The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 65

LOS ANGELES TIMES WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 20(H) E3 West A Joyful Portrait of the Author and Friend ym jr i joyed the opportunity to tell stories about their own heritage in a more open, honest and affirming voice in movies such as "Zoot Suit," "la Bamba," "Stand and Deliver," "Selena" and "A Walk in the Clouds." Reyes, a movie publicist who is also a chronicler of Hollywood's latin American heritage, describes the book as "an attempt to show the way Hollywood has depicted Hispanic Americans and Latin America, while also pointing out the contributions to Hollywood movies and television made by unsung Hispanic Americans as well as those more famous." Thus, his book can be approached as a serious effort to ponder the issues of race and ethnicity in American pop culture and, at the same time, as one of those useful reference works that can be pulled down from the shelf when puzzling over some old and obscure movie on cable. "Latino Metropolis," by Victor M. Valle and Kodolfo D. Torres (University of Minnesota Press, $18.95, 218 pages), delves even more deeply and with a much sharper sense of alarm into what its authors call "the Iatinization of Los Angeles," a city where the latino population already makes up 45 of the total population and is fast approaching an outright majority. The authors view the urban landscape of LA from a scholarly prospective Valle, a former writer for The Times, is a professor of ethnic-studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Torres is a professor of education at UC Irvine and they have taken careful observations and measurements of the political, economic and social factors that affect the I a- formed by both a Marxist and a critical 'postmodern' social theory." Thus, for example, Los Angeles is described as "Johannesburg by the sea, with lines of 'racial' demarcation only more formally drawn under apartheid," and the Los Angeles Times is described as "still dominant among the blueblood elite." Indeed, the authors occasionally engage in a kind of rhetorical overkill.

At one point, the authors condemn former Times restaurant critic-Ruth Reichl for indulging in "His-panicizing nostalgia" by failing to disclose that the author of an early and influential book of recipes, first published in 1898, was a descendant of "one of Alta California's wealthiest and most tragic of the elite ranchero families," the Ilerrye-sa family. Reichl is praised for noting that "nouvelle" California cuisine can be traced to old Mexican culinary traditions, but, as far as I can make out, she is criticized for failing to point out that "Yankee miners, soldiers, and vigilantes lynched or shot a total of eight Ber-ryesa men." "Intended or not," the authors insist, "her omissions leave much of the I lispanic fantasy legacy intact." Clearly, "Latino Metropolis" seeks to hold us all to the very highest standards when it comes to understanding and honoring the Latino traditions of California and accommodating the urgent needs of its growing Latino population. And the fact is that its verbal pyrotechnics serve their intended purpose the authors manage to catch and hold our attention with the occasional verbal blow, and then they deliver a sober (and sobering) lecture on the hard realities of multiculturalism. cake on the cover and a gossip column on the inside. "Life is compromise," he told Anderson.

For many, certainly; for Anderson, never. He found British films "emotionally inhibited, willfully blind to the conditions and problems of the present." Although an all-star cast of writers felt much the same about F.ngland in general and left (mainly for America), Anderson stayed to fight the good fight. His idealistic skepticism and his insistence on working in England made him like John Ford, who loathed Hollywood but managed to make film after film of quality there. No wonder he admired Ford so much. "England doesn't change," he often wrote Iambert, yet he did brilliant work about the home he loved in spite of its flaws.

With their themes of injustice, the plight of the homeless, science at the expense of humanity and a shredded societal safety net, Lucky Man!" (1973) and "Britannia Hospital" (1982) portray the conditions of the time they were made and of today. (Alan Price's songs that anticipate and comment on the action in Lucky Man!" are perfect; Lambert says they're as integral to the movie as the Street Singer is to "The Threepenny And for more than 40 years Lambert has written brilliantly about the "horizontal automotive city" that became his second home. Lambert also writes engaging sketches of other friends, among them Isherwood, Natalie Wood and Paul Bowles, and of such lovers as Peter Brook and Nicholas Ray. His portrait of Rachel Roberts, who committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of lye, is heart-wrenching yet its aftermath is sweet: Anderson kept her ashes in a gift-wrapped box in a Gianni Versace shopping bag for more than 10 years before scattering them in the Thames along with those of another suicide victim, friend and actress Jill Bennett. He filmed the ceremony for a 1993 documentary on his work and life, entitled "Is That All There Is?" Alan Price sings the title song while others on the boat amiably gossip, drink and eat sandwiches.

