They Were All Smiles for a ‘Melancholy’ Day

“I wanna ask you a question,” Rod Steiger was saying to an ebullient Tim Burton. “Who am I?”

He drew his elbows up to his ears and tilted his head to the side.

A scarecrow?

“Christ on the cross,” Steiger said later. “Because it’s my fourth divorce. I just came from court and I don’t know where the hell I am.”

You’re at Burton’s book party at Storyopolis, where the hair-free actor and his hair-ful host have joined a hundred billion hipsters snarfing hors d’oeuvres in honor of the director’s first children’s book, “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories” (Rob Weisbach Books). The nutty volume features such illustrated Burtonian inventions as Stick Boy, Voodoo Girl and the Girl Who Turned Into a Bed.

“It was a nice cathartic experience for me,” Burton said. “I was always a big fan of fairy tales, but they never had any connection to things like kitchen appliances that relate directly to your life.”

So your new-and-improved first novel wasn’t inspired by your parents’ relationship, but by their washer-dryer?

“Inspiration comes from so many different things.”

How about, I don’t know, Hollywood? Is Melonhead a metaphor for anyone you deal with in your day job?

“It describes a certain feeling,” Burton said, “that’s best described as a feeling.”

*

“Nothing like going to your own wake.”

Reports of Eve Babitz’s demise are highly exaggerated, mainly by Babitz. Certainly her edgy sense of humor is intact. That’s an accomplishment after the writer’s recent ordeal. Last April, a cigar ash dropped on her Indian cotton skirt while she was driving, engulfing her midsection in flames.

“I got burned up by vanity and folly,” said the longtime L.A. chronicler. “You don’t expect your skirt to kill you.”

Babitz is sitting in the garden of the Chateau Marmont, engulfed again, but this time by admirers. One by one, they come up to her, take her hand, kiss her head. The only apparent evidence of the accident is the purplish shadow that traces her thumb and forefinger circling a single gardenia.

Babitz, 54, author of “Black Swan” and “L.A. Woman,” sustained third-degree burns from her waist to her calves. “I stayed in that medical environment for 3 1/2 months. It was a bummer. I was in ICU for six weeks. It was touch and go, 50-50. But I didn’t think I was going to die. It wasn’t my style.”

Babitz’s recovery cost half a million dollars and, as a free-lance writer, she had no insurance. So last week, some of her celebrated friends descended on the Chateau to bid on artwork donated by Laddie John Dill, William Wegman and John Baldessari, among others. They chowed down on chili supplied by Tony Bill from his 72 Market St. restaurant. And they raised more than $30,000 for Babitz’s medical bills.

“Love to see you looking so good,” said Atlantic Group co-chairman Ahmet Ertegun, depositing a kiss on her forehead.

Babitz felt good about the old friends who rallied ‘round. “In spite of it being the ‘90s,” she said, “it’s still the ‘60s.”

She was anticipating the imminent arrival of one of them, Steve Martin, whom she met at the Troubador in 1972. “Steve had long hair and was totally without a sense of humor. That I could see. But then I saw him on stage and he was wonderful.”

Martin dated Babitz.

And Linda Ronstadt.

At the same time.

“We didn’t care. It was the ‘70s, but it was the ‘60s.”

Talk about moving the clock back.

*

In a special edition of Up and About, we bring you a report from a plane recently headed to that other North Hollywood--Vancouver, B.C. We happened to be sitting behind Melanie Griffith, who was looking very sleek in a long brown skirt and suede boots.

OK, we were in the first row of coach, if you must know. And we weren’t directly behind her. That seat was occupied by a young Australian woman who was playing with Griffith’s 1-year-old with Antonio Banderas. Stella, fashionably turned out herself in a blue-jean dress, was standing on her mom’s lap, playing handsies with the woman behind them. Across the aisle sat Griffith’s one-person entourage, the handy nanny.

“Do you want to keep playing with her?” Griffith suddenly asked the woman in coach. “I’m going to sleep now. Is that all right?”

Is it OK with the stranger if the movie star hands her kid to the nanny and takes a nap?

That’s the kind of Hollywood attitude we would like to encourage.