BY: Amy Wallace

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — It was dinnertime when the 80 or so invited guests began arriving. Handing off their Benzes and Boxsters to uniformed valets, many of Hollywood’s most important agents, producers and studio and network executives followed a brick path to Sandy Grushow’s front door. Mr. Grushow is the president of 20th Century Fox Television, and his clout was reflected in the 8,000-square-foot Tudor house he shares with his wife, Barbara, and their two children. A pianist played standards on a baby grand in the foyer. An army of waiters in taupe Nehru jackets offered hors d’oeuvres on glistening platters.

“Mini-Reuben sandwich? Knish?” a waiter asked the guest of honor, Rabbi Steven Z. Leder. Rabbi Leder opted for a corned beef and Swiss about the size of a postage stamp, then climbed a few steps up the Grushows’ elegant staircase and quieted the crowd. “I thought we might begin tonight by taking an opportunity to turn to your left or right, to meet your neighbor,” he said. “Then, I would appreciate it if you would just share your net worth with them.”

The room shook with nervous laughter. No one complied.

Rabbi Leder is the senior rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, arguably Los Angeles’s most prestigious synagogue. The evening was a chance for him to unveil his new book, “More Money Than God: Living a Rich Life Without Losing Your Soul,” for some of the wealthiest members of his congregation: those who make the deals, call the shots and create the programming that ends up on America’s movie and television screens. While he didn’t mean to offend, he knew that the book’s central premise — that raging materialism and the relentless pursuit of money lead to moral bankruptcy — might strike some in his audience like a stick in the eye.

“The thought has occurred to me: Am I biting the hand that feeds the temple?” he said a few weeks before the book party. Not that “More Money Than God” is particularly incendiary. Close readers will find a few juicy tales (without names) about some in his flock, like the young woman who inherited tens of millions of dollars from her grandfather but feels as if her husband is a mooch, or the Oscar-winning movie director who died alone, with nothing but a tattered snapshot of his parents to soothe him. Overall, however, the book’s messages are hardly fire and brimstone: don’t be a workaholic; give generously to charity; teach your children that materialism, like racism, is not okay.

Nevertheless, in Hollywood, where who’s up, who’s down and where one stands in the pecking order are constant obsessions, Mr. Leder’s chosen topic is a thorny one. Money here is much more than a passport to comfort. For people whose success depends on something as amorphous as being able to predict the national mood 18 months into the future, the size of one’s paycheck (or profit participation, or back-end) is a crucial signifier. Perhaps more than any place on earth, money here, like corner tables in hot restaurants or middle seats at movie premieres, is a way to assert your rank. And the fickle nature of the business can make even the very affluent feel insecure in a way that makes no amount of money ever seem enough.

“This is a town where the next big script could be written by the person who’s handing you the cup of coffee at Starbucks,” said Stuart Krasnow, a temple member and an executive producer of reality programming at NBC. “Things change so rapidly. Success can go away rapidly.”

Which makes the rabbi’s supporters a bit worried for him. By focusing on money, said Erwin Stoff, a partner in the management-production company 3 Arts Entertainment, whose clients include Keanu Reeves and Matthew Broderick, Rabbi Leder had entered “a risky area.”

Leonard Goldberg, the TV and movie producer (among his many credits: “Charlie’s Angels” — the series, the film and the sequel), agreed. “This book will force people to look at themselves, and there may be some who don’t appreciate that suggestion,” Mr. Goldberg said. “We’re not building bridges here, or saving lives. We’re just making movies. And when you’re making so much money for what secretly you think may be the very little that you do, it can be very unsettling. The only benchmark some people have is what their peers are making. As somebody once said: ‘It’s not about the money. It’s about how much.’ “

Originally appeared in Vanity Fair April, 1995

BY: Amy Wallace

Down an alley, next to a sheet-metal factory just off the Santa Monica Freeway, is a place so exclusive that some of Hollywood’s most powerful players are turned away at the door. It’s not a nightclub, but a prep school: the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, a 23-year-old experiment in nontraditional learning that – despite its grungy locale – draws celebrities like moths to a spotlight. 

“We look like an urban-renewal poster child,” admits headmaster Roger Weaver, describing the hodgepodge of renovated factory buildings that house Crossroads’ $12,400-a-year middle and upper schools, grades 6 through 12. Nevertheless, he says, “we have turned down, for basic reasons of admissions standards, some of the biggest names around.”

Dustin Hoffman’s son fared better, as did the children of Goldie Hawn, Maximilian Schell, director Lawrence Kasdan, and Ted Danson. And that’s just for starters. Over the years, Crossroads has taught the progeny of Streep, Streisand, Sheen – even the older children of O.J. Simpson (and, for a time, the son of Simpson’s lawyer Robert Shapiro).

But Crossroads, which also has an elementary school, is known as much for its unusual approach to education as it is for its famous names. Besides being academically rigorous, the school requires its students to participate in community service and the arts. No one graduates without taking kayaking, rock climbing, or two other excursions into the great outdoors.

One day a year, classes are dispensed with to allow students to discuss “global issues” such as racism or nuclear power. Athletic programs include yoga and the martial arts. And to cap it all off, students complete a “Mysteries” class – an exercise in self-expression that culminates in a five-day retreat involving chanting and activities based on Native American sweat-lodge rituals.

“To this day, anytime Crossroads people get together they can say these chants,” says one 26-year-old alumnus. “You did them over and over.”

According to Weaver, it’s all part of the Crossroads ethos: to build self-esteem along with G.P.A.’s. He’s heard the whispers about “fringy, over-the-top” programs, but is unapologetic: “We give kids a lot of permission to be who they are.”

And the kids take advantage of it. During a recent lunch period, the lack of dress code was apparent in the tie-dyed T-shirts, overalls, and fatigues. One pink-haired 12-year-old wore a pair of gossamer wings, “because I’m different,” she explained.

Out in the alley, where kids gathered around a gourmet-lunch truck that serves empanadas and meatless burgers (there is no school cafeteria), one student observed that, for all its downscale fashion, Crossroads is no stranger to conspicuous consumption.

“You can tell the teachers’ cars from the kids’,” he said. “The teachers have beat-up Volvos. The kids have Beemer convertibles.” At other schools, pranksters may put thumbtacks on chairs. At Crossroads, they steal one another’s vanity plates.

You don’t have to be rich and famous to go to Crossroads. The school prides itself on its diversity – roughly a quarter of the students are minorities – and this year’s financial-aid budget is $1.7 million. But the support of wealthy families is essential to its survival, which has at times proved troublesome in this tight-fisted town.

Dr. Jake Jacobusse, a former director of the upper school, explains, “So much of the money in L.A. is new money, there’s no tradition for philanthropy.”

Big names bring other complications as well. Like how do you tell somebody with a shelf full of Oscars that he or she needs to spend more time parenting? “The big-star types are not used to people telling them they’re blowing it,” says Weaver. “But sometimes, that’s what they need to hear.”

The school, lauded as exemplary by the U.S. Department of Education, is not without critics. One parent says that for all its creative programming Crossroads’ so-called student-centered focus fails to teach important lessons.

“The kids lose out on the experience of having to deal with things that don’t always suit them,” worries this mother. “Everyone’s bending over backwards to please them.”

But the school must be doing something right. Its orchestra is nationally recognized and its choir world-class. Nearly 100 percent of the students go to college, many to the Ivy League. And the waiting list for admission is legendary, no matter who you are.