The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 63

Southern California ktTSi ij Sarah Ferguson touts the Cos Angeles (Times i I tamily and Wedgwood at a promotional gig for the British company. E2 E5, 6, 7 WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 4, 2000 WWW.LATIMES.COMLIVING I Hi comics 7 fi 1- Kids' Reading page C8 rtff.rn urn i 1 Mm in 1 iiimii' in MMVirftiV-. ANNIE WELLS Los Angeles Times GRAND JURY I -r-jTOACTlN I fifl zooTsurrwA iURD A "Hispanics in Hollywood," IFilm PublishingLone Eagle F.dward lames Olmos is Y. Pachuco in Luis Valdez's movie "Zoot Suit." Ethnicities Obscured, Celebrated WesiWords By JONATHAN KIRSCH si'K ii to mi: i'imls HCMI17 Silva is one of those character actors who are the glory of American motion pictures we may not know his name, but we instantly recognize him in the dozens of vivid roles he has played over the years: A Korean manservant in "The Manchurian Candidate," an Indian brave in "The Plainsman, a Sicilian mobster in "Johnny Cool." His all-purpose ethnicity says something profound about how Hollywood has denied and reinvented the racial and cultural identities of some of its finest actors. What we learn about Henry Silva in "Hispanics in Hollywood: A Celebration of 100 Years in Pilm and Television," by Luis Reyes and Peter Huhie (il'ilm PublishingLone liagle, $21.95, 592 pages), is that his ethnic-Please see West, E3 --rti i.

.,..,1.111 ROBERT HOLMES Corbis Though from vastly different backgrounds, three men on the 2000 presidential ballot had a sojourn at Yale. The Ruling Class Three men in this year's presidential election were students at Yale business as usual for a school whose sense of entitlement matches its tradition of producing leaders. By ELIZABETH MEHREN, TIMES STAFF WRITER EW HAVEN, Conn. The football jock from Wyoming. The prom king an observant Jew.

The silver-spoon legacy kid. Could one Ivy League institution have hosted three more different men? As students, about all Richard Che 1 job was to create "1,000 male leaders." Over the centuries, Yale students have learned to think big. Senior Eliza Park, 21, said she knows six people on campus who plan to be president of the United States, and one who expects a seat on the Supreme Court. Park herself intends to become surgeon general. "People here have a feeling that they can run the world with their Yale degree," agreed sophomore Molly Lindsay, 19.

"I feel like you get told that when you come to school here, like you're going to be a kingpin of power." Much the same mandate was at work in 1959, when Natrona County High School football star Richard Cheney packed up his scholarship and headed to Yale. New Haven and Yale were worlds away from Casper, and by all accounts he was miserably homesick and pined for his girlfriend. The school won't release Cheney's academic records, and Levin purports to know nothing more about the Republican vice presidential candidate's tenure at Yale than "what I've read in the papers." I-evin presumably is referring to media accounts that Cheney was out of his academic league, that he left Yale once, then returned, then withdrew a second, final time in 1960. Cheney ultimately finished at the University of Wyoming. But cheering briefly for the Bulldogs is apparently almost as good as graduating, and even without a diploma, Cheney has been known to show up at Yale alumni functions.

Lieberman, by contrast, arrived from a large public high school in nearby Stamford, in 1960, when Yale still enforced a quota on Jewish students. A big man at his own big-city high school, Lieberman unpacked his bags at a university where about half the student body came from prep schools, already a badge of elitism. Students wore coats and ties to class, and the school was so blindingly WASP, said Boston public Please see Yale, E3 Chris Erskine THE GUY CHRONICLES Watching Boys of Summer Turn Into Fall Guys So we head out to the Church of the Divine Dodger, the Rev. Davey Johnson at the pulpit. At least for now.

At 7:10, the organ music stops and evening vespers begins. "Now batting for the Dodgers Tom Goodwin," the stadium announcer says soon after. All around us, there are Giants fans. This is no way to end a long season, surrounded by San Francisco fans, with their pasty skin and black and orange hats. They are a peculiar bunch from a peculiar city, a lovely enough place except for the fact that it is filled with Giants fans.