The BBC didn't quite get what Lambert calls "the portrait of the artist as an old man-quirky, funny, sadder than perhaps he realized and nakedly personal as he intended." Much the same can be said of Lambert, an elegant stylist and raconteur who has opened the gift box that holds his own past as well as Anderson's. A friend recoiled when Anderson invited her to the ceremony for Roberts and Bennett. "No, Lindsay, you can't throw the ashes of two of your dearest friends in that awful, cold, dirty" river. But she came anyway and saw, "He was right. The whole scene was extraordinarily warm and joyous." Just like this book.

Uric Lax is the author of "Woody Allen: A Biography." he also sees rising careerism among Yalies. Before he retired in July, Smith said he received more and more complaints about grades. "It wasn't complaints about Cs," he said. "It was about A-minuses that weren't A's." But Alexandra Bobbins (Yale, 1998) found that many young Yalies are still thinking about politics when she wrote two major magazine articles about her school, in the Atlantic and the New Yorker. One talked about George W.

Bush's mediocre academic record, and one was about Skull and Bones. Robbins, who works in the New Yorker magazine's Washington office, was deluged with letters, e-mails and calls from Yalies. "What they said was, 'When I run for office, I hope no one digs into my past like you They didn't say if, they said when." Robbins said. The reaction, she said, reflects the aura of entitlement that penetrates the environment at Yale. "It's in the air," Robbins said.

"You feel it in your interactions with other students, you hear it in class and you see it in the grandiose plans of the organizations. It just permeates the atmosphere." One of the 5,000 students inhaling that atmosphere this fall is Barbara Bush of Austin, Tex. Yale has 12 residential colleges, and as a freshman, the Republican presidential candidate's daughter has taken up residence in Davenport, her father's college. Along with Ms. Bush came two male security guards, disguised to look like college boys.

Normally, fellow Haven-porters say, she introduces herself only as "Barbara." But by no means is she Yale's resident celebrity. At the Yale Women's ('enter, a chorus supplied that name: "CLAIRE Continued from El ity is not so ambiguous as his film-ography might suggest. Born in Brooklyn in 1927 to Italian-Puerto Rican parents, when he came to Hollywood he was pressed into service as a kind of multicultural jack-of-all-trades. An illuminating and entertaining survey of films and television programs in which latino actors, settings or themes figure prominently, "Ilispanics in Hollywood" is full of such surprises. Anthony Quinn, perhaps best known as Zorba the Greek, is only one of many actors whose Mexican origins were once concealed, and there are many others whose latino roots have only recently come to public attention, ranging from Rita Hayworth (bom Margarita Cansino) to John Gavin (born John Anthony Golenar) to Ra-quel Welch (born Raquel Tejada).

And it was a young Emilio Estevez who boldly reclaimed his own latino family history and thus revealed to the world that the real name of his father, Charlie Sheen, is Ramon Estevez. More often latino actors found themselves in an awkward dilemma in Hollywood, as the authors of "Ilispanics in Hollywood" point out if their latino identities were not concealed, they were put to use in depicting stereotyped Latino characters: "maids, slum dwellers, drug addicts and gang members," co-author Luis Reyes reminds us, or "cruel dictators, mustachioed bandits and beautiful semritas." Only in the last couple of decades have latino actors and directors en Yale Continued from El radio host Christopher l.ydon (Yale '62) that although there were no quotas for his creed, as a Catholic, he felt like a token, too. Yale had a definite ladder of class distinctions, Lydon said. "The top of the Yale class system was all tied up in the word he said. "It was code for white shoe.

We'd say, That's a really Shoe guy, a realiy Shoe way to dress, a Shoe way to carry yourself. More than we wanted to admit, there was the ideal of being Shoe." Shoe or not, Lieberman swept into prominence, earning what was then Yale's most coveted elected position, chair or editorof the daily newspaper. He wrote editorials railing against boxing as barbaric on the one hand, and favoring the admission of women to the all-male university, on another. His political aspirations were so unconcealed that one friend, Al Sharp, took to calling him "Senator." One day, Lieberman approached him, said Sharp, who now lives in Chicago. "You're not wrong," Lieberman told Sharp.

