“Oh,
come on,” I said.

“Okay,”
she snapped, “name one you’ve seen lately.”

She had
me there; I thought for several moments and couldn’t. She smiled grimly
and said: “Small film parts they used to call someone like me for, now
they call Frances Fisher. Oscar-winning actresses are duking it out with each
other for 20 minutes on screen.”

This poisonous
atmosphere has a pernicious way of spreading beyond performers, which is why
I’m saving up to get rid of my eyebags. If I don’t, I can see myself
starting to lose work. You think I’m being paranoid? Maybe so. But really,
who wants a 40-year-old freelance writer? I can’t say I would. God knows
it’s appalling enough just being one.

A few years
ago I interviewed Jerry Seinfeld and asked if he thought women have a harder
time in New York or Los Angeles. “Los Angeles,” he said, “because
women are commodities here.” The thing about interviewing celebrities is
that every now and then they say something not terribly original that nevertheless
sticks in your mind forever as piercingly true. Probably that’s just the
fame factor working, but thus spake Seinfeld and who am I to argue? Plus, he
was very charming to me during the interview. My eyebags were smaller then.

Not that
men always have it easy here, especially men who have enjoyed an exceptionally
handsome youth. Lance Loud came over to have lunch and prune my lime tree last
week, and he recounted a traumatic experience he’d had while attending
a movie premiere in Westwood recently. “Are you a celebrity?” some
UCLA students standing on the sidelines asked. Actually, Lance is sort
of a celebrity. He couldn’t use “LanceLoud” as his AOL moniker
because it was already taken by some pop culture parasite, and there’s
a band in San Francisco who’ve named themselves the Loud Family. But he
just joked good-naturedly, “Oh, sure, I’m a big celebrity.”

“Yeah,
right, Grandpa!” the students said rudely.

Still, it’s
worse for women. My friend Sandra Tsing Loh just finished a four-part radio
commentary about her own excess undereye luggage in which she noted that there
are only two jobs where eyebags don’t count against you: President of the
United States and Vulcan crew member on the Starship Enterprise. A few
months ago I accompanied her on an eyebag research expedition to a plastic surgeon.
We leafed through a thick binder of the surgeon’s work in the waiting room
and were shocked to see how many girls (and even a few guys) in their 20s were
getting this done. The difference was exquisitely subtle. Sometimes the “bags”
in the pre-op photos looked more like slightly heavy circles.

“You’re
Persian!” Sandra yelled to the pictures of one young patient. “Get
over it!”

A week later,
however, she’d snapped up one of the surgeon’s few available spots
and was quickly eyebag free. Personally, I didn’t think she’d had
a huge problem to begin with, but Sandra said she was beginning to see martial
arts star Sammo Hung whenever she looked in the mirror. If that had been merely
my situation probably I would have joined her then under the laser. But since
I’m a few years older and a few shades paler, not only do I see Sammo Hung
under my eyes, but an apparition of Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi is beginning
to form on top. So my operation would be twice as expensive. As I said, I’m
saving up.

Part of
my trouble is that, although I live in a humble, barrio-adjacent neighborhood,
I’m often over on the moneyed west side of town and find myself surrounded
by women I know are several years my senior who have begun to appear,
mysteriously and unfairly, markedly younger. The rich, they are different. Because
they can afford to be surgically altered.

Here in
Silverlake, it’s easier to look relatively good. The day after I’d
been to a party in Beverly Hills I went to a meeting at my daughter’s school
and felt fairly dewy fresh compared to the other parents. I scrutinized everyone
around the table as the meeting droned on: eyebags…eyebags…

jowls…big mole…eyebags…

After you’ve been among your cosmetically improved betters, you stare at
ordinary people and think, why don’t they just get rid of that?

On my right,
the principal had arranged his features into an expression of long-suffering
martyrdom as he doodled little pictures of airplanes and daisies on a notepad.
Hard to tell if he’s older or younger than I am, since he started the school
year at around 300 pounds and has since gained 80 more. So eyebags really aren’t
his problem.

After my
conversation with the over-40 actress at the bus stop I took the dog for our
usual morning hike through the Silverlake hills. On my route is a house where
the upcoming Paramount feature The Next Best Thing was on location for
a couple of weeks this summer. In the film Madonna gets impregnated by her gay
best friend, Rupert Everett, after a night of drunken abandon. The production
has also been in the news because Madonna’s entourage reportedly has been
addressing her as “Hatsumomo” on the set; apparently, Madonna is campaigning
to be cast as a geisha in the film version of Memoirs of a Geisha, and
this helps her keep a positive attitude.

