looking. I’m kinda sorta tired of drop-dead gorgeous actresses steeped in adorable quirkiness – is there a quirky outlet store? Because they sure make a lot of them.

Anyway, I will be watching Girls. And I’ll try not to be shy about it. I’ll even try not be envious of their hormones.

Move over The Voice and DWTS…there’s a new Girls in town.

Among the few things you should know about me…I love me my Clippers. I go to every game I can – to me, it’s like meditation – I forget my troubles. There’s no one to cook for or bathe, or admonish for not doing homework. I don’t know how the story’s going to end. It’s a great excuse to eat kettle corn and feel self-righteous about it – after all, it’s almost popcorn! It’s not a hot dog! I can yell and swear and no one says a word. I meet new friends, who are as obsessed as I am. Sometimes, I take my Victoria’s Secret Miracle Bra to the games, but not too often, as it’s distracting – to me (I can’t look anywhere but my “chest”). Sure, it’s like Eddie Murphy’s fat suit, but I need something to start a conversation, right? The Clippers are the best date I ever had – even if the relationship is very one-sided – and actually, they’re not great listeners.

Divorce sucks.

I mean, it really sucks. Got kids? If so, don’t do it.

You probably think you have no reason to listen to me. I’d agree if we were talking about shifting weather patterns or why Lil’ Wayne has diamonds instead of front teeth. But, hey, I’ve lived a pretty long time — by L.A. standards, I’m ancient — and I’ve had many life experiences, among them two marriages.

My novels The Starter Wife and Queen Takes King, as well as the original screenplay I wrote for Stepmom, all center on marital break-ups. I’ve become a reluctant expert; the poster ex-wife for divorce. My second wasband and I (I coined the term, it sounds nicer than “ex”) get along so well that we are often mistaken for a happily married couple at Little League games, the school play, or a first grader’s birthday party. We still share holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and, of course, Super Bowl Sunday. We sign off on emails to each other with a minimum three x’s and o’s. We kiss hello, we hug goodbye. Our divorce — though public and heavily laden with fancy attorneys whose grandchildren’s weddings we paid for — was actually about as amicable as one could hope. I have never said a bad word about my “was” to my children; I hope he can say the same.

What we no longer share is the bond of marriage.

The first time around, I was married just three months after meeting Starter Husband at a nightclub. (I didn’t say I was smart, just married.) My “starter” marriage proved to be just that — lasting three years, a year for each month of courtship.

I left my home, husband, four dogs, and shotgun, and moved around the corner from Canter’s Deli to an empty apartment with an empty aquarium. The first week apart from Starter Husband, I lost eight pounds. Friends forced me to eat matzoh ball soup, counting every spoonful. At night, alone in bed for the first time in years, I swam through my tears while listening to George Michael and Don Henley (the only time I’ve listened to Don Henley), weeping to Van Cliburn playing Mozart sonatas.

I also wrote my first screenplay.

I reasoned that marriage had held me back from fulfilling my dreams, from self-actualization — the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (love and belonging hovering way below, only after safety needs and stuff like “breathing”). Oprah would have been proud.

I swore to my friends I would never marry again.

—
Um. Hey. Guess what? I was wrong. I got married. Again.

The second was supposed to be “my” marriage — ironic. I’d been determined to make holy matrimony my bitch. I knew the territory. We drove my baby-blue Ford Falcon downtown, got married in front of a judge and several gang members . Then I dashed off, making it to work that day by 10:30 that morning.

This time I would do it right. But after over 16 years of living together, almost ten years of marriage, with a family unit of two little boys, my husband’s two older children, and a mini-dachshund named Cecil, I found myself divorced. Again.

I was in my forties, and hadn’t learned a thing about relationships. If anything, I was less sure of what I knew at this point than when I was 16 and happily engaged to Prince (in my head). Since I’m not remotely Elizabeth Taylor, this divorce thing was getting old, fast.

What I’ve learned since is that divorce lingers. It makes you sad when you least expect it. It colors everything — from a first date with a promising somebody to a basketball game where your kid makes three-pointers. And you can tell yourself, yeah, I did it for my kids, so they could grow up with a healthy mother, a happier mother who had more time for them. But single motherhood, even with access to help, is not for sissies. Sure, I have more control over my children under the circumstances — but in return, I’m more strung-out, I’m more overwhelmed.

Okay, after the second break-up, I no longer have to eat osso bucco with Sumner Redstone, and that almost makes it worth it, but I also have to answer my children’s questions about why, how, when. I have to tell them that — despite my past, despite my wasband’s past — marriage is still worth trying.

It is also worth preserving.

Ladies (and curious men), these are my top seven (and a half) reasons for staying married:

1. All men suck…
…and all men are great. All men are annoying. And all men put the toilet seat down every time. All men are needy. And all men live to make you happy. All men are demanding. And all men are easy. (Well, actually, all men are easy, especially those in politics, but that’s a whole other subject.)

All men are cheap. And all men love shopping at the Tiffany’s counter. All men keep you guessing. And all men check in several times a day, just because. All men hog the covers. And all men tuck you in at night. All men are dull. And all men will whisk you off to Napa on a moment’s notice.

All men are mama’s boys. And all men are fighter pilots. All men are complicated. And all men have basic needs, like ESPN in HD.

Do you get what I’m saying, here? Men are human. Weird, I know.

Basically, if you hate your spouse and get divorced, you will be trading him in for a similar model, only in chinos. If you’re lucky.

2. Raising kids on your own sucks…
…but this doesn’t mean you want to raise them with someone new.

Divorce with children is — mathematically speaking — 180 million times worse than divorce without children. I’m sure there’s a New York Times study to back me up on this.

Kids are not better off with divorced parents. (Hi, angry tweets from ecstatically divorced parents!) Psychologist Judith Wallerstein conducted a 25-year study on the effects of divorce on the children involved; her book chronicling her findings is more frightening than any TV commercial advertising an Anthony Hopkins movie. If I really don’t want to sleep at night, I’ll reread her statistics. For example, children of divorce are more likely than children from intact families to drop out of school, suffer drug and alcohol problems, require psychotherapy, and get divorced themselves.

Recently, there was a new study in The American Sociological Review that showed children of divorce lag in math scores and social skills. For years.

Insomnia, much?

My observations of children of divorce, including my own, are simple. Divorce makes your kids’ life harder. Would you want to go to a different home every few days because it suits someone else’s schedule? Would you like to remember at which house you left your wallet, your laptop, your workout bag, your briefcase? How about sleep in a different bed, use a different toothbrush, get used to the new person in the kitchen and the master bedroom? Your kids have to remember textbooks, notebooks, backpacks, favorite t-shirts, socks, Vans, homework, football helmet, cleats… No wonder these kids are more anxious.

On top of that, they have to do science reports in first grade, master algebra in fifth. Everything’s gotten harder. I’ve volunteered in my sons’ classes, and I hate to say it, but I can tell which children have parents who are divorced. Admitting this brings me no pleasure, and a great deal of pain.

A friend of mine, a divorced mother, told me that her son was depressed about the new woman in his dad’s life. “I’m afraid I’m going to forget our Christmases, Mom,” he told her, “Someday, will it be like they never happened?”

Consistency is key to a happy, healthy childhood. Guess what’s inconsistent? Living with divorce.

3. The money sucks.
Financially speaking, both men and women are better off staying married. Post-divorce, the higher wage-earner typically pays alimony and child support. The lower wage-earner typically endures a lower standard of living.

Fighting over money turns people into the worst versions of themselves. This is true whether you’re divorced or married. Throw divorce lawyers into the mix and you have a recipe for bankruptcy, both financial and moral.

I’ve found that in dating, men are expensive — probably as expensive as women. I know many divorced women who’ve lent money to their boyfriends or bought them expensive gifts. No longer do men feel remiss in accepting, and in some cases, demanding money, clothes, cars, trinkets. Hey, we wanted men to be more like us, right? We’ve turned men into luxury items.

