Diane Keaton, the good kind of celebrity
As a long-standing observer of celebrity/fan interaction, I divide the stars into two categories: The ones who go through the motions of meeting their admirers with their eyes glazed and their attention turned inward (when will this be over?) and the ones who look around a crowded room, trading glances and perhaps scraps of conversation with those peering at them, in a fair exchange of star radiance for star worship.
When it comes to meeting “the public,” Diane Keaton is the good kind of celebrity. She’d said she didn’t want to talk to the press at the Sacramento Street design store Hudson/Grace on Tuesday, where she was face to face, hand to (fingerless-gloved) hand with 400 fans who’d lined up on the sidewalk outside to buy her $70 book and to meet her while she signed it. But she had a mini-conversation with each buyer and posed for souvenir snapshots taken by a staffer who used buyers’ cell phones to do the deed. (I can reliably report that store owners Monelle Totah and Gary McNatton passed the Starbucks test; you didn’t have to buy a book to meet Keaton. Three non-buying non-selfie-taking women waited in line to give her a tote bag emblazoned with their company logo, and they did get to meet her.)
The cover of Keaton’s book, “The House That Pinterest Built,” is blackand-white, and the elegant store had been staged in keeping with that color scheme, which was also how Keaton was dressed. The book, published in October and in its fifth printing, is about her designing her own house and its interiors. She’s a frequent customer at the Los Angeles area Hudson/Grace in Brentwood, the store owners said, and when someone had broached the idea of doing a San Francisco appearance, she drove up for the occasion.
Invitations were sent and the event was full in a day. There was a tent outside for a row of booksellers. Buyers made their purchases, then waited patiently in a line that stretched outside and along the sidewalk.
The customers were overwhelmingly female and overwhelmingly, in keeping with at least one half of the event’s color scheme, white. Keaton may be a role model for women of a certain age, but most of them — streaked, highlighted, tipped and balayaged — hadn’t bought into that gray-haired thing. And while the author’s quirky taste is legendary, and who doesn’t love a good book about home design, I’m guessing there were as many women there intent on peering at her up close as there were women there in search of tips about throw pillows.
Catherine Hedrick came away from her conversation with Keaton with a grin on her face. They’d talked about interior design. What did she tell you? I asked. “She said, ‘Enjoy yourself and have fun with it,’ ” said Hedrick. Who could argue? As to the Stanford intelligentsia: Marilyn and Irv Yalom — her new book is “The Amorous Heart,” his is “Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir” — hosted a party to celebrate the publication of Cynthia Haven’s “Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard.” The book’s a biography of the late French historian/ literary critic/philosopher, who was the first member of the Stanford faculty named to the Académie française and spent 30 years there. The academic circle that was completed at this gathering was that when Girard was at Johns Hopkins before coming to Stanford, Marilyn Yalom was his first graduate student. 1 Meanwhile, in Berkeley: The Bay Area Book Festival, Saturday, April 28, and Sunday, April 29, in downtown Berkeley, sent word of its multitude of events, seminars, discussions and more, featuring an array of familiar big-name authors: Robert Reich, Pico Iyer, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Waters, Dave Eggers, Catherine Coulter, Geneen Roth, Barbara Ehrenreich, Peggy Orenstein, Joyce Maynard and more.
But maybe because of the irresistible “ø” in her name, my browsing glance focused on Ellen Støkken Dahl, coauthor of Norway’s bestseller “The Wonder Down Under.” Let its name not mislead you; it’s not a book about kangaroos. The subtitle is “The Insider’s Guide to the Anatomy, Biology, and Reality of the Vagina.”
The book, which came out of a blog written by two medical students, sold out in three days when it was published in Norway last year. Was it a coincidence that Norway was named the happiest country in the world in 2017?