Creepy Hollywood A-Listers: A Personal History

Mike Ovitz

Kevin Costner

Ben Affleck

I first worked in the entertainment industry as a story analyst at CAA, a job I did part-time from late 1989 to around 1992. Though it paid horribly–$25 per script and $50 per book, as I recall-it was a good way to find out what other people were writing (crap, for the most part). Because this was before PDF’s, I had to go to Beverly Hills to pick up my assigned scripts, which I would read, synopsize and analyze overnight. Arriving at CAA’s brand new, I.M. Pei-designed building at Wilshire and Santa Monica, I would announce myself at the desk and wait under the giant Roy Lichtenstein painting until I was allowed to go down to the Story Department, a cramped warren of basement rooms that, in addition to unrelentingly tense CAA atmosphere, led me to refuse a staff position.

One night, after a last-minute call to pick up scripts, I had to bring my five-year-old son with me. As we crossed the lobby toward the elevator, I saw Mike Ovitz, then CAA’s Chairman. Peering out from behind a column, he was staring at me stonily. I glanced back; more staring ensued. Years later, I read that CAA employees were instructed to avert their eyes in Ovitz’s presence, but I never got that memo. Ovitz continued to stare until the elevator doors closed.

At that point Mike Ovitz was the most powerful and feared man in Hollywood, threatening, cajoling, and making and breaking careers. He also had an uncanny knack of being everywhere, including many of the places I went. Soon I was receiving the Ovitz stare at the Forum during a Lakers Game, and during lunch at Locanda Veneta and Maple Drive. Both Ovitz’s ubiquity and his staring came to an end when he left CAA for Disney, at which point he also lost his power. But before that fateful move, he presided over some staring by a client, Kevin Costner.

Costner, then at the height of his career, was having lunch with Ovitz at the latter’s special booth at Maple Drive on a day I was there for a business lunch. The booth was lozenge-shaped, allowing Ovitz almost total privacy and his client a view of the room. The woman I was meeting was an hour late, and I was too naive to take this as a sign and leave. Between the wait and the lunch, I spent nearly four hours at Maple Drive that day, making three trips to the ladies’ room. To get there I had to pass Ovitz’s booth, and each time I walked by Costner would stop talking and watch me. This was no flirty glance or admiring gaze but a fixed, unblinking stare, reptilian in its intensity and impossible to ignore.

Years passed, and I assumed my days of being stared at like prey by Hollywood stars were over. Then, in 2000, it happened again. This time I was having lunch with my then teenage son in the courtyard of Pinot Hollywood. It was a hot August day and most of the patrons had finished, leaving us and the couple at a neighboring table. At some point I realized the man had been staring at me for some time, and showed no signs of stopping. “That guy is making me very uncomfortable,” I said to my son, who turned around to look at him. “Mom,” he said, “That’s Ben Affleck, and he’s with Gwyneth Paltrow.” Affleck was wearing a baseball cap; his hair, dyed for “Pearl Harbor,” had masked his appearance, and all I could see of Paltrow was her blonde hair. In time they got up and left, leaving me to wonder why a movie star who was having lunch with his movie star girlfriend would bother staring at me.

More than two years later, I was stopped at a long red light at the corner of Rossmore and Beverly. Though it was a cold day, the young man in the convertible to my right had the top down. He wore a grey watch cap, and he was staring at me so intently that if he had been a cartoon character his eyes would have been out on stalks. His car was uncommonly beautiful and expensive for a young person, and I was about to roll down my window and say, “Hey guy, nice car–is it your dad’s?” when I realized it was Ben Affleck. The convertible was the blue Bentley Azure given him by Jennifer Lopez, who was then his fiancée. I said nothing, and a moment later the light changed. He turned right and I went straight, already certain he was never going to marry Lopez.

Though I haven’t seen Affleck since, the creepiness of these encounters has stayed with me. To the horror of my boyfriend at the time, I once tried to hide under a table at Matsuhisa when I spotted someone who resembled the actor. Even worse, my subsequent boyfriend’s parents lived next directly next door to Affleck, who by then was married to Jennifer Garner. Though walls and trees blocked all views of their property, I half expected him to appear out of thin air and start staring at me again.

Last week Affleck made news by claiming not to know anything about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse of women. He was then accused of lying by Rose McGowan, who reported not only telling Affleck that Weinstein raped her but his response: “Goddamnit! I told him to stop doing that.” This, and the allegation that Affleck groped Annamarie Tendler after the Golden Globes in 2014, brought back memories his fixed stare, and not fond ones.

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