The only good thing to come out of this recession is that fewer people are getting divorced. Why? They can’t afford to.

4. Raising other people’s kids suck…
…because you’re also raising not only their issues, but their parents’ issues. That’s a f-ckload of issues, to put it in psychological terms. If you get divorced, it’s likely you’re going to be dating other divorced people — and guess what, they come with the same thing you have — ex-and-kid baggage. Hey, I love kids, I’ve raised or helped raise enough of them, going back over two decades — but being a stepparent, or even a stepfriend — is not for the faint of heart. Parents get bent out of shape when another adult comes into the picture, no matter how good their intentions. I’ve got the restraining order to prove it.

Fitting the pieces together with others after a divorce is a constant struggle, whether you’re talking about old exes, new marriages, or the children from either. I’ve talked and talked to women and men desperately trying to figure out how and when and with whom to start again. And why? Why put yourself through the drama? How do you fit the puzzle pieces together when one of the pieces is a hormonal pre-teen, another is a borderline personality ex bent on destroying everything in her path, including her own child, and a third is the dog who growls every time you enter the room.

This is not the most romantic scenario.

Bottom line: You may care as much for your significant other’s children as they do, but you are not their parent.

5. Dating sucks (after the first three months); your ex dating sucks and never stops sucking.
Look at your date. Does his slightly wheezy laugh grate on your nerves? What about the fact that he just called his ex-wife a b-tch? Or, better yet, a c-nt? Charmed yet? Do you like a backwards baseball cap and baggy jeans on a forty-year-old? No? Guess how much you’re going to like it in twenty years? Just. As. Much.

Every little quirk that you find the slightest bit irritating in your dining partner is guaranteed to become the central core of his personality as the years pile on. Good luck with that.

Speaking of dating. Dates will shock you — shock you — with what they believe is normal behavior. When a dinner date feels like a scene from Hangover 2, you know you’re in trouble.

Internet dating now seems like a safe, time-tested way to get to know people — until you read about the film executive who was the victim of a sexual attack by a man she met on Match.Com. Craigslist is just another name for potential date rape; to a single mother, nothing is scarier than craigslist.

Which brings me to another point: sex. Living with children is like living with parents. Except you’re not a teenager, trying to sneak one over on Mom and Dad. You are the sole member of the household responsible for the health and well-being of your children. And your kids don’t want you to date. They don’t want you to bring home someone new. Even if they like the new guy or girl, they don’t want to appear to be choosing sides against their other biological parent.

When you do go out with someone (after the kids go to bed), you size them up not only against your standards, but the standards of your children. You’re not the only one going out on that date — your seven-year-old is right there with you, with his toothy grin. Your fourteen-year-old is scowling in the background. Your stoic ten-year-old has tears welling up in his eyes.

Frankly, other than superficial dating far away from your kids’ eyes and ears, E.S.P. might be the only thing that makes sense for the single parent.

Yes, your happiness is important, but the moment you gave birth, your happiness took a backseat to that squalling bundle of joy. You’re not a teenager anymore. It’s not about you. Your self-actualization and self-esteem needs to move over and make some mac and cheese.

Keep this in mind, as well. Just as time is the only true test of love and marriage — time is the true test of divorce, as well. Time heals, it clarifies in surprising ways. The old hurts seem more minor, less lacerating. Now you’ve been hurt anew, and by someone with whom you don’t share children or a dog or a name. You’ve been hurt by someone you barely even know.

6. Bumps in the night suck.
A single mother feels it every day: When the sun goes down, there is no one there to watch your back. I have to be combination nursemaid and Rambo. I have not slept a full night in three years; it’s hard to sleep with one eye open and a dog named Peanut the only thing between you and potential threat. A phone call after nine sends chills down my spine. The other night my doorbell rang at 11:30. It was a drunken teenage girl (I’m learning there are no other kind) demanding her purse back. Er, you may not find this frightening if you have a man in the house. I, on the other hand, called the cops, and thought seriously about getting a gun.

It’s scary not being married.

7. Synergy sucks…
…when it’s gone. Prior to my divorce, an Oscar-winning screenwriter told me to keep in mind that a couple is more than just the sum of two people. Do you get it? Neither did I, but that’s probably why I don’t have an Oscar. Still, I’ve thought about what he said a lot since then. He was speaking of synergy, the mutually advantageous conjunction of distinct elements. The two of you have combined to make something that would not otherwise exist. What we are together is greater than what we are apart.

On the other hand (now ring-free), when you divorce, there’s you and the divorce.

A marriage is a living thing. A divorce — while it can go on forever in court, bankrupting you financially, emotionally, mentally and physically — is not a living thing; it’s a death.

Really hard to see that when you’re furious at each other, with one foot out the door, your middle finger raised high. Adrenalin loves a dramatic exit.

—
There’s that fallback saying people in a break-up often say: “You want to get to know someone?Divorce them”. I don’t believe it. I think it should be reworded: You want to get to know someone under the most stressful conditions…

On the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, divorce is just a tad less stressful than death of a spouse (presumably, one you liked). People don’t behave well under that kind of stress. Money is tight, the kids are upset, in the air is the odor of hatred. The spouse that you loved enough to marry is now a raging dick.

If your husband beat you, verbally abused you more than you verbally abused him, abused drugs, alcohol, or wanted a porn family, then by all means, leave. You’re better off. But, in other cases, maybe there’s a higher order. Maybe we were actually correct in selecting that person, that spouse, to procreate with.

In the midst of our separation, our family therapist, a cancer survivor in her 60s, who’d been practicing for many years, gave me sage advice, which I was too angry or blind to accept. “Wait until the kids are launched,” she told me. “Who knows? You may even find yourself in love again, with your husband.”

I chose not to take it. A big part of me wishes I had.

As seen on the Huffington Post

July/August 2004

ENVIRONMENTAL STEPMOM

Story and Photo by Vicki Godal
As the screenwriter of “Stepmom” (starring Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon) and author of the sexy Hollywood novels “Rescue Me” (currently in film development) and the recent bestseller “Maneater,” Gigi Grazer would seem as much a part of the Hollywood crowd as her husband, mega-producer Brian Grazer. (Brian’s resume is a list of Hollywood box office hits both in film and television from “24″ to “A Beautiful Mind.”) Her articles appear in popular magazines likePeople where she recently described her trip with her husband to the Academy Awards. However, Grazer is not the typical Hollywood diva. Her self-deprecating article about being a nonmovie star at the star-heavy awards is quintessential Gigi Grazer. She’s tiny, smart, beautiful and funny, with an environmental twist.

Grazer lives on the beach in Malibu with her family, Riley, 18, Sage, 16, from Brian’s first marriage, Thomas, 4, and infant Patrick. At the beach on a cloudy Saturday morning, Thomas, dressed in an action hero outfit, plays near the tide pools. Brian stands nearby checking out the waves. Gigi’s focus in on the ocean’s waves as well, but for a very different reason. Gigi Grazer’s environmental focus is the oceans. As she looks out over the sea, Grazer refers to the future in terms of children.

“If you want your children to be able to have children, to climb trees, to fish and swim in clean water, to breathe without coughing, you become an environmentalist,” Grazer said. “You can close your eyes to the problem (of pollution), but our children won’t be able to.”

An active supporter of the National Resource Defense Council, Grazer, who has served on environmental action committees, routinely writes letters and calls members of Congress and the Senate for the NRDC in order to pass legislation to protect the oceans. In May, Grazer co-hosted an NRDC “eco-salon” with Kelly Chapman Meyer called “Responding to the Crisis in Our Oceans.” Speakers were ocean experts from the PEW Oceans Commission, Fishing Center of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the NRDC.

