Author: A.T.

From Dana Dlott: “Thanks for your entertaining saga of THE STAR. If it were proven to me that one had to be a total ——- in order to be a great star (or great scientist, artist, etc.) I might think differently. But it turns out there is lots of evidence to the contrary. I know hardly any STARS, but several Nobel Laureates, and some of them are pretty nice. I think greatness is uncorrelated with being a total ——-. I say, SHOOT HER before she reproduces.”

From Michael Simpson: “Your story reminds me of many encounters I had with the Hollywood set at the San Diego Wild Animal Park (I worked there while going to college). For the most part, I find actors and actresses boorish, shallow people. Those I found most kind and “normal” were the younger stars. I met Brooke Shields and Tom Cruise and they are nice people. I met Shelly Duvall at a party we were catering at the Zoo. She is an extremely nice woman.

“The ones that stick in my mind however are the obnoxious ones. Michael Landon once visited. One of the food service clerks was trying to assist him, like she would anyone else and like the doorman in your story, and he snapped at her. The hurt in her eyes was very evident. He just sneered at her and said some derisive things. She left crying, and I think about how she probably carries that hurt to this day. At the time, Landon was in a show about himself as an angel. I thought ‘What a crock.’ When he got cancer and died, I could feel no compassion for the man.

“Judy Collins is another royal pain. She was performing at our theater. She had the staff running around doing silly things. Me, I was running all over Escondido trying to find a specific wild rice. We served them dinner. She didn’t even touch the wild rice. I hope she didn’t get bound up.

“The late Ricky Nelson performed at the park. He was an hour late and the crowd was starting to get ugly. He showed up but offered no apologies. He played a short set. That year, he burned himself up in his plane freebasing.

“These stars view themselves as all important. They work to become stars and when they do become stars, view it as a burden. There aren’t fans because there are stars, but stars because there are fans. Tina Turner is one star that probably has the best grip on this. She sincerely thanks her fans after a concert. (She’s one I would like to meet personally.) Anyway, enough of my rant.”

From Robert Doucette: “I read your column on the requirements of Ms. Star at the hotel and it reminded me of a conversation I had with one of my better in-laws. He manages an open-air pavilion which hosts concerts for big-name talent throughout the year and often has to deal with some strange requests as part of the care and feeding of celebrities, such as bowls of M&M with all of the brown ones removed. Some of these bizarre requests are put in to demonstrate their own sense of self-importance but some of them have a good business reason behind them.

“Sometimes a ‘requirement’ is put into the concert contract as a warning flag. It allows the rock star (and their business managers and entourage) to know immediately if the concert manager has read the contract and intends to comply with all terms and conditions. The brown M&Ms may not be important, but the backstage nurse for a diabetic drummer would be. And, if they get there at 9 a.m. and find no M&Ms or brown M&Ms, the manager knows she needs to ask about the nurse.

“(By the way, my cousin-in-law did give me the good news that although many celebrities are a real pain to work with, many are delightful. He says Dolly Parton, Jimmy Buffet and Elton John — in addition to being extraordinarily talented — are very well-mannered and a joy to work with.)”

"I have a question for you!! If you use my question in an article, please omit my last name! I am currently living in a mobile home that is paid for and has controlled rent. I can afford to buy a house but really have no desire at the present moment. The situation that I’m in has allowed me to save a good percentage of my income and invest. I’m 33 and would like to buy in a few years. Am I making a mistake? Am I losing out on a great tax break??? Is the tax break really what it is cracked up to be? The market in California is soft and I’m guessing that the environment will not change drastically anytime soon. Please let me know what you think!!!!" — Ken

Hmmm. Two conflicting things here. On the one hand, based on this sketchy info, I’d suggest that now — when the market for homes is soft — might be a good time to buy one. I wouldn’t be surprised to see California real estate prices pick up again. I think it’s already happening. Relatively speaking, stocks are pretty high and some California real estate prices not so high. A better time to buy a home rather than more shares of Coke? (A decade ago, you would surely have done better buying the Coke than the home.)