"But not so loud." After distinguishing himself as head cheerleader at the exclusive Phillips Academy in Andover, George W. Bush entered the college of his forefathers in 1964, where he was well-known as a prankster and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Reborn now as a man of the people, Bush seldom dwells publicly on his days at this elite institution. Yet Yale classmates number among his closest friends. In his book, "First Son," Dallas Morning News reporter Bill Minu-taglio quotes Bush speaking of his time at Yale years after graduation: "What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous.

They thought they had all the answers. They thought they could create a government that could solve all our problems for us. These are the ones who felt so guilty that they had been given so many blessings in life." In 1964, the late Mario Savio stood on a police car in Sproul Plaza to launch the free speech movement at UC Berkeley. Soon protests over civil rights, free speech and Vietnam were rattling many other universities. With sit-ins and love-ins, it was a turbulent time at many campuses.

But al the Yale of George W. Bush, the '60s barely showed up before he graduated in 1968. The cultural revolution of the mid-'60s, Levin observed, "didn't really hit Yale." William Sloane Coffin was Yale's chaplain from 1958 through 1976. At Coffin's urging, Lieberman organized a small group of Yale students who traveled to Mississippi to do civil rights work. But as the decade wore on, Coffin expressed despair over a sense of complacency on campus.

"The social concerns of the minority were very great in the 'tills," Coffin recalled. "Lieberman was in the minority. George W. Bush was in the majority." Insulated and Isolated An hour and a half's train ride from New York, Yale nonetheless seemed both insulated and isolated at that time, graduates say. As it is today, New Haven was a gritty city, and Yale an island of privilege within it.

I he school was so white that when Sharp, l.ieber-man's successor as chair of the Yale Daily News, sent- his staff out Book Review By ERIC LAX SI'MCIAI. TO Till; T1MKS MAINLY ABOUT LINDSAY ANDERSON by Gavin Lambert Alfred A. Knopf $29.95, 372 pages JT ostly About Lindsay Ml Anderson" is also a lot about Gavin Iambert, which makes it all the better. Anderson, the director of "If and Lucky among other films, and of such influential plays as "Look Back in Anger" anil "The Changing Room," died in 1994. He was also the author of "About John Ford," which is also a fair bit about Anderson.

Lambert is a screenwriter Daisy biographer and novelist whose "The Slide Area" is one of the best books about L.A. and the movie business. Building on Anderson's example, he has intertwined stories of two lifelong friends. Iambert and Anderson met in the early 1930s at Cheltenham College, an English boarding school with "stone corridors that reeked of carbolic acid" and where they "sat on long worn benches like convicts in a prison movie." Homosexuality was common though generally not a permanent preference. Anderson's diaries show how he struggled with his homosexual desires and detail his often unfulfilled longings.

Iambert, on the other hand, writes that since his sexual initiation at age 11 with a teacher at his preparatory school, he has felt only "gratitude" for realizing his homosexuality. The many indignities inflicted on the Cheltenham student bodies the straying hands of teachers, beatings, "metallic tea from a blotched urn" and "ancient mutton or frazzled cod" colored Anderson's work, most directly "If. (1968), an allegory of revolution and youthful passion that earned the praise of Patrick White (the school's only and ignored Nobel Prize winner), the enmity of the Establishment, and which introduced Malcolm McDowell to the movies. Anderson and Lambert were drawn together by their love of Hollywood movies, and they were such cineastes that at Oxford they founded Sequence, a magazine devoted to ardent examination of films and filmmakers. Lambert writes that Anderson "took falseness of any kind as a personal affront, and the films that Sequence attacked, as he wrote retrospectively, 'hurt us as much as our comments hurt their Anderson instinctively resented authority, and no authority figures more than producers.

The first he met was Sam Gold-wyn, whom he interviewed for Sequence. The magazine's fortunes were flagging and Gold-wyn's advice was to put cheese For the Record Incorrect names: Tuesday's story Orthodox Cathedral misidentified Skouras. 0 s.i a An Hispanics in Hollywood. iFilm PublishingLone Eagle Actor Henry Silva has played characters of different ethnicities. lino population, ranging from the globalization of the Southern California economy to the shrinkage in housing, schools and social services.