Near the tide pools, Grazer described some of what she saw happen outside their Malibu home, the catalyst for her most recent environmental activity.

“I saw people urinating here in the tide pools. I saw people pick up and sometimes throw starfish. I saw people put starfish in their bags to take home with them,” Grazer said.

Grazer made some phone calls to get help for the tide pools. She met with Alan Reed, chair of the Malibu Surfrider Foundation. Surfrider, founded in 1984 in Malibu, is a nonprofit organization that works to protect and preserve local coastal waters and beaches. A daily surfer, Reed has worked to protect the Malibu coastal waters since moving here. The two communicated frequently on how to resolve the tidal pool abuse. They came up with the idea of signs indicating the sensitivity and importance of protecting the tide pools.

During a Saturday morning meeting at the Malibu Starbucks, Grazer and Surfrider principals met with California State Parks and Recreation Department’s Hayden Sohm to discuss proposed signage. Signs protecting tide pools to be placed strategically through-out Malibu’s beaches will be officially proposed and pursued by Sohm.

For Grazer, personal responsibility if part of being an environmentalist, but it’s also a reaction to the way environmental issues are presented to the public.

“Open your eyes. Read the paper. Get angry and demand change,” Grazer urged. “Question those who are paid handsome sums of money to push bad science and bad laws. We can have beautiful forests, clean oceans and clean air, and make money.”

Malibu Times Magazine  July/August 2004

May 2, 2005

THE WRITING WIFE

By Lauren Collins
When Jackie Collins finally got around to updating her early- eighties classic, “Hollywood Wives,” in 2001, she took care to insure that “Hollywood Wives: The New Generation” would reflect certain significant shifts in the culture of Los Angeles. To that end, Karen, Elaine, and Sadie, with their modern-dance classes, marabou-trimmed pajamas, and lunches at Ma Maison, were replaced by Taylor, Lissa, and Nicci, who prefer Pilates, low-rider jeans, and the Ivy. But, for all these careful anthropological alterations, Collins overlooked the modern Hollywood wife’s latest occupation: novel-writing.

Among the newly minted authors who are married to celebrated filmmakers is Cheryl Howard, wife of Ron, who joins Gigi LevangieGrazer (wife of Brian) and Linda Bruckheimer (wife of Jerry) on the shelves with this month’s publication of “In the Face of Jinn,” a geopolitical thriller-cum-love story set in Central Asia. Howard-she writes under the pen name Cheryl Howard Crew, the “Crew” having been tacked on in homage to an adventuresome grandmother-met her husband in high school, in Burbank, California, when they were both assigned to Mrs. McBride’s English class. Ron invited Cheryl to see “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” and the romance blossomed; eventually, he signalled his intentions with the gift of a woolly monkey named Sugar. “I said, ‘I can’t accept her from you, but I’ll take care of her,’ ” Howard recalled the other day, in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she and Ron keep a Cape Cod cottage as a sort of mom-and-pop office building. (Home is a farm in Westchester.) “I felt funny that he’d spent five hundred dollars. That’s a very serious gift for someone who’s not engaged!”

If Grazer, who writes kicky social comedy (her book “The Starter Wife” comes out in June), is the Jane Austen of the group, and Bruckheimer, who favors steel-magnolia family sagas (“The Southern Belles of Honeysuckle Way”), is the Rebecca Wells, then Howard, who has red hair and a warm, can-do nature, could be called the movement’s Graham Greene. The daughter of a waitress and a Louisiana roustabout who eventually settled his family in the San Fernando Valley, she learned to shoot when she was five and flew a taildragger at sixteen. For the past twenty years, the Howards-Cheryl, Ron, their four children, five dogs, seventeen cats, and assorted donkeys and minihorses-have lived in East Coast exile. “I’m not someone who’s a big party-giver,” she said, fiddling with a lapis-lazuli earring. “Henry Winkler’s wife gives the most glorious parties; Rita Hanks gives great parties; Steve’s wife, Kate, gives them. So I have a lot of learning to do in that regard.”

She is similarly modest about her book, which took nine years to write. “I have great difficulty putting sentences together,” she said. “Slowly but surely, though, I have progressed as a writer. Ron, thank God, didn’t tell me how horrible I really was. He let me sort of evolve.”

Howard counts among her literary influences Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, James Clavell, and Nelson DeMille, along with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. “I love a page-turner,” she said. On a good day, she writes for three or four hours, while her assistant holds calls. She uses outlines and index cards to contrive her plots in advance. She admires writers for whom words come naturally-like Gigi Grazer. “Gigi’s got a quick wit, and she’s very prolific,” Howard said. “We’ll talk and she always has some deal in the pipeline.” (It’s not clear whether Grazer, one of whose characters bemoans the glut of novels “about Southern belles and their cancer scares,” shares Howard’s good will toward the efforts of some of her Hollywood peers.)

Howard began “Jinn” after giving up on several screenplays and a murder mystery. She befriended her children’s karate teacher, a Pakistani, and became interested in his native culture. “I said, ‘Sensei, you’re a Rajput? Sensei, that’s so incredible,’ ” she explained. “The family in my book are Rajputs.”

In 1997, she travelled to India and Pakistan, where, with the help of a burka and a retired C.I.A. operative-Robert De Niro introduced her to him-she was able to steal over the border into Afghanistan. “If it hadn’t been for Bob, I don’t know what I would have done,” she said. “I wanted to write about an area that no one knew anything about, that was fresh. My husband said, ‘You can’t get more obscure than Pakistan.’ ” There she met women in purdah, arms dealers, opium smokers-into the book they went. Satisfied with the results of her immersion method, Howard is considering visiting the Eastern bloc for her next project. “I researched Bhutan at one point, but there’s just not much conflict there,” she said. “I’m thinking about Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary. I like picking two or three countries. And Transylvania, because I’ve got a feeling there’s a lot more there than just mythic vampires.”

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town   May 2, 2005

May 22, 2005

Gigi’s Novel Life

By Alex Witchel.
”Write down that I actually eat bread. And butter.”
Gigi Levangie Grazer was sitting at a table in the Bel-Air Hotel, where, incredibly enough, the jeans that fit her like an Ace bandage were not cutting off her circulation and causing her to fall, gasping, to the floor. She did indeed eat two rolls, with butter, though she left most of her Caesar salad with chicken on the plate. She showed me the Ziploc bag of almonds in her purse, her usual lunch. ”My husband thinks I’m crazy,” she said. ”He’s the only man in Los Angeles who wants his wife to gain weight.”

When I recounted that sentence to a handful of Hollywood observers — men and women, both — their reaction was uniform. Raucous laughter. Too thin? That of course would fall into the same category as too rich, a market cornered by Grazer’s husband, the producer Brian Grazer (”A Beautiful Mind,” ”Apollo 13,” ”24”), whose personal fortune is estimated at several hundred million dollars. So, he has kept up his end of the bargain, as she has hers; she may, in fact, have the smallest behind in Los Angeles — at least outside the kindergartens.

”Brian does not like skinny women,” Grazer insisted. ”He says, ‘You’ve lost too much weight, and it’s showing in your face.’ And I go, ‘Are you saying I look older?’ Because I am older.” She sighed. ”It’s weird,” she said. ”It isn’t supposed to happen to me.”

Grazer, who is all of 42 (”When you write that you asked me how old I am, can you say I haven’t decided yet?” she asked), is too thin, too rich and too smart not to see the barrage of envy aimed in her direction. Because appearances to the contrary — Dolce & Gabbana leather jacket, Jimmy Choo stiletto boots, 11-carat diamond ring — Grazer is more than a ”wife of,” a social affliction peculiar to the movie industry, where it has managed to stay 1955 since 1955.