Then again, if you’re happy where you are and can continue adding to your investment portfolio, keep squirreling it away! Have you read The Millionaire Next Door? They got rich at least in part by living beneath their means.

In any event, I wouldn’t buy the house for the tax deduction. It helps you afford the mortgage and property taxes, and should certainly be taken into account when you figure what home ownership would cost you. (Also take into account repairs, insurance, lawn maintenance, repairs, utilities, painting every few years, plumbing problems and repairs.) Alone, though, the tax deduction is no reason to buy a house.

Hawaii is a state that chafes under its high auto insurance premiums, high proportion of uninsured drivers, and all the rest. The legislature passed a law a couple of years ago that would have cut rates 45% by cutting out almost all the lawsuits between drivers and eliminating the incentive for most of the fraud, but Governor Cayetano — a former trial lawyer — vetoed it. A big win for the trial lawyers of Hawaii, a modest win for the insurance companies (who don’t want to see the business shrink by 45%), and a big loss for Hawaii motorists.

The only insurer that pushed hard for the legislature to override the veto was State Farm, which, as a mutual insurer, doesn’t mind if the business shrinks 45%. (State Farm executives get no stock options or profit shares. At Allstate or Geico, by contrast, executives’ first goal is to see their stock rise — which doesn’t happen when premiums drop 45%.)

Anyway, the issue was recently revisited, under renewed pressure for lower rates. And this time, a way was found. Governor Cayetano got involved in the legislative process again and saw to it that the “threshold” beyond which drivers could sue each other was weakened even further. Great news for the lawyers. Meanwhile, to cut premiums, they reduced their mandatory minimum personal-injury protection (PIP) from $20,000 to $10,000. (Reduce it to zero, and premiums for those electing the zero coverage could fall even further.)

In other words, rather than cut back on legal fees and the incentive to commit fraud, they mainly cut back on benefits.

I do not worship pagan gods, because I don’t believe in them, frankly. And I don’t believe in them because if there were pagan gods, I know volcanoes on all seven Hawaiian Islands would have erupted over this latest legislative twist. Miraculously, all the lava would have fallen on the Governor’s mansion.

With respect to the column I titled Can the Market Keep Climbing?, I got one pat and one pan. “Ahh, Andy, Andy, Andy,” wrote Dan H. Oops, I figured — I’m in trouble. But no. “If only I had listened to this kind of thinking in August 1995 when I had just succeeded in turning my one-stock portfolio (SGI) into a cool $1,114,000, rather than today’s $116,000. Perhaps someday I’ll write you the definitive cautionary tale about letting the tax tail wag the investment dog. [I presume this means he failed to sell in order to avoid paying capital gains tax.] Hopefully, a few people will recognize themselves in your column and it will make some kind of difference to them. Alas, there will be those pesky Emerson fans who will quote his, ‘Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.’ The problem is, people fall in love with the basket, and they start watching the basket instead of watching the damn eggs.”

I’m not sure I follow that last little bit — especially if he had just one egg in his basket (SGI). But I’m not going to quibble when someone agrees with me, let alone the brother of the husband of the daughter of the chairman of the Senate budget committee, Pete Domenici. (In a P.S., Dan reveals this connection and says he passed on my stuff about the recently introduced Auto-Choice bill to Senator Domenici. Go, Dan!)

I fared a little less well with my friend Less Antman, whose opinion and insights I regard very highly, but who doesn’t seem to be related even to a subcommittee chairperson, let alone Domenici, so I don’t mind sparring with him from time to time.

Less writes:

“Far be it from me to give you a tongue-lashing for trying to time the market again, especially since anyone who would follow your advice today probably already followed it in the past and has nothing left in the market to sell at this point <g>.”