The street
was congested that day because they were shooting exterior scenes in front of
the house, but dog-walkers and neighbors were allowed through. I picked my way
carefully over the lighting cables and was lost in thought about the usual–how
many good years I have left, with eyebags and without–when a production
assistant came running after me.

“Excuse
me!” she yelled, huffing and puffing to catch up. “But would you be
an extra in our movie?”

“Well…”
I really had a lot to do that day.

“Oh,
please!” she insisted. “The assistant director told me to catch you
because of your cute little outfit and your cute little dog.” I was wearing
green socks, yellow leggings and a red t-shirt–apparently this fit in with
their color scheme–but what got me was the flattery about my dog. I did
like the idea of seeing Linda immortalized on screen. Also, Madonna is exactly
my age and therefore I’ve watched her closely over the years. My mother
used to do the same thing with Angie Dickinson in the 70s, tuning in to Police
Woman every week just to keep tabs on Angie’s figure. I was curious
to see how my age doppelganger looked in real life.

By the time
they called me to the set my daughter was back from camp, so she played with
Madonna’s two-and-a-half-year-old and wrote in her notebook as Linda and
I, “background action,” walked down the street for about 15 takes
while Madonna acted out a fight with her boyfriend in the driveway. This scene
is what instigates the crying-on-the-shoulder, rebound sex with Rupert Everett.

“I
don’t love you! I never did! Take another lap around your self-discovery
track!” Michael Vartan as the caddish boyfriend yelled at Madonna as Linda
and I walked by, over and over, with me (as directed) doing a little nosy neighbor
stare each time. One of the producers whispered to my daughter explanations
about what was going on as she watched. Later I saw she’d copied down the
dialogue in her notebook with this addendum: “Extra word: ‘Asshole.’
Man said, Madonna added word because she’s a really good actress.”

Like many
stars, Madonna is remarkably tiny in real life. “She’s your
age?” said my daughter, shocked. “She looks like she’s in her
20s!” No doubt about it, Madonna looked great, but I don’t think this
is just because she’s several inches shorter and many pounds lighter. Up
close, I would say that the weirdly serene expression she’s been wearing
ever since entering her spiritual phase is probably due to Botox. Plus her undereye
area is remarkably smooth. And of course, she stays out of the sun. Between
takes her muscular bodyguard hovered over her with a big umbrella, like a Nubian
slave.

Being a
big star, Madonna was standoffish, although she did say hello to my daughter
when her own little girl insisted on introducing her. Michael Vartan, who was
Drew Barrymore’s cute love interest in Never Been Kissed, was quite
friendly, asking my daughter and another 10-year-old girl standing around if
they’d liked that movie and happily giving them his autograph.

“Aren’t
you a bit young to be playing Madonna’s boyfriend?” I said, as he
signed their

notebooks.

He smiled
and shrugged. “I don’t write ’em!” he said tactfully.

I shouldn’t
have been so catty–blame it on the eyebags–because it’s refreshing
to see someone Madonna’s age working at all on screen. Hatsumomo, you go,
girl! There was talk a while ago that the success of The First Wives Club
would loosen things up for post-ingenue actresses, but that hasn’t happened.
First of all, remember that while the stars in that movie were all at least
50, the characters were in their (oh, sure) 40s. Still, it made enough money
that a sequel is in the works and so are a lot of knockoff projects. But this
being Hollywood, naturally there’s a nauseating twist.

A friend
of mine, a 48-year-old actress-turned-writer, got a lot of interest in a vaguely
First Wives-ish treatment she wrote, about three over-40 friends reentering
the dating world. But when she actually met with the producer, an over-40 woman
herself, the news wasn’t good. “These women cannot be in their 40s,”
the producer announced flatly. “They have to be 38.” Why? “Because
we have to believe they have a chance at a future life.”

And actually,
even 38 may not be young enough. Because then an executive said that the studio
was only interested in the project as a starring vehicle for Sandra Bullock.
And Sandra Bullock is…well, let’s see–either only 35 or only 31,
depending on which reports you believe. With true foresight, Bullock began fudging
her age several years ago, although she seems to have stopped, after Vanity
Fair called her on it.