She wrote the original screenplay for the movie ”Stepmom,” starring Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts, based loosely on her experiences with Grazer’s children from his first marriage, but after an unhappy collaboration, turned to novels. Her first, ”Rescue Me,” was eclipsed by the second, ”Maneater,” a satirical look at a Paris Hilton prototype based in Beverly Hills that was optioned by Mandalay Pictures for $1 million.

A reviewer for The Los Angeles Times wrote: ”’Maneater’ is in the fine tradition of the trash novel, but Grazer displays a self-satirical edge not found in the works of say, Jacqueline Susann.” He went on to note ”moments of deja vu” via a ”genetic link” with ”Bridget Jones’s Diary” and ”Sex and the City.”

In Hollywood, of course, being designated as derivative is cause for celebration — especially when evoking two of the biggest pop-culture phenomena of the last decade. David Rosenthal of Simon & Schuster, who has published all three of Grazer’s novels, including ”The Starter Wife,” which comes out next month, also compares her with Jacqueline Susann, whose typewriter famously laid some of the most golden eggs in publishing history. He calls Grazer’s writing ”sophisticated, funny and self-deprecating,” falling ”somewhere between Susann and Dorothy Parker.”

”The Starter Wife” tells the story of Gracie Pollock, the wife of a studio executive forced to remake her life after her husband ”Cruises” her. (”Cruised” is a term Grazer coined when it was reported that Tom Cruise filed for divorce from Nicole Kidman right before their 10-year anniversary. In California, if a couple have been married for 10 years or more, it is possible for an ex-spouse to petition the court for financial support during the remainder of his or her life.)

”Gigi has one of the best social eyes on the mores of contemporary marriage of anyone I’ve seen,” Rosenthal says.

And her radar for bad behavior among the haves and have-nots is dead on. Along those lines, Grazer has written a pilot script for ”The Colony,” a midseason replacement on ABC about life in tony Malibu. All of her work has a ”Prince and the Pauper” theme; poor characters who are really good people end up being secretly rich, or eventually rich, or rich enough just to be happy. In that way, her books mirror her life, because Grazer started out poor, in a family whose troubles have continued to reverberate through her storybook life.

Raised in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of East Hollywood, she was the third of four girls, all of whom shared a bedroom until she was 12. Her Bulgarian mother was an elementary-school teacher, then a principal. Her Irish father was a stay-at-home dad. Grazer graduated from Hollywood High at 16, the same year her parents divorced, and she attended Los Angeles Community College before graduating from U.C.L.A. in 1984. For three years she was married to an African-American blues musician; they lived in south Los Angeles with four dogs and a shotgun, she says, before she left. She met Grazer when she was 28 and a development executive for the television producer Fred Silverman. (She started as his receptionist while still at U.C.L.A. and worked her way up.) After her first date with Grazer, they were never apart. They lived together for seven years, have been married for seven years and have two young sons.

But moving into homes in the Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Oahu still didn’t shield her from her previous life; for more than 20 years, she says, her older sister Mimi, a convicted drug dealer, has been in and out of prison and struggled with gambling problems, and was, at one point, shot and left for dead by a drug-dealer husband. Long before Grazer’s second marriage, she assumed financial responsibility for Mimi’s three children by three different fathers. ”These kids are completely innocent, and fantastic,” she said staunchly. Now teenagers, the oldest child lives with Grazer’s father in Venice, the second is at boarding school in Lake Tahoe and the third lives with Grazer’s younger sister and her husband in Santa Barbara. Grazer keeps a maternal eye on them all.

”I wrote an essay once called ‘I’m Afraid to Answer the Phone,”’ she recalled at lunch, devouring her second roll. ”At the time I was living in a house. There are 29 phones in this house. And when Mimi calls or one of her friends calls, you’d hear the ringing echoing through this giant house, and it’s the past reaching out. And you answer it, and it’s some person named Gepetto or Foxtail or something. I swear.” She smiled wryly. ”I always say if you wait 20 minutes, tragedy is comedy. You just have to get through the 20 minutes.”

So Grazer arrived in Hollywood a touch less breathless, say, than the next gal. ”I’m either the insider’s outsider or the outsider’s insider,” she wrote in an e-mail message before we met. That means she doesn’t always feel compelled to follow the rules in a community as insular and regulated, as, say, Stepford. For instance, Grazer has broken ranks with other Hollywood wives by refusing to function as her husband’s event planner, which out here is something like a politician’s refusing to kiss a baby.

”I sometimes wish she would have more of a conformist personality,” Brian Grazer told me over the phone after I returned to New York. ”She won’t keep a calendar weeks in advance filled with activities with other industry families. If any of that stuff happens, it’s because I do it. In our equation, she is extremely independent and tough and keeps me on guard, and I like that about her. Even when I get home I have to have my wits about me. But sometimes I don’t want to. Sometimes I wish it was just a little cozier.”

Grazer laughed when she heard that last sentence — a bit sympathetically. ”This planning thing is definitely a sticking point between us,” she said. ”I can’t make the outgoing phone calls. I go into a social paralysis. And somehow, my husband has managed to have a career without it.”

But by no means does Grazer exempt herself from playing the Hollywood game. When her husband asked her two years ago what she wanted for her birthday, she instructed, ”Make it hurt.” Thus the 11-carat diamond. And when I asked her, the author of numerous unproduced scripts, if she would be distressed if her work on ”The Colony” was dismissed because Imagine Television, her husband’s company, is producing it, her answer was swift: ”Not if it makes money.”

Certainly this aspect of her personality has helped her master the mind-set of ”Survivor”-meets-your-worst-day-in-seventh-grade that defines this town. For the most part, though, the persona that Grazer has fashioned is of the witty social malcontent, rolling her eyes at the absurdity of it all as she cedes the spotlight to her hyperactive husband, whom one Hollywood denizen called ”the poster child for the successful A.D.D. man.”

”Brian is the movie star in our house, there is no doubt,” Grazer told me, early on. That is a decision that has served her well. But it can also be a frustrating barrier to genuine conversation. Grazer insists on making jokes and deflecting serious questions, giving the impression — her sharp writing aside — of lacking the confidence to have an opinion or take a stand. She is an expert at hiding, not just from parties but from exposing an emotional truth in a town where image is all. Ultimately her behavior seems a kaleidoscope of bravado and fear. It doesn’t feel easy to be her.

To a certain extent, I understood. Every writer is an outsider. In the world in which Grazer lives, she’s an outsider twice. She has never made the mistake of putting herself front and center, so why start now? (Those darn book sales!) Also, as a writer, she wants to be in charge of her own story, so for my benefit, she fashioned an itinerary for our ‘Gigi Tour,’ as she called it.

In a concentrated 48-hour period, Grazer would flout the artifice in her life as she embraced it, starting with my accompanying her — no kidding — to a plastic-surgery consultation. She would show me each of her old neighborhoods, interrupting the tour, conducted in her Volvo S.U.V., for an unscheduled emergency visit to the pediatrician for her 19-month-old son, and invite 10 women to a madcap girls’-night dinner at her home, where the cosmopolitans flowed and some guests spontaneously burst into the theme song to the movie ”Ice Castles.” She would even offer me the chance to watch her be spray-tanned — wearing only a thong — in preparation for a trip to Oahu. (I passed.)

The only activity we did not have time for — the pediatrician put a crimp in that plan — was a visit to the personal shopper at Neiman Marcus. When it became clear that that opportunity was lost, Grazer admitted that Elena Zennaro, the couple’s assistant and the children’s nanny, a woman Grazer calls her wife, had offered to go to the store first and preselect the clothes Grazer was supposed to like. See, Grazer doesn’t like to shop. Zennaro shops for her. By telling me this story and exposing the contrivance of Hollywood wifedom, Grazer seemed to figure she was being authentic. Or was it just another layer of artifice: Can you see how outside I really am?