The <g>, as you know, stands for “good-natured grin,” which is of course exactly how I take it. I don’t think I ever told anyone to sell all his or her stocks, and I haven’t sold all mine. But it’s true: I’ve sometimes suggested lightening up, or selling half in your tax-free account, or shifting some to overseas funds — and I’ve frequently suggested not owning stocks at these levels on margin, or with money you might need in a year or three. (Less agrees with me on those cautions, so, as usual, there are only subtle distinctions between his point of view and mine-such as that I’m right and he’s wrong <g>.)

“Remember Paul Samuelson’s joke about stock market declines predicting 9 of the last 5 recessions?” Less’s message continues. “Someday, you will be immortalized for having forecast 20 of the last 2 bear markets <g>.”

I’ll admit there are things I’d rather be immortalized for. (“The man who invented the clickle,” perhaps, or “the man who went on at such length about auto insurance reform they finally just threw up their hands and enacted it to get him to shut up.”) But immortality doesn’t come cheap or easy, so if it has to be for predicting 20 of the last two bear markets — even though I have forecast only one bear market, and am 100% right that it will come exactly when I say it will (“someday”) — so be it.

In hindsight, of course, my caution has proved unnecessary. It was born of the period 1968-1974, as I watched stocks descend from euphoria to an environment in which many sold at six times — depressed — earnings. (Yes, Virginia, there was such a time.) These last five years, by contrast, and with hindsight, you should not only have kept 100% of your long-term money in stocks, you should also have committed your short-term emergency savings to the market, and then levered to the hilt with margin (just so long as you didn’t fill your portfolio with SGI). You should also have dropped your fire insurance, as it turns out, since your house did not burn down.

But the next five years? Well, the same terrific macro trends are in place: lower nonproductive expenditures for defense, freer trade, near worldwide acceptance of market capitalism, astonishing technological advance. But none of this is a secret, and the stock market seems already to take much of it — perhaps even too much of it — into account.

Less understands all this at least as well as I do, yet believes one should never attempt to “time” the market (guess when it’s time to get in and out) — a view I, too, have long largely espoused.

Indeed, an awful lot of people now espouse it . . . and that may be a problem. If not today, one day. It’s just when everyone catches on (and when they invest in stocks not based on value but on, say, their need to build a fortune in the relatively short time remaining before retirement), that markets have a way of becoming uncooperative.

“Let me explain why this hold-for-the-long-pull tactic will self-destruct if ever it becomes universally believed in,” wrote Nobel-prize winning professor of economics Paul Samuelson in the Fall 1994 Journal of Portfolio Management. “If you adhere to the dogma that stocks must beat bonds in the long-enough run, there is no P/E level . . . at which you will take in sail [lighten up your holdings]. A ponzi bubble is ever possible, and given past psychologies of boom and bust, ever-higher P/E ratios become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I cannot prove to you that every bubble must burst. After all, anything can be carried on to twice where it has already reached. But . . . at high enough P/E ratios, equities will cease to display in the future their historical superiority over bonds.”

This is not to say Samuelson saw the market, at its mid-1994 level, as a bubble about to burst. Or that he sees it that way now that it’s doubled. But because he was writing about the difficulties in “active asset allocation timing,” he was afraid his readers might “think I have climbed on today’s bandwagon of Become a Long-Term Investor Who Buys and Holds in the Confidence Acquired from History, Which Assures that Stocks Do Better in the Long Pull than Non-Stocks Do.”

“As will be seen,” he continues, “I give two cheers at most for this new dogma. There have been worse dogmas. And there will be worse ones to come. However, as I shall explicate, once everyone comes to believe in and act on Always Hold Stocks, that tactic will self-destruct in the way that the Tokyo Equity Bubble self-destructed after New Year’s Day 1990.” (The Nikkei Dow was 40,000 then. Seven and a half long years later it is 20,000 — and that’s up a lot from its low.)

We are not at “Nikkei 40,000” — a long way from it, in fact. But it is to keep from getting there that Alan Greenspan and Warren Buffett and such are sounding notes of caution.