Not that
men are immune to this sort of thing. After Albert Brooks’ character’s
cri du coeur that he was a 40-year-old man in Mother a few years ago,
I couldn’t take my eyes off the then-49-year-old Brooks’ jowls. Still,
they have it easier, both on screen and off.

Some time
ago, my father and I were sitting on a bench outside a Los Angeles courtroom.
We’d just finished testifying for my ex-husband in his custody trial with
his #2 ex-wife. “She’s a horny broad,” my father remarked, about
the #2 ex-wife’s lawyer.

I could
feel a headache coming on. “Why do you say that?”

“Because
when she asked me a question I didn’t want to answer, I said, ‘Well,
you know, I’m 70 years old, and my memory isn’t quite what it used
to be.’” Technically this is true–he is 70, and his memory isn’t
quite what it used to be–but it’s still better than the memories of
99 percent of people half his age.

“Then
she stared at me and said, ‘Hmm, you look pretty good for 70.’”

I closed
my eyes, wishing I had a Tylenol. “Yeah, Dad, she wants your bod,”
I said. Obviously, she just wasn’t buying his Clintonian answer. But then
my eyes snapped open again with a sudden thought. That lawyer looked like she
was in her mid-50s. And the man shortage at that age being what it is… Probably,
I realized, she did want his bod. And why should he not think so, given
how Hollywood encourages this attitude? So far, he’s seen As Good As
It Gets three times.

I could
see my future, and it wasn’t pretty. I think that’s when I started
my eyebag fund.

On the other
hand, there is hope on the horizon. I saw the actress mom at the bus stop the
other day and she was much more cheerful. She’d gotten some work, on the
tv show Star Trek: Voyager. There are roles for over-40 actresses after
all. “I spent all last week as a Klingon,” she said happily.

Let’s look at the typical heavy tv consumer, as they say in the trade. She’s female (60 percent of the prime-time audience); she’s old (people over 50 watch an hour more per day than the core target demographic of 18-to-49-year-olds); and there’s a good chance she’s black (the set’s on 70 hours per week in black households, versus 50 hours per week in white ones). She is, in other words, Touched by an Angel, a hugely popular CBS show that features, probably not coincidentally, a black, female, over-50 co-star.

I’ve never seen the wholesome Touched by an Angel, and odds are you haven’t either (I’m familiar with this newspaper’s demographics). But it’s a top-10 mass audience hit, enjoying almost twice the ratings of a niche show like Fox’s very nasty, very funny Family Guy, which I’ve watched regularly since it was introduced last spring. Question: On which show do advertisers pay more for a 30-second commercial? Answer: Family Guy, a top-10 favorite with teens, 18-to-34-year-olds and men under 50. These are more elusive eyeballs than Grandma’s, so advertisers value them more.

Family Guy is rife with tv references–sight gags about The Wonder Years, Star Trek, One Day at a Time, Speed Racer and Calvin Klein commercials pile up with the speed of a magician’s deck of cards–but its executive producers, 25-year-old wunderkind animator Seth MacFarlane and King of the Hill veteran David Zuckerman, told me they don’t watch much tv these days. Television writers always say that, and I used to think they were being disingenuous. But the truth is they really don’t have time to sit around slackjawed in front of the set all evening like the typical Nielson family. Nor do they have much respect for those who do, as their writing sometimes makes clear.

In an early Family Guy episode, the doofus dad rediscovers the joys of real life after accidentally knocking out the local transmitter in a car accident, leaving the town tv-free. But then the transmitter’s repaired, and the family wearies of constantly being urged to go outside and have some fun. “Sure, Dad,” says the daughter, settling in before the tube, “but maybe now it’s time to watch other people have fun. Or get killed! Y’know, whatever’s on.”

Family Guy family members, like all animated tv families right now, are white. They’re also a truly awful family, and if they were black you can be sure that Spike Lee, among others, would protest. That’s what happened with another clever new show on Fox, Eddie Murphy’s The P.J.s, which was pulled from the fall schedule (the only new animated comedy not to make the lineup), although Fox promises it will be back for midseason. The P.J.s was roundly criticized as insulting to black ghetto dwellers–as indeed it was, but no more so than Family Guy is insulting to middle-class white Rhode Islanders. This is the sort of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t conundrum that can annoy those whose livelihoods are affected.

