Completing his first lap around the room, Bart returns to his table, nods fondly at his wife, and finally takes a few sips of vodka. By the time Nigel Sinclair, cochairman of the British film company Intermedia, stops by to pay his respects, Bart is coiled less tightly. So, as he often does, he launches into a ribald tale from one of his past lives. In this one a panicky crew member calls Bart from the set of the 1972 movie The Getaway to say that the film’s two stars are having an affair. What made this report especially juicy at the time: One of them, Ali MacGraw, was married to Bart’s friend and then,boss at Paramount, Robert Evans.
“I was the guy who got the phone call: ‘Ali went into Steve McQueen’s trailer 24 hours ago, and they haven’t come out. What should we do?’” Bart says, enjoying the story he has dined out on for 30 years. “I said, ‘Take a hint from this.’ And I hung up.”
*
Mentor Peter is at Le Dome, telling me what to eat.
He’s invited me to lunch at the frumpy power restaurant on the Sunset Strip. With a flourish he orders us each a chicken burger with mixed greens — the favorite meal, he says, of his own mentor, Robert Evans. “There’s no bun, so it’s the Atkin’s diet,” he tells me. “Not that you or I are in dire need of diets. You look like a jock.”
Then he offers a career advice. “I’d like to see you do books. You are a disciplined writer, and for someone who can write and be disciplined about it, doing books and magazine articles is a wonderful thing. That’s why I like writing for GQ every other month. I would love to see you do that sort of thing,” he says, taking a bite. “The New Yorker is looking for someone. Everybody is.”
For a moment I find myself basking in Mentor Peter’s regard. Then Withholding Peter takes over, delivering a critique of the magazine for which I actually work. “The last issue — I really liked it, but I wonder if it’s a little overdesigned. Where are the big stories you want to read? Having said that, I liked the energy. But even your last story was just … THERE. I wish you guys nothing but the best,” he says, chewing slowly. “I just hope your magazine succeeds.”
*
BART’S 17 YEARS INSIDE THE MOVIEMAKING MACHINE is the foundation on which he’s built the rest of his career. His management style stems from it. His books and columns draw credibility from it. More than anything else, it confirmed his belief in a credo he’d had drummed into him since childhood: Self-invention is the route to power.
“I was raised with one adamant dictum: Don’t allow yourself to be imprisoned in any socioeconomic category, religious category, ethnic category, whatever,” Bart says one afternoon. We are sitting in the peach-colored living room of his home in Fremont Place, the Mid Wilshire enclave that was one of Los Angeles’s first gated communities. The eight-bedroom house used to belong to Harry Cohn, the producer and movie-studio founder whom Bart likes to call “the mean-spirited czar of Columbia.” Bart and his wife have refurbished Cohn’s screening room to its original 1920s splendor, and he delights in referring to a separate alcove as “Harry’s phone room.” But there’s another commonality that Bart does not wish to talk about. Cohn, like many of Hollywood’s founding fathers, was Jewish. When I ask Bart about his own ethnicity, he turns elusive. It’s peculiar, to say the least. Of all American industries, Hollywood has historically been a place where Jews have not only achieved acceptance but thrived. But following his parents’ dictum, Bart keeps his ancestry a secret.
Here are a few things Bart would tell me about his upbringing: Peter Benton Bart was born in 1932 and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His only brother is six years older. His parents were public-school teachers who had immigrated to the United States, though their son won’t say from where. (“They were very Americanized,” he says.) The elder Barts were fiercely irreligious and ferociously anticommunist. (“They told me if I was caught playing with a communist, they wouldn’t feed me.”) For reasons he never understood, they served Chinese food “morning, noon, and night.” (“They weren’t the kind of people you sat down with and said, “Tell me the origins of this fetish.’”) Although not wealthy, the family enjoyed some luxuries: a nanny, private schooling for the kids, and a vacation home in Martha’s Vineyard.
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