So the wife and I went out to a party downtown Wednesday night. Which is unusual for me, because I don’t normally go to parties, through an effective combination of a) not being invited and b) not wanting to go, as parties typically involve conveying myself somewhere and encountering unfamiliar people. I’d rather be home.
But my close personal friend Christie Hefner invited me to a book signing at Carnivale, the big, fun Latin American restaurant on Fulton, and while that still wasn’t enough to make me want to go (by “close personal friend” I mean I like Christie and we had lunch once at the Cliff Dwellers Club) it prompted me to ask my wife if she was interested (I recognize the burden of being married to me for — Jesus! — 34 years, and try to enliven the torpor, when I can). To my surprise she said, yes, in fact, she would like to go to the party.
Which still might not have been enough to get us there. But Christie (now that I think of it, we’ve also had dinner, at the gorgeous, if narrow, Venetian palazzo on Michigan Avenue belonging to auctioneer Leslie Hindman) is nothing if not efficient, and her assistant prodded me until I finally RSVPed that we were going.
At Carnivale, we were met at the door by owner Billy Marovitz, who I’ve known since he was a sprite, having been a close personal friend of his uncle, Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz (and by close personal friend I mean we had lunch together at the old Standard Club, and he came to my apartment on Logan Boulevard to marry my brother, Sam Steinberg to his wife of. — Jesus! — also 34 years, Yuri Hiraki.
The room was packed, and I noticed several well-known personages, including former governor Pat Quinn and former TV political reporter Mike Flannery, who I considered speaking to. But he didn’t look in my direction and the moment passed.
I can’t hope to read the books piled on the floor by my night table, not if I took three months off from work and did nothing else. So getting another book was not high on my list. But having had — Jesus! —nine book parties myself, albeit more sparsely attended than this, I have a moral code that can be described as “Buy the book!” I hurried up to beat the crowd to acquire the book being feted, “Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech,” getting in line right next to beloved icon of Chicago journalism Carol Marin.
Due to some quirk of personality, I introduced Carol to the author, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who, perhaps being in the middle of a long, exhausting book tour, looked up without exhibiting signs of interest or comprehension. She read my name off a Post-It note, wrote it with a Sharpie, then “Star power!” and signed her own name, “Maureen.” No last name. Which, in many years of attending such events, I can’t recall any author ever doing. Maybe she considers herself in the ranks of Cher and Madonna and similar mono-named cynosures. Or maybe she has arthritis or something. I probably shouldn’t speculate.
The talk involved Marovitz asking questions and, I would discover later when I began reading, Dowd repeating whole paragraphs from her book’s introduction, almost word for word. While I wasn’t in my reporter mode, I like to show that I’m sometimes out and about. She said, ““Hollywood and Washington are twin capitals of illusion.” So I snapped a photo and sent that line to my 2,860 followers on Bluesky.
My close personal friend, Northwestern professor Bill Savage (having enjoyed many, many lunches together over the past dozen years) responded to my post by writing, “And her success in turning political commentary into bulls—t gossip column pseudo-psychoanalysis since the Clinton Era helped make it so.”
Can’t argue that. I replied:
“She did have a troubling habit of referring to the man currently destroying American government as ‘Elon,’ as if they were in feet pajamas exchanging confidences at a slumber party. I didn’t realize the book is a contact high huffing of celebrity, which is kinda how our country got into this mess.”
Unlike most celebrity journalism, that last graph seems a sentiment worth sharing. We should never lose sight of the fact that the president of the United States was the star of “The Apprentice” and, to millions of Americans, including half of Congress, any other consideration is meaningless in comparison. You’d think that alone would take the blush off this whole celebrity worship business. But I can report to you first hand that it does not.