There were so many of these moments — until her son vomited on the examining-room table, I wasn’t quite sure that that emergency wasn’t staged, too — that the lines between appearance and reality, Hollywood and the rest of us, became completely blurred. By the time I left, I didn’t know if I had just seen two days in the life of Gigi Levangie Grazer or the greatest show on earth. It occurred to me that had she been an actress instead of a writer, the performance might have been more coherent.

”I have social Tourette’s,” Grazer wrote in an e-mail message before I arrived, in an apparent plea to cut her some slack. And, after one spicy exchange during the girls’ night, she looked at me, suddenly dismayed. ”I think Brian might have a problem with this piece,” she said somewhat pleadingly. I shrugged. In an instant, she shrugged, too, and laughed gaily. After all, not caring — or not seeming to — is an integral part of the game.

”My given name is Georgianne,” Grazer said as we sat down for lunch at the Bel-Air Hotel. ”But nobody here can handle that. It’s too much, darling. Too many syllables.”

Although she had promised a backdrop of Hollywood wives, our fellow diners were, instead, a motley collection of lumpy tourists. When Grazer walked in with her leather boots, leather jacket, long brown hair and big black (leather) bag, you expected to see a motorcycle helmet under one arm. But her tough-girl clothes aside, there is plenty of the girly girl to Grazer, who makes supremely enjoyable company. Her voice has a laugh to it, a throaty promise of an incipient adventure.

But business first. She took off her jacket and flexed her right biceps, encouraging me to feel it. I did; it was a credible imitation of concrete. ”My Bulgarian genes,” she said, which might be less relevant than working out twice a week with Cindy Crawford’s trainer, running three miles every other day and playing weekly tennis. So, before the tape recorder was even turned on, we established that despite being very skinny, Grazer can beat me up. The display was reminiscent of one of her favorite stories about herself, which was the time she arm-wrestled her future husband on their first date.

And the point of that was what, exactly?

”I probably wanted to humiliate him, but it didn’t work,” she said.

Why? Did he win?

She nodded. ”He did, but he did this thing with his wrist, and I know it’s sanctioned by whatever, the Arm Wrestling Federation, but he twisted it.”

So he cheated, in other words.

Her smile was brave. ”Let’s put it this way,” she said. ”Brian Grazer always wins in our house. I don’t have that much energy.”

With the salads ordered and the biceps duly noted, we reviewed some biographical details. Grazer’s father, Frank, lives in a house in Venice that she bought him with ”Maneater” option money. Her mother, Phillipa, remarried 20 years ago and moved to Bend, Ore. Grazer’s stepchildren, Riley, 19, and his sister, Sage, 17, spend half of each week with her and her husband, their 5-year-old, Thomas, and their 19-month-old, Patrick. Grazer is particularly close to Sage, who wants to be a writer, too. ”Hopefully, she’ll go to N.Y.U. in a year,” Grazer said. ”I told her I’d go with her and get an apartment and she can be a student and I’ll be an intern at Vanity Fair, and we can be Mary Kate and Ashley.” She sighed longingly. ”Wouldn’t that be great?”

Spoken like someone who stayed home to go to college, the very one where both her parents went. ”Educated, no money, that’s my family,” Grazer said, heaving a sigh.

”Better than the other way around,” I said.

”Not necessarily,” she shot back.

I laughed. ”I guess not out here.”

She laughed, too. ”Not out here, honey. We don’t do books.”

Except for Grazer, who, growing up, did lots of books. Suffering from allergies, she was forced to spend much of her time indoors and out of the smog, so reading was her primary activity. At least until the troubles with her sister took over. She says she doesn’t know where Mimi is now; she hasn’t heard from her in more than a year. But her effects, like a hurricane, linger.

”This is really useful as insight into my psyche,” Grazer said, ”because what I know is that anything can happen. The people whom I socialize with are inside the bubble, and I can’t live there because of my background.”

Also because of her background, she has recently become involved with the Inside Out Writers program at Central Juvenile Hall in downtown Los Angeles, teaching incarcerated teenagers to express themselves through writing. ”I think my talent is that I can relate to almost anybody,” she said. ”That’s because of where I grew up. I walk in and say, This is who I am.”

A bite or two into the salad, she blurted, ”I just started therapy. I’m becoming more of a battle-ax, a little more difficult to handle. At 42, I think you have to be conscious of how you’re going to live, because so many people choose not to be. And I don’t have that luxury. I’m just too aware. It’s not good enough for me to have stuff and other people don’t. That, I think, is because of where I come from and how I was raised.”

She declined to say more, joking instead about having a midlife crisis and dating Ashton Kutcher’s younger brother. Her husband, though, inadvertently offered some insight while talking about himself in our phone conversation. ”I’m pretty needy,” he said. ”When I’m doing press during the premieres, I need her in those moments to support me or indulge me. I get nervous still. And it’s become increasingly more boring for her to sublimate herself to me. Though she does it.”

Well, marriage to a mogul has its downside, but whenever I asked about it, Grazer was quick to say, ”Am I complaining?” Still, it can’t be fun watching people try to play it cool while hoping to make it big, by either using her to get to him, or worse, by ignoring her. ”It does get uncomfortable wondering if there are ulterior motives to be in a project someday if you’re friends with someone,” she said, finally. ”But when we meet most of those people socially, it doesn’t take long before the hope drains from their eyes.”

Does she ever think what might happen if, like the heroine of ”The Starter Wife,” she found herself suddenly bereft of the trappings of her power marriage? She had already noted that seven of her friends were either separated or getting a divorce.

”Well, if I lost everything,” she said slowly, ”I would have a house to live in with a backyard. I would have a car that works. I would have children still in school. My closest friends wouldn’t change because they’re not really of Hollywood. So then you kind of have to quantify what would I be missing. Brian. I wouldn’t get to go to certain parties. I wouldn’t be going to the Academy Awards.” Her expression grew mischievous. ”Unless I picked up the Thalberg, you know, posthumously for Brian. I would look fantastic. Anyway. In other words, would I miss it at certain points? Probably, but would it kill me? No.

”I mean, I’m sure there are other people who want to kill me,” she continued calmly. ”I’ve had girls’ nights at my house where there’s always one of them who would like to slit my throat. A friend of a friend or whatever. But I love watching that sort of thing because I like scenarios: ‘Oh, look at her jump when my husband enters the room.”’ She flung her arms wide. ”Go ahead,” she said, her tone wearily mocking. ”Dance. Dance!”

The next morning we headed into Santa Monica to the Office, a writers’ room where Grazer books time by the hour. It was completely silent, and four people sat at open workstations, staring into space.

With a house — two houses actually — set on four acres (that’s the Palisades property, not the Malibu home), wouldn’t it be easier just to work at home? Grazer shook her head and dumped her empty Starbucks cup in the trash out on the street. ”The house is filled with distractions, anywhere from the refrigerator to the phones,” she said. ”Here, it’s kind of like taking an essay test in college. You have to write.”

We climbed into the S.U.V. ”I like to take my Louis Vuitton computer bag in there,” she said. ”It’s gorgeous.”

And no one shoots her?

”No, they love me,” she said, tossing her hair. ”What’s not to like?” She was feeling frisky that day, in a different pair of tight jeans, no diamond ring and sandals from the Gap. ”I like hanging around with writers,” she went on. ”They’re tortured, unhappy, funny, not snobs, they don’t dress too well, their hair is messy and they’re actually writing, not going out to lunch and talking about writing.”

As she drove to Hollywood High on Sunset Boulevard, Grazer talked about screenwriting. ”The reason I started writing scripts when I was working for Fred,” she said, ”was not because I would read scripts and think, I can do this so much better, but I would read scripts and think, I can write as badly as this. That’s the truth. I knew what my mother made at the height of her career as a teacher, and these people were making tons of money, and I thought it was garbage.”

Scripts, of course, can mean endless rewrites and unwelcome co-writers, but the beauty of a novel is working alone. ”I know it’s not popular to say, but I like to write,” she said. ”I find great comfort in going in, writing my thousand words, then going about my day. I’ve always had a job, and I like the regularity of it.”