Invest . . . invest for the long pull . . . invest partly or largely in stocks . . . but not blindly. Samuelson’s 1994 equation-laden article is entitled: “The Long-Term Case for Equities (And How It Can Be Oversold).”

#

One last thing to say, in fairness to Less. He rightly pointed out that my earlier column was flawed in the simplistic way it equated profit growth with growth in stock prices. Most public companies reinvest all or most of their earnings — these days, often, by buying back some of their own shares — so that when profits rise 5% (say) profits per share, and hence stock prices, may rise faster. Less has a lot of interesting things to say on this point, and has done a better job of thinking about it than I have. If I ever feel I understand it well enough, I will share his comments with you — and poke as much fun at him as I am able <g>.

Friday, I confirmed your growing suspicion that I am a lunatic — and was so from a very early age. Today, let me get to the point. Among the books I dusted off were a whole series from the ’70s and early ’80s. Remember those years? Our national confidence was not what it had once been or would be again.

Here were the titles, several of them national best-sellers: The Coming Credit Collapse (Alexander Paris, 1974); The Coming Deflation by C.V. Myers, 1976; 99 Ways to Make Money in a Depression (Gerald Appel, 1976); How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years (Howard Ruff, 1978), and, when they didn’t come, Survive and Win in the Inflationary Eighties (Ruff, 1981), which turned out to be perhaps the most disinflationary decade in our nation’s history. Crisis Investing (Douglas Casey, 1980), which foretold economic collapse by 1983; The Coming Currency Collapse (Jerome Smith, 1980); The Great Money Panic (Martin Weiss, 1981); How to Survive and Grow Richer in the Tough Times Ahead (Thomas Holt, 1981), when in fact the market and the economy bottomed the following year and then began its more or less astonishing rise ever since.

One of my favorite titles in this genre, from 1976: You CAN Survive any Financial Disaster: Strategies to Beat Triple-Digit Inflation, Severe Depression — Even Wartime Catastrophes. Isn’t that great? The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and you can make a lot of money while it does!

One more, from 1980 — Get REALLY Rich In the Coming Super Metals Boom, where the word “really” was underlined, getting rich being a promise almost any book could make, and the word “Coming” was crossed out — because, really, who wants to wait? This one referred to strategic metals like chromium, critical to the production of stainless steel, bismuth, zirconium and so forth. The notion that paperback book buyers would in fact be able to profit from this coming boom was almost as absurd as the timing of the book itself, which appeared — surprise, surprise — at more or less the top. Anyone buying into this strategy would not have gotten rich but, rather, hosed. REALLY hosed.

(I actually met the author of Get REALLY Rich, Gordon McLendon. He was a Texan with scores of drive-in movie theaters in places like, oh, say, downtown Dallas. The drive-in business, he told me, is really just a way to warehouse land while it appreciates. By the time he died, his had appreciated considerably. This strategic metals book was just a lark, no doubt inspired by the killing he had made on strategic metals. If only he had written us this book ten years earlier, at the bottom instead of the top.)

There were other books I had not even remembered owning, some of which I consigned to a pile destined for some unsuspecting library.

It was onto this pile I was about to throw The Battle for Financial Security: How to Invest in the Runaway 80’s by someone I had never heard of named Rodger W. Bridwell — who are all these people? where did I get all these crazy disaster books? — when I noticed the blurb on the back. It was by me.

This highly readable investment guide brims with the kind of good sense and perspective that’s worth a shelf of more technical stuff. Rodger Bridwell’s outlook is admittedly bleak — ever-increasing inflation that it is too late for us to lick — but his advice most decidedly is not. No $800-an-ounce gold bullion for him . . . no howitzers surrounding isolated rural fortresses . . . no hedges against ultimate social collapse. Instead, he outlines a practical, plausible way to get rich, or at least beat inflation, by investing in, of all things — productive assets. Stocks.