"Jeez, we're surrounded," I tell the guy I came with. "Yeah, Giants fans," he says, his voice trailing off, his smirk saying it all. A haze hangs over Dodger Stadium this night, an Indian summer soup heavy in the air. Like Vaseline on a Please see Erskine, E4 ney, Joseph I. Lieberman and George W.

Bush had in common was Yale University, where all three studied in the 1960s. Now the trio and their boola-boola background dominate the Republican and Democratic presidential tickets thought to be the first time three candidates have come from any single institution of higher learning. Presidents Taft and Bush went to Yale, and the school also likes to lay claim to Presidents Ford and Clinton, both graduates of Yale Law School. Six U.S. presidents, meanwhile, may have gone to Harvard College, but in this election, Harvard alum Al Gore is the academic oddball.

Whether weird, unprecedented coincidence or, as Yale president Richard Levin quipped, "the natural and expected course of events," the phenomenon reflects a sense present for almost 300 years at this Gothic-towered campus that a Yale diploma is a passport to stewardship. The rhetoric of leadership flows through the air and water here. Its flip side is a powerful streak of entitlement, and no small measure of elitism, despite an increasingly heterogeneous student population. If Yalies past and present have been leaders, they'll tell you it's because they were meant to be. Levin himself calls the institution "a laboratory for future leaders." Before the school went coed in 1969, one of Levin's recent predecessors, the late Kingman Brewster, made a habit of reminding his flock that his III Photos by Associated Press George W.

Bush, top, followed his forefathers to Yale and was a notorious collegiate prankster; Joseph I. Lieberman edited the school paper. TheLondon Monk's Philosophy on the Art of Life and Writing By SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS TIMliS STAFF WHITER 9 113 ONDON It's drizzling and gusty Li in London. People don't come in off the street, they blow in. Men 'stand in phone boxes, their eyes lifted heavenward as they scan the "An Artist of the Floating World," "Remains of the Day" and "The sits quiedy at the center of London's famously nasty literary life.

Everyone likes him (suspicious, He engages just enough to be a player, but not enough to fall into the kinds of squabbles that clutter the careers of writers like Martin Amis. On the morning 1 visit Ishiguro at home in Golders Green, the Times reads more like Agatha Christie than a source of news. The front page sports an oversized photo of the tony blond who was so recently aide to a duchess and who, it seems, has killed her boyfriend with a single stab. She, who was born to the lower middle, the reporter gloats, always thought she was posh, dressed a little too fancy. "Which duchess was it?" Ishiguro wants to know.

"Must have been the Duchess of York." Like Christopher Banks, private detective, the hero of "When We Were Orphans," the author's mind wanders a wav down the path to solving the case. One can imagine this latest intrigue rippling through the city's subconscious, an echo of the gray car carrying the famous politician that moves through a London morning in Virginia Woolfs "Mrs. Dalloway." These are the currents that Ishiguro, like Woolf, plugs into. His books often begin with the feeling of an era, then the feeling of a culture, then a city, moving like arrows shot from an extremely focused consciousness, into the minds and hearts of his characters. The prose is restrained, precise and very evocative.

Ishiguro did time on the fringes of society as well. In 1974, age 19, with long hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, he hitchhiked for two months down the west coast of America, searching at one point for a boy guru in San Francisco, yeah. His guitar was stolen in his lodging and it was a relief to get rid of it, to travel light. Please see lshlgu'f E4 business cards with photos that line the walls for the perfect prostitute, London's answer to street violence and cat fights. One must step over puddles of vomit that signal the understated entrances to trendy West F.nd pubs.

In better neighborhoods, book parties and readings announce one of the city's most glittering literary seasons in years. Anita Brookner, Will Self, William Trevor, Jeanette Winterson and Caryl Phillips all have books out in October. But perhaps the most exciting of these, the most hopefully awaited by fans on both sides of the Atlantic is Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, "When We Were Orphans." Ishiguro, author of some of the most arresting novels of his generation Pale View of Hills," ni.MrJ--Tf"vJJ 1" -T-- -r- in i I'TV I'm1 GRAHAM BARCLAY For The Times Kazuo Ishigtiro, 46, spent his ear ly 20s making demos and meeting with record pro- ducers. "I did so much failing Ih at, as a wr.iter, I was allowed not to do it all again..