A month ago, a black actor named Damon Standifer wrote to The Los Angeles Times complaining about how “self-appointed spokespeople for the black community” are one reason networks avoid shows with black casts these days: “If a show portrays wealthy black people, it’s criticized for ignoring the plight of poor ones. If a show features poor black people, it’s criticized for stereotyping black people as poor…In past years there were complaints that the tv show Seinfeld never featured a black lead. But honestly, which Seinfeld lead could have been cast as an African-American without drawing protests: the spastic, bug-eyed Kramer? The chronically unemployed, lazy George? The sexually promiscuous, self-centered Elaine? Had these characters been black, Seinfeld wouldn’t have lasted one season.”

As it happens, the only Seinfeld character likely to be resurrected in a spin-off is black. Phil Morris, the actor who played the Johnnie Cochran-like Jackie Chiles, is currently talking to Seinfeld’s production company, Castle Rock, about developing a new show starring himself as the fast-talking lawyer. Morris also has parlayed the Jackie Chiles character into a starring role in Honda’s current tv campaign.

Speaking of Seinfeld and how tv portrays minorities, that show (although I loved it) stuck in my craw when it insisted that, of its four obviously Jewish main characters, only Jerry Seinfeld was actually Jewish. This is an ancient tv tradition exemplified by shows like Columbo, in which Jewish actors and Jewish writers created characters who were always, mysteriously, Italian. (Like George Costanza. Right–it’s an Italian thing to get in big arguments over marble rye.) And don’t even get me started on the medical shows. Recently I read a statistic that something like one out of six doctors these days is Asian. But on Chicago Hope or ER, of course, they’re always either white or black. 

The last straw for me with Seinfeld was when a rabbi got a crush on Elaine, the ultimate Jewish princess, even though she was “not of his faith.” Uh-huh. I called up Lori Jonas, Seinfeld’s notoriously cranky publicist at the time, about this and got an earful of nutty spin-control.

“It’s not as if their names are Jewish,” she informed me firmly.

“Kramer?” I said.

“Cosmo?” she said.

Anyway, the dearth of black leading characters in the new fall season has led to a torrent of earnest, side-of-the-angels soul-searching in the media, especially after NAACP president Kweisi Mfume blasted the new season as “a virtual whitewash in programming” at his July 12 speech to the group’s annual convention. That thumping sound you hear is The Los Angeles Times patting itself on the back for its umpteen-part “TV’s Diversity Dilemma” coverage, which was actually well reported; the problem began when they hauled out the heavy thinkers.

The usually sensible Howard Rosenberg, the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tv critic, concluded the series on July 25 with a self-congratulatory essay that began: ”Just the other day, it seems–about 1980, actually–I was mounting a soapbox to say in print how rotten it was that no broadcast network had aired a prime-time drama series about blacks.” Good for you, Howard! Except…doesn’t that seem an odd soapbox to mount when the memory of shows like The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and Good Times was still fresh?

But Rosenberg was no match in bathos for Mike Downey, the sportswriter turned lead L.A. Times news columnist. Downey, whose nickname among his colleagues is Y2K? (a reference to his rumored salary) has, you see, experienced Hollywood racism directly, even though he’s white. First he wrote a script with a black lead character that never sold. Then he was asked to work on a film about Jackie Robinson, and the film never got made. (Unmentioned in Downey’s column is that an excellent 1950 film called The Jackie Robinson Story already exists, which would be hard to improve upon, since for one thing it starred Jackie Robinson as himself.)

“There are African American, Latino, Asian and Native American audiences and actors, waiting for something to watch, waiting for someplace to work,” Downey concluded soggily. “They don’t mind shows about white people. They grew up watching shows about white people. They just would like a few shows that aren’t about white people.” Mike Downey seems awfully sure about just what “they” would like–but then, of course, he’s assuming that this would include a script featuring black characters written by a white guy named Mike Downey.

But question any bit of this worthy attitude and you’ll quickly be dismissed as an old meanie. Last year I called up the Writers Guild and asked why they publish separate directories for women writers, Latino writers and African American writers, but not for men writers or white writers. (Or, for that matter, gentile writers. I mean, why not just go all the way?) “These are outreach programs!” said Zara Buggs Taylor, the Guild’s executive administrator for employment diversity, yelling into the speakerphone. “Do you believe we live in a colorblind society?”

“No, but I really don’t care what color or sex a writer is when I’m watching a show,” I said. “I only care if it’s good writing.”

Taylor was still on the speakerphone, but not for long. “I have to go!” she shouted. ”Because I have tons of stuff to do if I’m going to open up employment opportunities for those writers that you don’t care about!”

