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part. Newly divorced and beset by
writer's block, she's scrambling to
gain a foothold on her own terms.
The road back is a difficult one,
however, and with candid accuracy
our gal sums up her precarious posi-
don in the Tinseltawn food chain:
"I'm sure somewhere across town
someone's secretary is taking my
name from their personal-pocket-
computer-data-management
notepad. They may even be wonder-
ing whatever happened to me. Or
maybe not. No hard feelings. It's the
nature of the business."
There are glimmers of hope,
though. True friends offering support
make up for the dispiriting array of
clueless producers, slithering agents,
incompetent writers and plastic per-
sonalities Frankie has to wade
through before reaching her goal.
Oh, and there's a new man in her
life. Jonathan Prince, agent-trainee
with both eyes focused on the next
rung on the ladder, tantalizes
Frankie with his unbounded confi-
dence in her work — and his subtle,
romantic overtures aimed right at
her love-shy heart.

A beguiling hybrid — think Eve
Harrington with a strong dose of
Sammy dick — Prince is an enig-
matic charmer, and the role he plays
in the book's final chapters is more a
revelation of Frankie's character than
of his. There are no "happy" endings
in this work, unless self-realization
can be accepted as one.
The novel's irony is perhaps best
summed up in the book's cheeky
title. Although it is not Carter's
dominant theme, she does focus
humorously and sharply on the
strange fact that the movies, an art
form guided by so many Jewish
hands over the years, should be so
uniformly ambivalent to the depic-
tion of Jews on the screen.
Carter eschews the too easy expla-
nations of self-loathing and desperate
assimilation, seeking a middle ground
that treats the issue as an aspect of
ambiguity — an unspoken, heartfelt
wish to re-create ourselves, even in the
ephemeral world of faces flitting mag-
ically across a silver screen.

DC: I believe [Jewish studio execu-
tives] would use their power and influ-
ence differently. They would do what-
ever they could. Before World War II,

DC: They don't present themselves as
Jewish.

they did not know what to do.
Remember, we didn't let the [refugee
ship] St. Louis land here. Now it's not
politically correct to be antisemitic.

JN: But you say they still avoid
Jewish themes. Do you think Steven
Spielberg's Schindler's List was the
great exception?
DC: That was groundbreaking.

JN: The movie Clueless was enchanti-
ng, and they were obviously a Jewish
family.
DC: But they never came out and said
they were Jewish.

JN: Yet Alicia Silverstone, who played
the lead, is Jewish, and she's never
denied it. She's one of many Jewish
and half-Jewish sex goddesses that fit
the beautiful WASP image: Gwyneth
Paltrow, Lisa Kudrovv, Goldie Hawn,
Jane Seymour, Sara Michelle Gellar,
Winona Ryder. And there are male
stars too.

Robert del Valle leads the Jewish Book

Group at Borders in Farmington Hills.

JN: Let's talk about the characters in
your book. Were they based on real
people or were they composites?
DC: Most are composites. Jonathan

Prince (a 24-year-old agent trainee) is
like Sammy Glick's (What Makes
Sammy Run?) virtual grandson. But
while Sammy started with nothing,
Jonathan starts with everything,
including a Harvard background and
money, and he still behaves the same
way.
He's someone who has nothing to
contribute to the creative process. He
works his way to the top because of a
negative power. He steals ideas, he's
very political, knows whom to play up
to. Basically he's lazy. Hollywood is a
place that allows this kind of personal-
ity to shine.

•

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JN: And he used, then more or less
betrayed, screenwriter Frankie Jordan
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DC: Well, no one is afraid of the

writer. They're very low on the food
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