Survival Kit

Going Hollywood is not as simple as going native. To be Mistah Kurtz or a Paul Gauguin, one has to learn little ritual incantations; to survive in Hollywood one must take survival training. Even chameleons die there of eczema, looking in their last hours like iguanas by Jackson Pollock. Yet people can live there, if they know how. A 1964 survival textbook for men and women:

Begin with a sauna bath. Even Charlton Heston likes saunas. Install a bidet in your bathroom. Love Tom Jones. Adore Barbra Streisand. Get a dress shirt with hundreds of layers of overlapping eyelet ruffles. When you are hostess, wear evening skirts. Serve baked marrow bones. Appear in your own hair, because wigs have had it. So has LSD. Don't wear mink anywhere but to bed (sable is safe enough elsewhere), and don't ever mention Cleopatra.

A helicopter is essential. It's all right to rent one (CH 5-8641, $125 an hour), but it is vital that you refer to it as a chopper. Go to the ball games in Chavez Ravine, but leave before the seventh inning. Get a pool table, and don't give a party unless you have a mahogany keg on the patio with draft Michelob. Get a Yorkshire terrier. Learn to think. Stay out of toreador pants and stretch pants; wear Jax slacks.

The Full Ashtray. Ferraris are too popular; a Jaguar sedan is still O.K., but avoid Lincoln Continentals--press-agents drive them. Get an Aston-Martin. Renting a car is acceptable. Warren Beatty gets a new one whenever the ashtrays are full.

Sheer necessity once demanded that you own three houses, one in Malibu, one in Palm Springs and one in Beverly Hills. But now you can reverse field and have no house at all. This saves money and is considered bright. Billy Wilder has a simple $100,000 co-op apartment with a low monthly maintenance of $1,000.

In restaurants, avoid the one with good food. Perino's, worth a Michelin star, is for tourists. La Scala, which serves mediocre Italian food, and Chasen's, where steak is cooked under white-hot rock salt, used to be No. 1 and No. 2. Now everyone is crowding into The Bistro--perhaps because nearly everyone is a stockholder: Laurence Harvey, Tony Curtis, George Axelrod, Otto Preminger, Robert Stack, Jack Lemmon, Jack Benny, Dean Martin, Merle Oberon, Sam Spiegel.

But Dominick's in West Hollywood is it--not because of the atmosphere, which is early roadhouse, or the cuisine, which could have been learned in a vending machine, but because Dominick is an irascible bounder who only lets in people he likes. Everybody wants to be liked by Dominick, but he stands in his doorway before a cavern of empty tables and announces that he is booked solid. He lets Jack Lemmon in, and Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Jim Aubrey, president of CBS-TV.

The Power Centers. Restaurants as a whole are actually out and private dinner parties are in, but try to remember not to put it that way because it is out to say that something is in. Yet nothing is in-er than a dinner on the Bel Air circuit. Careers are made or snuffed there--at Saturday-night after-dinner screenings in the Bel Air homes of new power centers like Producers Harold Mirisch and Ray Stark, or old Hollywood truebloods like Bill Goetz, son-in-law of Louis B. Mayer.

At Mirisch's, a Matisse swings out from the wall, a screen drops from the ceiling, and people like the Fred Zinnemans, the William Wylers, the Billy Wilders, and William Holden settle back to judge a new picture or star whose fate may be seared with a wisecrack.

If asked by the Mirisches, accept instantly. Parties elsewhere may be more chic or at least more interesting than chow and a movie, but you won't enjoy them until you've made it with the circuit.

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