I happen to know a producer of one of those 26 whites-only new shows, Rob Long, the cocreator (with his writing partner Dan Staley) of Love & Money, premiering on CBS this fall, Friday nights at 8:30 (you’re welcome, Rob). “Yes, one of the bad white shows,” Rob said amiably when I called him up. Love & Money is an Upstairs, Downstairs-type comedy about a young super (working-class Irish) who loves a young heiress (upper-class WASP) living in his Upper East Side building. “We’re only talking about two families here,” he added, beginning to sound a bit exasperated, “so what am I supposed to do? Of all the times in the business for black people to be complaining, now is the worst possible time. There are all these black shows. We are opposite a black sitcom, in fact, on the WB, so what do they want from me?”

Staley-Long Productions have gotten a couple of shows past the pilot stage since leaving Cheers, where the writing team were coexecutive producers during that show’s last season, while still in their twenties. The first was the stillborn Pig Sty, for UPN. The second was George & Leo, the Bob Newhart-Judd Hirsch vehicle that lasted one season on CBS. “First off,” Rob said, ”let’s get a show on the air. Let’s keep a show on the air. With George & Leo, what we liked about it was also what doomed it–that it was about two old guys.” Even at CBS, known as the geriatric network, George & Leo skewed too old. As Rob put it: “Our demographics were awful.”

We spoke a few days before CBS’ fall season press junket, and I wondered how Rob would respond if asked about being one of the new whites-only shows. “We’ll be asked about it, I guarantee you,” he said, “because by asking about it they can pretend they’re doing socially conscious good work as they feast on the goodies and the handouts. And my response will be–try this out–that we’re concerned about it, but there’s only so much you can do. The thing that leaps out to me is demographic segregation. At least we’ve always done intergenerational shows.”

Actually, though, I guess we both underestimated what out-of-town Jaspers these junketeers are, because not only did no one bring up the “diversity dilemma” at the July 26 Love & Money press conference, there wasn’t even one newsworthy question. Instead, starlet Paget Brewster (who plays the young heiress) was asked how she got her first name; someone else wanted to know if Brian Doyle-Murray (who plays the young super’s Dad) still gets comments about Caddyshack. I thought about raising the topic myself, but decided that would have been unscientific, like Jane Goodall manipulating the behavior of apes instead of just observing it.

“What do you want? They’re entertainment journalists,” said Rob equably as we sipped complimentary smoothies in the lobby afterwards. He admitted that he might have been a bit ticked if I’d started grilling him in public anyway. ”I’d have said, ‘What am I–on trial here?’” he added, only semi-jokingly. He also thanked me for not bringing up his latest National Review column, an un-p.c. gig he conveniently leaves off his official CBS bio. But the July 26 column is worth noting here, because it makes a cogent argument that tv content isn’t as important as the fact that Americans watch way too much of it:

“…people like their crappy entertainment culture, it makes a whole lot of money, and with a whole lot of money you can buy a very nice president… But assuming that family-hour programming returned to all television channels–broadcast and cable–would that be such a good thing? Does the fact that content is free of violence and sex mean it’s okay to watch 18 hours of it a week? It is a strange era indeed when the concept of ‘family hour’ refers not to time spent with family but with time spent with television.”

It might seem odd for someone in the tv industry to argue for less tv viewing, but, as Rob told me, “it would be good for society and good for the business, by reducing inventory a little. If everyone were to watch fewer hours of tv the overall numbers would go down, but the value would go zooming up, because the attention would matter more.”

If you believe in the free market, it’s hard to be convinced that a slate of new shows with all-white casts (most of which will end up canceled) is a serious social problem, especially when you consider the success of programs like Oprah or The Steve Harvey Show or Touched by an Angel. As Rob put it in his next column, titled “Kweisi and Me,” “It’s sort of like protesting a certain stock price. Whom do you send letters to? The market in general? That’s an awful lot of cc’s.”

A few weeks before Kweisi Mfume’s NAACP speech, The New York Times ran a front-page story about the troubling discrepancy between black and white test scores, even among students from the same middle-to-upper-middle-class backgrounds. Buried around paragraph 64, on the jump, was this sad little fact: black teenagers watch three hours of tv a day, compared to white teens’ one and a half hours per day. Now, that’s a social problem. The best thing Mfume could do is tell his constituency to just turn the damn set off.