It also helps ward off her intermittent distress with her wealth. ”I think that I have enough barriers to my creativity,” she said, ”that I have to not succumb entirely to the lifestyle. It happens to a lot of people, especially out here. You get a nice house, you live behind gates, you don’t talk to, quote-unquote, normal people. So what do you write about then?”

She was just approaching her high school when the car phone rang. Grazer listened to Zennaro tell her that Patrick, who had been taken to the emergency room at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center earlier in the week with a febrile seizure, was having diarrhea, though his fever wasn’t spiking. Grazer initially hesitated (”I slept in his room last night; he was fine”) but soon thought better of it and drove 40 minutes to the doctor’s office; he was scheduled to leave at noon. We arrived at 11:55. She made it upstairs in time to get thrown up on, then to walk Patrick around until he quieted down.

From the waiting room, I could hear her conversation with the doctor. She said something jocular about suing him. ”Well, I was going to sue you for not inviting me to the party all my patients were invited to,” he replied loudly, referring to what Grazer later called ”the Brad Grey inauguration,” a cocktail party that celebrated his appointment as chairman of Paramount Pictures. ”Brad Grey is my patient, too,” he went on. ”But no!”

Grazer’s voice had the same soothing tone she had used with her child. ”Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. The talk turned toward Patrick — he had a virus and would be fine — then we all headed to the parking garage, where Zennaro got into a Volvo S.U.V. identical to Grazer’s and drove Patrick home. Grazer gamely headed back to East Hollywood; by the end of that day we clocked six hours in the car. Wasn’t she going to call Grazer and tell him about Patrick? She shook her head. ”He’s got enough viruses to deal with,” she said.

We went next to south Los Angeles, where Grazer lived during her first marriage. She pulled up in front of a slightly dilapidated green shingled house. ”It’s so much smaller than my memory,” she said quietly, as a man and a young boy on a porch next door stared. She sighed. ”At a certain point, I saw the rest of my life, and I didn’t like what I saw,” she said.

Her mood lifted as we headed toward Beverly Hills for her plastic-surgery consultation. ”I think my novels are going to change,” she said. ”I don’t want to do the Hollywood thing anymore. I’ve done it. I’ve mined it — what is she next? The widow of?” She laughed. ”The Edie Wasserman story.”

Dr. Andrew Frankel is young, dark and handsome and a friend of Grazer’s. She says she has not had plastic surgery on her face, though she has discussed it with him. ”I haven’t seen you in a while, which means your life is good,” he said. ”How old are you now? Forty-two? You look good.”

”You’re going to tell me to have a brow lift, right?” she asked.

”I’ve done brow lifts on some actresses in their 20′s and it looks fantastic,” he said. ”Come here and sit in front of the mirror.”

When she got up, he exclaimed: ”Oh, my dear! You’re too thin.” Grazer flushed and sat down. He pulled up her left eyebrow. ”This one would be a great brow-lift candidate, but your right brow peaks higher. I would do your lids. One day you’ll need both. You have almond-shaped eyes, and you’ll want to retain that. You need to be more excited than you are afraid, but until you reach that point, the truth is you don’t really need it yet, so you won’t look much better.”

Grazer allowed that she’d be happy to wait, but Frankel wasn’t through. ”It’s sophisticated and pretty to be thin, but the look is harder,” he cautioned. ”It gets more difficult to put fat on the face as we get older.”

Out in the waiting room, Grazer scooped up a handful of peanut M&M’s, which she ate on her way back to the car. So much for the almonds.

Much has been written about the Grazer home in the Palisades. It was designed by the architect Cliff May and once owned by Gregory Peck. It has low ceilings, a beamed living room and spectacular views of the city lights winking below. Grazer appeared in her third pair of tight jeans, this time with a rose-colored Dolce & Gabbana blouse. She drank a cosmopolitan and greeted her friends animatedly, as her son, Thomas, played with his trucks in front of a glass case that held shelves of his father’s awards, including the Oscar for ”A Beautiful Mind.”

Julie Jaffe, a close friend of Grazer’s, heard about our drive that afternoon. ”I tell her, ‘Gigi, that East L.A. story, you’ve been over it for so long,”’ she said, laughing.

Mimi James, a senior vice president for talent and creative development at VH1, had come from a meeting with Kevin Federline, she said. Could anyone believe that? Until she added that he was married to Britney Spears, no one recognized his name. Then they all wanted details. ”Could you just say we were making out?” she asked me, indicating my notebook.

Dinner, cooked by Nora Grazer, Brian’s sister, who is a private chef, was served buffet-style. There was grilled salmon with miso, pasta and platters of vegetables as exquisite as jewels. Grazer sat at the head of the table, and everyone raised a wineglass as Natalia Safran proposed a toast. ”Not to the wife of, but the wife,” she began, as everyone clinked glasses and cheered. Grazer was having a ball; as someone who usually stands on the outside looking in, she seemed completely connected, relaxed and happy.

The conversation veered from divorce (Safran had just sent a bottle of Champagne to a recently separated friend in Paris so she could drink it for breakfast) to a dog Grazer had rescued and had to give away six months later. ”He ended up weighing 175 pounds,” someone said. ”More than Brian.”

One woman made an early exit — ”My husband wants sex, and if I wait until 10:00 I’ll fall asleep,” she explained, so she missed dessert, a biscuit topped with whipped cream and strawberries.

”Eh, voila!” Grazer said, holding up her empty plate. Apparently Frankel’s comments had made an impression.

It was after 10 when Brooke Shields arrived with her daughter, Rowan, whose nanny was AWOL. Shields had been shooting ”New Car Smell,” a pilot for Fox produced by Safran’s husband, Peter, and had just finished work. As she drank a glass of white wine, looking preternaturally gorgeous, the energy in the room sapped. By comparison, everyone else looked ragged, and knew it.

Grazer passed out copies of ”The Starter Wife” galleys, which drew oohs and aahs, and on the way out there was lots of kissing, and women kept pulling me aside to tell me, one more time, what a spectacular friend Grazer is.

I waited as each guest hugged her hostess in turn, their affection genuine and abundant. When I said goodbye, I hugged her, too. After all, she had been so generous with her time — and her wine. I put my arms around her taut, wiry frame — the vertebrae, so quickly! — and thanked her.

My touch seemed to jolt her back to earth, and she pulled away.

”Was that a knife in my back?” she asked lightly. Her smile dazzled.

The New York Times  May 22, 2005

May 8, 2005

AND THE OSCAR FOR BEST NOVEL GOES TO…

By Sherryl Connelly
Celebrities, of course, have an easier time getting their novels published than mere mortals. Just ask Ethan Hawke. But now A-list wives and lovers are being given a run at the best-seller list, too. At least that’s what three new books suggest.

Author: Cheryl Howard Crew
Book: “In the Face of Jinn”
(St. Martin’s Press, $24.95) The wife of Ron Howard, the famed director in preproduction with “The Da Vinci Code,” went undercover in Afghanistan to research her first novel.

What’s the story? A California woman embarks on a perilous journey across Central Asia in search of her sister, who disappeared in a terrorist attack. Rape, parasitic illness and a Muslim lover figure in the plot. Not yet optioned for the movies.

Author: Matthew Carnahan
Book: “Serpent Girl” (Villard, $19.95)
The jacket copy on Carnahan’s novel boasts that he’s held 77 jobs, from deckhand and circus worker to film director. He’s also Helen Hunt’s longtime boyfriend.

What’s the story? Bailey Quinn, 22, is a druggie carny worker who wakes up in a desert one morning. He’s naked, high on peyote and has had his throat slashed. Then things get really wild. Carnahan’s editor suggested the novel might aptly be named “Sex With the Serpent Girl.” Reviewers are loving it. People magazine gave it four stars.