This is a book I picked up with considerable skepticism and then could not put down. As neither will anyone else with a few dollars in the bank.

Whoa! Wish somebody would give me a blurb like that.

I had no immediate recollection of this book or writing that blurb. Only when I closed my eyes really tight and thought about it as hard as I could was I able to dredge up some vague recollection. Still, if I had to have blurbed one of the books on this shelf, I seemed to have lucked out by blurbing this one. The future certainly did not turn out exactly as Bridwell expected. But Chapter 8 is titled: “1980-1990: The Bull Market Decade.” And the final line of the book reads: “The time to buy and be fully invested in stocks is right now.” Better advice than most of the other books were giving in 1980.

I suppose books should be dusted after 18 years, but it was not something I was planning. I’m way behind on about a dozen different things. Dusting the books was not a priority. (I’m speaking quite literally here of dusting books, not “cooking” books or some other accounting esoterica.) But somehow, in a weak moment, I had agreed it was time to replace my put-’em-up-myself-on-brackets bookshelves with molding-adorned professional built-ins, not unlike the way Jerry agreed to wear the low-talker’s “puffy shirt” on the Today Show.

(Translation for the Seinfeld-deprived: She was a low-talker, so Jerry and Elaine couldn’t hear a word she said. Eventually, they gave up trying and just smiled and agreed at what they took to be the appropriate places. One of the things Jerry apparently agreed to, without knowing it, was to wear the puffy shirt. And may I say, to further confound those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, or how Seinfeld could possibly command $1 million an episode, and the others $600,000 apiece: Hey! I think they’re worth every penny of it. Now just give the writers a raise.)

Anyway, getting built-in bookshelves meant taking down all the books from the old shelves and after a week or so, dusting them off and putting them back in the new shelves. Not a small job. But the side benefit, of course, is coming across so many long-forgotten pieces of one’s life.

One thing I came across was the little file box from the eighth grade in which I kept neatly typed three-by-five index cards for the book I was writing on Attila the Hun. (It’s pronounced AT-ill-ah, even though nobody does, and my book, aged twelve, began: “Like demons out of hell, they came …” speaking here of the Huns, who used to “cook” their meat by putting slabs of it between themselves and their horses’ backs and then galloping off to loot and pillage.) So there was this box, filled with alphabetical cards I had neatly typed 38 years earlier (“Acatziri, a tribe imperfectly subdued by Attila,” “Addac, king of the Alans in Lusitania (around Portugal). He died about 418, in battle against Wallia” . . . ). I have never hidden the fact I was a strange child. And as you can imagine, looking at it now for the first time in decades, I was struck by the passage of time and by the absurdity of my pursuit (no, I did not complete, let alone publish, my book on Attila — at 12, I didn’t even have an agent), but mainly, I was struck by the note I had apparently typed to myself, with some urgency. Indeed, it was the urgency rather than the note itself that struck me. It was the first card (alphabetical order be damned), and it was headed: IMPORTANT IMPORTANT, once in black with red underline, once in red with black underline:

SEE HODGKIN’S MAP, PAGE 568, VOL I., PART II. NOTE: THAT THEY USED A HIGHWAY ETC. !!!!!!!!!! NOTE WHICH ONE !!!!!!! NOTE WHERE IT LEADS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hodgkin’s was a wonderful 19th century three-volume history I had found at a rare bookstore. I seem to have deduced from one of its maps the route Attila would have taken on his way to or from some battle. And — lest I forget this world-shaking discovery (the Huns were thought to have come teeming down over the hills, I think, not to have taken highways) — I had pounded away on my old manual Olympia typewriter this card: IMPORTANT IMPORTANT.

Can you imagine if, at 12, I had put the same passion into learning about computers?

I had not planned to tell you any of this. I had planned to tell you about a few of the financial books I dusted off. Please come back Monday.

