A classic example of Stein’s whining about his good life, from the same column:
“Frankly, I am getting old and tired and cannot handle all of the homes I have much longer. Maybe I will sell them all and just live with my big wifey in the one in Malibu. No swimming pool, but we can get one put in. Then it would be perfect.”
This is beyond parody.
Why doesn’t Ben stick to the topics he knows something about, like his dogs and his meds and his neuroses and his rich pals’ hospitality and his fear of growing old and his guilt about being rich himself, and etc..........
Now, in 1978 he wrote an absolutely first rate book about venality and leftwing hypocrisy in Hollywood called “The View from Sunset Boulevard”. Of course, that was an update IMO of Eugene Lyon’s classic “The Red Decade” (1940).
Ben was a superb muckraker once, but wealth and ease have left him a changed man. His idelogy changed, too, like so many who attain affluence and think it was just pure luck and they don’t really deserve it and skew leftward to assuage their guilt.