Author: Gigi Levangie Grazer
Book: “The Starter Wife” (Simon & Schuster, $24) The wife of spiky-haired producer Brian Grazer, Howard’s partner in Imagine Entertainment, has the corner on Hollywood chicklit. Her 2003 novel “Maneater” was optioned by Mandalay Pictures.

What’s the story? A studio head dumps his spouse, stripping her of her “wife of” status. In Hollywood, that’s serious currency. Grazer threads the tale with celebrity cameos as her heroine takes a bumpy road. Due to be published next month, it sounds like a lot of fun.

Daily News (New York)  May 8, 2005 Sunday

By Mimi Avins, Times Staff Writer
The high life without airs. Brian and Gigi Grazer nixed any mogul-in-a-mansion feel in their cliffside compound in the Palisades. Her novels prick the pretension of haute Hollywood; she doesn’t want to live it.

“I never thought I’d be one of those women who had a relationship with her interior designer,” Gigi Levangie Grazer says. She is standing in the kitchen of her Pacific Palisades home, surrounded by honed limestone counters and cabinets painted the color of fresh hollandaise. The shade of paint, brushed nickel drawer pulls and a weathered farmhouse table in the adjacent family room were all chosen by Michael Smith, the interior designer who has become such an adored buddy that Gigi sometimes refers to him as “my next husband.” Her current husband, Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer, he of the spiked hair and $11.2 billion in gross revenue, would undoubtedly understand her comment as a compliment, in Gigispeak, not a plan.

The odd coupling of an interior designer with flawless taste and a bright, spunky woman with a wealthy mate is such a leisure class cliche. No problem. Whenever Hollywood reality swerves toward the trite, passes absurdity and winds up on the cover of Us Magazine, 42-year-old Gigi laughs, and then fictionalizes it.

Her new novel, “The Starter Wife,” follows the adventures of 41-year-old Gracie Pollock after she is dumped by her studio executive husband and banished from El McMansion, the Brentwood starter castle decorated by her dear friend Will. Gracie, Gigi wrote, “had sworn she’d never be one of those Hollywood wives who paid for friendship — whose best friends were their Pilates instructors, personal trainers, interior decorators…. But she grew to love Will; she loved that he told her the truth — that basically, she had no taste.” Actually, Gracie is discerning enough to observe that “The house was supposed to be Modern Spanish, but it veered more into Modern Office Building with Spanish moldings.”

How can Gigi, a busy, happy, irreverent “wife of,” create a sweet-and-sour fairy tale about a bored, miserable, insecure and increasingly angry “wife of”? Like the proverbial amorous porcupine, she conducts her business delicately, careful to make fun of herself first and to avoid wounding friends. And who better to detail the folkways of a company town where the sign-off “Love ya” must be followed by “mean it,” than this very well-informed girl guide in her uniform of Dolce & Gabbana shirt and size 25 jeans? She can ridicule moneyed enclaves where homes are equipped with security systems so elaborate and confounding that they’re never used, because she knows the territory.

Before her husband Kenny left to pursue a better matrimonial deal in “The Starter Wife,” Gracie wondered “how she had come to live on a street where a three-year-old, five-million-dollar mansion was considered a tear-down.” The Grazers live on such a street. Every weekday, workers’ trucks clog the road where a nouveau Mayan temple, a shingled supercottage, a Georgian manor and a majestic Prairie-style villa are in various stages of completion.

A thick wooden gate, a long driveway and an attitude separate the Grazers’ home from its neighbors. “I like to call myself blue-collar,” Gigi says, “but my husband always says that’s ridiculous, at this point.” When the revolution comes, her heart might be on one side of the barricades. She knows she’ll be stuck on the other. Yet rich is one thing. Showy is another, and the Grazers don’t go there.

Their compound was built in the late 1930s by Cliff May, the ranch house prophet of the West Coast. May was a sixth-generation Californian whose idealized single-story houses recalled a mythical frontier where homes sprawled over wide, open spaces. His most romantic designs combined the informal layout of historic adobe homes with modern amenities, but he also built lots of prosaic tract houses. The former would suit Butch Cassidy, in a good year. The latter were more Ward Cleaver. Gregory Peck and his first wife once lived in the Grazers’ house, from 1947 to 1952. Brian bought it from a USC professor 12 years ago.

The low-slung, U-shaped hacienda sits on a grassy four-acre spur with 300-degree views — of a wild, wooded canyon, the Santa Monica Mountains, the Getty Center and the Hollywood hills, Century City, downtown and the coast. The house is partially notable for what it is not. Not grand: There is no baronial living room that looks freshly dipped in a vat of caramel, nor a kitchen vast enough to serve up three squares to a regiment. Not pretentious: It is not accessorized with the sort of safe, status art (Hockney, Graham) displayed in so many self-described collectors’ homes.

It is not overdone. Not huge, or at least it appears, at first, not to be. The front of the structure curves around a courtyard of stone and gravel, revealing no hint that its wide corridors lead to other wings with rooms opening onto secluded patios and terraces. “I used to get lost in that house,” Brian says, “because the hallways have these twists and turns.”

A lower floor occupied by a screening room and Gigi’s office isn’t visible from the entrance, nor is a pool or a guest house built into the hillside. Brian’s office, the original guest house, is in sight, but it looks like a fetchingly landscaped ranchero outbuilding, not a 3,000-square-foot space that contains his work room and art studio on one level, a gym hidden beneath and balconies overlooking the Pacific.

Brian’s latest film, “Cinderella Man,” a Depression-era drama starring Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger and directed by his partner, Ron Howard, opens June 3. Even when pre-premiere buzz is strong, he is always as nervous as a virgin bride until the first weekend’s box office is tallied. The house felt like a refuge the first time he saw it. It still does. “Sometimes I walk out on the lawn and look over the whole city and the ocean and I feel so grateful,” he says.

The producer, 54, has been making movies (“A Beautiful Mind”) and television shows (“24″), for more than 25 years, and has done time around Hollywood moguls who value their residences as symbols of power. In his heyday as an agent, Michael Ovitz would invite business aquaintances to his home and show off his art collection, a deliberate and frequently effective intimidation technique. Instead of aping such methods, Grazer reverse-patterned.

“I made a choice about 20 years ago, when Michael Ovitz was my agent, to create the opposite effect from what he tried to have, in every environment that I have control over,” he says. “I want to make people feel relaxed and super comfortable. When people are intimidated, you don’t get the best out of them, they don’t tell their best stories. At my house, the bar is just a place to have a martini and relax. The bedroom has a great view, but it’s only as big as it was 40 years ago. When we were thinking about expanding, some people suggested we could build up and have even better views. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to make it overpowering.”

The couple have been together 14 years, married nearly eight. Gigi went to Hollywood High and UCLA, then worked her way up from receptionist to head of television development for programming guru Fred Silverman, dispensing with a starter marriage along the way. She bumped into Brian at Orlando-Orsini on Pico Boulevard, where they’d each gone for a business lunch. “I kind of fell in love with her at first sight,” he says. “Beyond being beautiful, she was so clever. I loved that she’s so creative, and there’s an untamed quality about her.” One dinner and a margarita and a half later, they were inseparable.

While Brian was becoming one of the most successful producers in Hollywood, Gigi found her own tutors in how not to live. “I remember going to the home of the head of an agency,” she recalls, “a very fancy, dark house that felt ominous and heavy to me. The women who worked at the house wore starched aprons. We’d seen a movie in the screening room, and on the way out, we noticed that the table in the dining room was set for breakfast. I didn’t even have my own kids at that point, but I thought, ‘No. Not in my house. Not ever will my children wake up to a set table. Who do they think they are?’ We’re not royalty. Kings and queens can live that way, but look how screwed up their children are.”