There are some things everyone knows, so no one explains them, and you somehow know you’d look stupid asking, so you never find out. This was the story of my sex life for a dozen years, but I write here of real estate closings.

Ninety-nine percent of you will just roll your eyes when you hear this, because of course you know it perfectly well. And the other 1% will pretend to be in that 99%. But I don’t care:

Do you know how much cash changes hands in an “all-cash” real estate deal?

None.

No suitcases full. No wads of hundreds. Well, maybe $5 for the notary public.

Cash is one of those words — like lash, rash, dash or bash — that has more than one meaning. To most people, it means actual currency. Dollar bills. Clinking coins. But in the financial world, it means “as opposed to debt.” An all-cash deal means you sold the building without having to “take back a mortgage” (i.e., you got the full selling price all at once at closing) and without even having to worry whether or not the purchaser can get financing.

“I’ll pay $150,000 — cash” means I’ll write you a check or send you a wire, unless you happen to run drugs for a living, or run a nightclub, or be the doorman at some swank hotel. The maitre d’ at one of Miami’s most famous restaurants bought a major condo, all cash. Every once in a while, “all cash” means all cash.

With respect to that $45 billion middle class “tax cut” I told you about a couple of weeks ago . . . it would come via reductions in the cost of your car insurance . . . I forgot to include what the New York Times editorial page had to say a few months ago:

“Trial lawyers contribute heavily to state and Federal politicians, largely because they want to block reforms that would eliminate excessive litigation that follows automobile accidents and other mishaps. For the most part they have succeeded, but their gain is the average driver’s loss. Americans pay punishingly high premiums, much of which land in lawyers’ bank accounts. Now, however, bipartisan proposals in Washington and New Jersey would give drivers, especially those who are poor, substantial relief . . . . The new proposals would give families the option of forgoing suits for non-monetary losses in exchange for quick and complete reimbursement for every blow to their pocketbooks. Everyone would win — except the lawyers.”

And remember, this is the New York Times, not exactly a right-wing outfit willing to trample the rights of the aggrieved or the poor.

Right now, you are forced to buy policies that pay insurance-company lawyers $150 an hour to fight your claim, and contingent-fee lawyers who take 40% of any money you do win. The Auto-Choice bill Senators Moynihan, Lieberman, McConnell and Gorton, among others, are pushing would allow you to opt out of this crazy system. Is your congressman on board? Or has he come to rely too heavily on trial-lawyer campaign contributions?

“Where can I find a company’s ex-dividend date? and pay date? Thanks.” — John Jessica

Check out www.stocksmart.com, which provides information about ALL upcoming dividends, splits, and distributions sorted by ex-dividend date or company for up to the next three months. Actually — check out this site anyway. It’s one of the best free sources of information I’ve seen.

And for those we’ve made curious: the ex-dividend date is the date on which buyers will no longer get the dividend that’s been declared. So it trades “ex-cluding” the dividend. The actual dividends themselves may not be mailed out for weeks — on the pay date (and you’ll still get yours even if you sold out in the meantime).

Usually it’s not very dramatic, in part because large dividends have gone out of fashion. If a company finds itself with an extra billion or two, it will not generally pay it out as a special dividend. It will generally use it to launch a disastrous acquisition campaign. Or it will build a luxurious new headquarters. Or, mostly these days, it will buy back shares of its own stock. That’s a better strategy than the first two, because it makes each remaining shareholder’s piece of the pie a little more valuable (the slices are slightly larger because the pie is divided into fewer of them) without having that extra value taxed (until you sell and take your profit).

But let’s say we’re the Ford board and we decide at our meeting June 15 to pay our regular 38-cent quarterly dividend plus “a special dividend” of an additional $1 a share. We decide it will be paid on August 15 to “shareholders of record” as of July 18. That means anyone buying the stock far enough in advance for the transaction to settle by July 18 (normally three business days in advance — which in this case would be July 15) will get the dividend. But anyone buying it too late for it to settle by July 18 won’t.

