mentioned yesterday that my teen-age
daughter expected to see movie and TV stars everywhere when we
visited L.A. a few years back. We did get to see Drew Carey on a
pre-arranged visit to a movie set but there were no random
sightings on the trip.
Over the years I have had some random sightings. A few of the
stars were from what they call "yesteryear," but it was a thrill
for me anyway.
One night in a Beverly Hills bistro, I sat across the way from
Esther Williams and Fernando Lamas. I was indifferent to being in
Lamas' company but seeing Esther Williams was another story.
I had grown up in the heyday of her Hollywood career and she was
one of those fantasy women on the screen, unique in that she was
the only one to swim her way to fame.
On the night I saw her at the restaurant, she was probably in
her 60s but still looked gorgeous. In fact, last time I looked, she
was about 80 and still looks great.
L.A. is probably the only place on earth where you can see
someone who looks like a celebrity and when you pass by, you
discover it is the celebrity you were thinking about.
It happened on a trip when my younger son was 13. We were
driving through Beverly Hills on a quiet Sunday morning and saw a
bald-headed man jogging down the street. I said that he looked like
Carl Reiner and as we drove by, we saw that it was.
One of my favorite L.A. stories was told by a colleague who went
to work here back in the mid-1970s. He put up at the Beverly
Wilshire Hotel and each evening would stop by for a cocktail at the
hotel bar.
He got to chatting with a man who frequented the bar and after a
while, the man asked why my friend was in L.A. He explained about
his new job in town with our company and got to talking about his
former aspiration to be an actor.
"I wanted to be an actor very much," he said. "But I gave it up
after a bit because I thought there were too many weird people in
that line of work."
"Really?" the man replied.
"By the way," my colleague said, "what do you do?"
"I'm one of those weird people," he said.
"You're an actor?" my friend said. "I thought you looked
familiar. Have you been in anything I might have seen?"
"Possibly," the man said."
"What's your name?" my friend asked.
"Alec Guinness," the man replied.
When I heard the story, I asked my colleague how it was possible
he didn't recognize one of the world's great actors.
"I don't know," he said. "He was just a guy in a bar."