Five-year-old Thomas Grazer makes his own bed, and his mother cooks him pancakes for breakfast. He was a toddler when designer Smith started working on the house. For two years, while the Palisades spread was expanded, renovated and decorated, the family — including Riley and Sage, the teenage son and daughter from Brian’s first marriage who spend half their time with each parent — lived in their Malibu Colony house. For part of their exile, Gigi was pregnant with Patrick, now 19 months old.

They also have a home on the north shore of Oahu; he surfs, she doesn’t. The family plans to spend some time at their Malibu beach house again this summer. Gigi hopes the neighbors will still welcome them. In “The Starter Wife,” Gracie describes the Colony as “the most expensive ghetto in the world,” with houses “inches apart.” If that doesn’t offend the locals, perhaps the pilot Gigi’s written for ABC, “The Colony,” will. But she doesn’t consider it her job to tend fragile egos. In her opinion, anyone who doesn’t get the flavor of satire that spices her work should just lighten up.

A producer often incubates ideas, then finds a creative team able to understand and execute his vision. On the Palisades property, Brian played his customary role. “I look at a lawn and see a lawn,” Gigi says. “Brian Grazer looks at a lawn and sees a football field and a guest house underneath it.”

Work had been done on the house when he first bought it — walls were knocked down to make some rooms more spacious and a new living room was created by enclosing a patio. But the narrow lawn beyond the library’s picture window bothered Brian. “I always wanted to have a big lawn,” he says, “and the way it was, if you threw a ball, it went over the hill.”

So in the second round of construction, the edge of the cliff beyond the home’s picture windows was extended. Dirt was removed from the hillside below and a new guest house built into the void, supported by the kind of caissons used to hold up freeways — 25 of them, at $30,000 each. From the main house, a verdant meadow now stretches toward the horizon like an infinity pool; some of it covers the roof of the guest house. In all, almost 11,000 square feet of living space was added: two children’s bedrooms, the screening room and Gigi’s office in the main house, and the guest house, thanks to the caissons.

Furnishing it all took an interior designer a year. When it was done, the Grazers were not happy. Their home wasn’t hideous. It just wasn’t them.

“I’d never thought about atmosphere,” Gigi says. “I’ve lived very happily in an apartment with a mattress on the floor and nothing on the walls — just a table from Wertz brothers and a computer from Radio Shack and a tiny refrigerator. I was raised primarily by a man who was an ex-staff sergeant in the Air Force. We didn’t know from decor.”

Smith does. His roster of clients includes Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, Cindy Crawford and Randy Gerber and Wendi and Rupert Murdoch. The Grazers had been in a number of homes he had done and found each one different and personal. “Having the first round of furniture not work out was horrible,” Brian says, “because it was wasteful. Nobody likes waste, and coming from a middle-class background, it made me sick. What Michael gave us is comfortable and classic. I thought it would cost less. It didn’t.”

Smith’s style is the interior design equivalent of a woman who deftly applies a great deal of makeup in order to present herself as a natural beauty. Limestone fireplace mantels throughout the house look as if they have always been there. In fact, they were salvaged from homes in France and Spain and acquired from European dealers and auctions. Rooms that appear deceptively simple are a quiet riot of luxe textures. Creamy walls are hand-layered, burnished Venetian plaster; the tint applied to ceilings is almost imperceptibly darker. The colors of the robust linen, linen velvet and aged leather used for upholstery and curtains are subdued. Pattern is nearly nonexistent, except for muted Turkish rugs made for the European market at the end of the 18th century that lie on stained wood plank floors. And a pair of chairs in the living room the color of worn jeans wear Ikat cotton woven in Thailand.

“Brian has a very bright, avant-garde art collection,” Smith says. “The conventional idea is to have a white room with bright, colored furniture to put the art into. But if everything is subtle and of quality, the art holds its own.”

Antique mirrors with wide, carved wooden frames of dark wood that hang in many rooms are a nod to the house’s Spanish ranch architecture, but everywhere pieces of diverse ancestry blend together — a 19th century French wood chair covered in antique French sheets piece-dyed a mellow lavender, a brass-studded Arts and Crafts table, a venerable ebony Dutch cupboard and a carved Italian table. Smith says, “This house was never designed to impress. It impresses because it works, but that wasn’t the intent.”

Small pads of paper and pens are placed on tables throughout the house. With a writer and producer in residence, who knows when an idea might strike? All the objects perched on tables and bookshelves, the chunky candles, small clocks, vases, bowls, dark wooden tissue boxes, stacks of books and framed family photos, are functional. “My mother used to spend every Saturday dusting her knickknacks,” Gigi says, wrinkling her nose. “Knickknacks cloud the mind. I like clarity, even if I don’t have to do the dusting. I told Michael, ‘Let’s not crack our children’s heads on any tables. Let’s not worry about breaking stuff.’

“There are people who work with Michael who spend half a million dollars on a table. That’s not us, even if we loved it…. Brian doesn’t need to be reminded constantly how much money he has, and he doesn’t have to remind other people. It’s not even something he really thinks about. For him, it’s always about the next project.”

In the house, order and chaos coexist: The inside of the refrigerator is as organized as one in a laboratory, with bottles of Fiji water lined up like test tubes and labeled plastic containers of food neatly stacked. Yet books on disc, one about a wacky British fashion designer, another by a psychiatrist in the vanguard of research on happiness, litter a kitchen counter.

“There’s a reason Brian’s able to jump from subject to subject, that he has so many interests,” Gigi says. “He challenges himself, and he also wants a woman who is somewhat challenging. He’s made some sacrifices by being with someone like me. I’ll be at a party and I’ll say things that other wives probably wouldn’t, maybe because I’ve always had a job and I have a strong sense of who I am and that I could survive, no matter what. Poor Brian has people working for him all day long saying ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ And then he comes home…. We have gone to therapy over this thing where I don’t schedule social activities. I like to fly by the seat of my pants. Each day winds up filled-up anyway.”

Every six weeks or so, she does invite a close group of friends for girls’ nights. Sometimes a movie is shown in the screening room. The women, a mix of old friends and mothers of her children’s friends, drink girly cocktails, eat, dish and giggle. Her other talents notwithstanding, Gigi did not spring from the Martha Stewart gene pool. “I know my limitations. I completely delegate and I don’t get nervous about whether everyone will have a good time,” she says. “Do we have great drinks to start with and something chocolate for dessert? Then we’ll have a good time.”

There is something of a gap between the Grazers’ self-image and real life. “We don’t think of ourselves as very social people, as people who entertain a lot,” Brian says. “But in the last couple of years, we’ve had several hundred people at our house many times, with golf carts bringing guests up the driveway.”

One of his favorite occasions was the “high-low” bash they threw in Malibu, a party that included Hollywood luminaries and his young surfer pals. Gigi considers children’s birthday parties an excuse to invite everyone she knows who has children, and everyone who doesn’t. She hosted a fundraiser for 400 on the lawn to benefit Best Buddies, an organization that aids children with learning disabilities. When friend and neighbor Steven Bochco’s first novel, “Death by Hollywood,” was published, about 60 of his close friends gathered on the Grazers’ deck on a summer night. “We give parties for people we love,” Gigi says. “We love Steven and we love Cheryl.” That would be Ron Howard’s wife, Cheryl Howard Crew. Party planners staged a celebration for 300 when her novel, “In the Face of Gin,” came out last spring.

They also love Brad Grey, the new head of Paramount Pictures. Hence the “inauguration party,” attended by 250 of the entertainment industry’s power players. At one point in the evening, Sumner Redstone, Michael Eisner and Rupert Murdoch shared a loveseat in the family room with Cecil, Gigi’s miniature dachshund. “That night was amazing,” Smith says. “People who had never been to the house were flipping out in a way that was really profound. They loved that it’s cozy and warm.”

Los Angeles Times   May 26, 2005