That’s why there will be a little “x” in the stock pages for a few days, to warn newspaper readers that the stock is trading “ex-dividend.” If you buy it “ex-dividend,” the trade will not settle in time for you to get this quarter’s dividend. The train has left the station.

Other things being equal, if Ford stock closed at 50 on July 15, it would open at 48-5/8 the next morning, because $1.38 in dividends has just been carved out of what you’re buying. If a share of Ford was worth $50 to you yesterday, then it should be worth $50 less the $1.38 dividend you’re not going to get if you buy today. Recognizing this, if Ford should close trading July 16 at the same $50 it did July 15, the computers and stock pages will not show it “unchanged,” as you might expect, but actually “up” $1-3/8 for the day.

But all of this is so out of fashion. Dividends? Who would want dividends? Isn’t it better just to buy stocks that go up 30% a year?

All week we’ve been following preparations for the hotel visit of a famous actress, her arrival, the days subsequent, including yesterday, when she had a problem with her fax.

It is almost time to leave — but not yet.

“More than 400 society and civic leaders attended a luncheon and fashion show at the hotel today,” reports my secret correspondent, the hotel manager. “Fortunately, while all of this was going on, Ms. Star behaved herself — until she flew into a rage over the fact that the operators couldn’t overcome the fact that she had somehow taken one of her phones off the hook, which prevented them from directing the calls to that line as she had instructed. Of course, she wouldn’t allow anyone to explain the situation to her (she chewed out — and hung up on — the operator who tried), nor would she allow anyone to enter her suite to put the phone back on the hook. I finally had to call her secretary and ask her to come back to the hotel (her staff and the rest of the cast are staying at a budget motel down the street) to remedy the situation.

“Spent the rest of the afternoon smoothing ruffled feathers in PBX and at the front desk — and assuring everyone that they wouldn’t be ‘written up’ for any alleged infractions of our standards even if Ms. Star complained about their performance during her brief tenure. (The staff is beginning to count the HOURS until her departure.)

“I finally left the hotel around 6:00 p.m., after she headed for the theater and I was confident she couldn’t inflict any more emotional damage. Took one of the hotel pagers home with me to ease everyone’s mind (only fair — after all, I got us into this starry mess).

“Kind people that they are, our staff feels sorry for her–they think she must be terribly unhappy to be so disagreeable all the time. Maybe they’re right.

“Yesterday, my counterpart at one of the hotels where Ms. Star will be staying next called. ‘Rumor has it that she’s a handful; how bad does it get?’ I told him what I’ve told you. ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’

“He said that they drew the line on moving furniture in the suite. ‘We have expensive stuff up there, and we’re tired of replacing it.’ In fact, when they reached this point in the negotiations, he tried to convince the travel agent to book her at another property. But the TA insisted.

“What prompted this hotelier to call me was that by the strangest coincidence, a meeting planner happened to have just come to his property from the hotel where Ms. Star was last in residence. This meeting planner told him that by accident the cell phone he had ordered through the hotel had been inadvertently given to Ms. Star and vice versa. Since the meeting planner’s number had been distributed to all of the attendees (and there were close to a 1,000 of them!), it was imperative that he and Ms. Star trade phones (if nothing else, to save her from hundreds of nuisance calls). The hotel, which had arranged the cell phone rentals for both, contacted Ms. Star and before they could explain the problem, she told them to ‘F— Off!’ and hung up. Somehow — at great expense — they were able to redirect the calls or advise all of the attendees of the situation. But everyone was shocked at her intransigence.

“I forgot to tell you that I wrote her a letter late yesterday afternoon and asked that it be given to her after she returned from the theater last night. I decided to apply some ‘reverse psychology’ and allow her to direct her anger at me. It may have worked: There was not one unkind word or irrational act from her today. Not a peep.”

And what was the text of this miraculous letter, I wondered?