Caught among these seemingly blind and irresistible forces, however, are human beings, and the authors issue a dire warning that we ignore the poor and disempowered among us at our own peril. "The effect of all this is to render the population that 'occupies' Central Los Angeles invisible politically and economically, to be policed but not seen or heard front the authors declare. "In this sense, the Los Angeles implosion in 1992 was not a riot or an uprising or an intifada, not an uprising or quite a revolt, but the overflowing of anger no longer containable." "Latin Metropolis" is soaked with the same volatile blend of sharp analysis and white-hot rhetoric. The authors characterize their work as "a political economy approach in Yale's feisty political union, the only organization of its kind at any Ivy League school. A top student, Maserati arrived at Yale with plans to become Secretary of State.

Maserati makes a firm distinction between today's campus and the old Yale, "a bunch of men, a bunch of WASP men, who got there because they were rich." When they visit today's more diverse, more meritocratic campus, she said, old Yalies say, "Wow, you guys do so much work!" They also do their share of political analysis. At the Yale Daily News, former editorials editor Milan Mil-enkovic said the presence of three presidential and vice presidential candidates from his alma mater was a subject of great pride. "The men of Yale such as Joe Lieberman and George W. Bush were the kind of men Yale strived to produce to lead and better this country," said Milenkovic, a senior majoring in political science. "In our time we will see Yale and other Ivy League schools produce a new breed of leaders to head corporations, the U.S.

Congress and perhaps the White House." Yale, said Maserati, retains mystique. "Everyone knows that intellectually, Harvard is the best," she said. "But there is a kind of cachet about Yale. Yale is where the cool people go." Gaddis Smith, a Yale history professor emeritus who is at work on a history of the school, said a further distinction between Harvard and Yale is that "for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the emphasis at Yale was on working together in groups. There was the ideal of an undefeated football team, a charity drive, the junior prom committeea huge emphasis on leadership in groups.

Harvard's spirit was much more conducive to the individual intellectual achievement. You could be a hermit and hide in the library." Smith said that the changing demography of the last 30 years has brought less unity to the campus. With so many organizations, "today you have people identifying themselves in groups, and each group has an agenda," Smith said. With tuition, room and board now costing nearly $33,000 per year, and 40 of students receiving some financial aid, Smith said fUtS GMft XjJr i liftk ,7: re to do a story on "Negroes at Yale," he could decree, "Go out and interview all six of them." Such a comment seems ridiculous today on a campus where 30 of the students identify themselves as belonging to a minority. Clearly, said Boston pediatrician Eli Newberger, Yale '62, "It was a very narrow band of citizens.

It was a place where the elite sent their sons, ultimately for positions in the leadership class." Amid the stone towers and courtyards, between the seminars and the master's teas, Yale also was fond of a good party. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll may have taken awhile to hit the campus, but fraternities and other campus clubs did their best to make up for the loss. Several years before Bush proudly assumed the post, John Adams was president of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the national fraternity known as Deke. "We had out-wild and crazy parties yes, we did," said Adams, now a businessman in Raleigh, N.C. Of course, the most important organizations of all at Yale always have been the secret senior societies, clubs that rely on tradition to "tap" their members.

Lieberman joined Elihu, not the most famous, but a club then considered the thinking man's secret society. Bush followed his father, grandfather, uncle and cousins by joining Skull and Bones, the most mythic of them all. Though it inspired the movie "Skulls," the organization is known to cognoscenti as "Bones." It occupies a dark, dingy "tomb" dead in the center of campus. When tapped, Bones members receive secret names. Usually they are assigned, but Bush was allowed to choose his own.

Until he could come up with one, he was known as Temporary. He never bothered to change it, so Temporary is what Bonesmen call him still. The New Millennium Imagine more than 200 years of male-only tradition at Yale. Bones-men of generations past must be spinning in their own tombs to think of new-millennium members such as 20-year-old Sarah Maserati of Palo Alto. Fiercely conservative, Maserati is an active debater with The 1 New York Times Bestseller Where Do Balloons Go? An Uplifting Mystery about a festival at St.

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