OS ANGELES - The unassailable truth about the party circuit out here is this: Anything you can get into probably isn't worth attending.
If nothing else, the convention lets you know where you stand. It spotlights the LA pecking order that punishes interlopers. Here, the gods can't stomach the mortals, who in turn detest the bottom feeders.
As the lowest form of LA life, the media can only imagine what happens in the mists of Hollywood's upper reaches. Titans like Lew Wasserman and David Geffen hold affairs at their estates so discreet that they are mentioned third-hand, if at all, in the press. Everything else is chopped liver.
But we can dream: The soft evening light skips from the shimmering pool onto the bougainvillea. The ping of primo crystal echoes off of the sienna stucco. The guests are sleek as seals. The city, the convention, the dreaded delegates do not exist. There are no surprises. Gods hate surprises.
Never mind.
Light years below are the purported A-list bashes, like Barbra's fund-raiser at her Malibu digs Sunday morning for Bill's presidential library. Details of these affairs are leaked wholesale because hosts like Barbra want it that way. What good, after all, is exclusivity if no one knows about it? That's also why reporters penetrate the lesser parties at wateringholes like Spago for politicians such as House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt.
As a result, the great unwashed get to read more than they want to know about, say, the West Wing bash Sunday afternoon on the Warner lot, where Clinton failed to join the cast in the faux Oval Office, or the Mandeville Canyon soiree Saturday night where Cher sang for the president.
Occasionally, a convention elevates a politician from snooze to sizzle. This can happen at the podium or a party. Such a transformation occurred this week with Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, a fine man and solid senator who nonetheless can put the cows to sleep up in the Vergennes Valley.
Last night, Sheryl Crow was to perform at a Leahy tribute at the Sunset Room, a venue quite a few degrees hotter than anything in the Green Mountain state. The press became so interested in the closed event that organizers finally allowed limited media access before banishing them into the peasoup funk of the LA night.
As a rule, the only things deadlier than media parties are Tupperware klatsches. Exhibit A this week was the party thrown for reporters Saturday night by Hugh Hefner at the Playboy mansion. They feigned ennui, badly, until apprised of the fact that the trophies mingling among them had earned their cottontails as centerfolds.
Paterfamilias Hefner, meanwhile, appeared with yet another mute blond and talked to anything that moved for over an hour. Fortified by the invention of Viagra and the massive press attention, he radiated the message: What's not to like?
Then there were the media parties that flew too close to the sun. New York Times LA bureau chief Todd Purdum and his wife, former Clinton press secretary DeeDee Myers, hosted an in-house Times affair at their home Sunday evening that ended up as a full-blown A-list bash. Beatty, Streisand, Reiner, the West Wing cast, all showed up with the welter of media heavies who have been eyeballing each other all week. Purdum fumed at the volume of gatecrashers begging for tickets or who materialized on his front lawn.
The best parties are those that are free of convention cynicism. High on this list was the pedal-to-the-metal Mardi Gras bash that Louisiana Senator John Breaux threw on the back lot of the Paramount Studios Tuesday night, funded by an awesome array of corporate giants like AT&T, Bristol-Myers, and Lockheed. (Did I mention that Breaux sits on the Senate Finance Committee?) This was an exercise in unadulterated fun.
Breaux, quite simply, was astonishing. He greeted everyone in the same orange outfit he later wore onstage when he played a torrid washboard with the Zydeco Twisters. After a costume change, he emerged atop a giant Mardi Gras float in a white, sequined body suit, framed by a rainbow of plumes rising from his shoulders into the sky. Part Elvis, part Liberace, all Cajun, Breaux presented a spectacle lacking, sadly, among our northern politicians.
''He clearly doesn't have aspirations for higher office,'' noted one Democrat as Breaux rode by, his eyes wide and his necklace blinking red and green.