Dear Ms. Star [he wrote]:

It is a great pleasure to have you at The ———-. Your visit continues a tradition of hosting Hollywood royalty that began at our historic hotel more than seventy years ago; and, as you might expect, we treasure it.

We understand how difficult it must be to find an acceptable home on the road, especially when your venue changes weekly and the demands on your time are extreme. No doubt it is doubly frustrating having to manage your domestic affairs through a revolving door of people and regional customs. Throw in the fact that perfection is a process (not fully achievable in a week, much less a few days), and disappointment is inevitable, as much as we wish this were not so.

More to the point, many of our staff come from the poorest sections of the city, and you can imagine the joy they derive from being able to please our distinguished guests with the services they provide. This is particularly true of stars of your caliber. From the doormen to the housekeepers, you could not find a more devoted following or one more intent on making you smile. A kind word is all they require.

As a gesture of goodwill and a first step in mending any misunderstanding, we would be very honored if you would accept the enclosed gifts. The first is a cookbook that contains a brief history of the hotel, with a mention of Maria Callas and her historic visit many years ago. The second is a commemorative box designed exclusively for us by Tiffany & Co. Only a few were made, and we wanted you to have one as a keepsake.

With kindest regards,

“At this point,” continues my friend, to me, “I think I went into the bathroom and washed my mouth out with soap–for all of the bad things I was THINKING about saying to her. I’m still blowing bubbles.”

Not long afterward, Ms. Star’s limited engagement ended and she went on to the next city, the next cowering hotel staff.

“She left around 6:30 a.m. Even though a bellman saw her leave, everyone harbored a doubt that she was REALLY gone. Since my associates know that I’ve faced everything from grizzly bears to bobcats, they left it to me to enter her suite and check it out. I knocked first, of course. But it wasn’t necessary; she was gone. Gone now, and probably gone forever. I was relieved to see that the suite didn’t suffer any permanent damage. She broke a lamp earlier in her stay, but considering what could have happened — and what stars have done to our suites in the past — we got off very, very lightly.”

SETTLING THE BILL

“This morning I learned that at the last moment, Ms. Star switched credit cards on us. She established her credit with the touring company’s card and, on departure, asked the front desk to bill it to her personal card. This usually poses no problem; but given the enormous sum involved, it required a little more than just the basics to obtain an authorization code from the credit card company — to wit, her home address. Oh, great.

“Fortunately, we were able to leave a message for her secretary. (Somehow we didn’t think Ms. Star would entertain this question.) The call was not returned for most of the day. Each time I passed the front desk I asked if we had heard from the secretary, and the answer was invariably ‘no.’

“It brought to mind the agony I went through a couple of years ago when I went out on a limb for a somewhat obscure governmental agency from Zambia (at least, I think it was Zambia). They brought in their minister of agriculture and an entourage intent on seeing everything — first-class. I think when they finally wiped the last crumbs of room service from their mouths, the bill topped $50,000. And I didn’t have a credit card to back it up. Or a check. Or U.S. dollars. Or Zambian dollars. Or ANYTHING. Just a promise to pay from a very diplomatic retainer in Washington, D.C., who waved away my doubts with, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get paid. I PROMISE.’ O.K. Sure. No problem.

“Every night I went home and tried to forget what a dent $50,000 would make in my personal balance sheet. What would it be like sleeping out under the stars. One week, no check. Two weeks, no check. Three weeks, no check. By the fourth week I was checking flight schedules to Zambia (and inquiring about the financial soundness of the Zambian government). Finally, in desperation, I called the diplomat again and asked him — in the interest of Zambian-American relations (not to mention my sanity) — to make good on his promise . . . via FedEx. Please.

“Something in my voice must have struck a charitable chord because the next morning that beautiful FedEx packet arrived with a cashier’s check for $50,000.

“About 4:30 p.m. Ms. Star’s secretary returned our call and cheerfully gave us the address. All’s well that ends well.”