If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Write a Book : YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN <i> By Julia Phillips (Random House: $22; 592 pp.) </i>

By Jean Vallely

March 17, 1991 12 AM PT

<i> Vallely is a Los Angeles-based writer. </i>

It’s been said that there are three kinds of Hollywood stories: celebrity on the way up, celebrity on the way down, celebrity makes a comeback.

The first time I met Julia Phillips she was on the way up. Very near the top, in fact. It was 1975. She and Steven Spielberg had come to New York to do some research for their next project, “Close Encounters.” (I had interviewed Spielberg for a Time magazine cover on “Jaws” and he introduced us). She and her partners, then husband Michael Phillips and Tony Bill, had won the Academy Award for “The Sting,” the first woman producer, the only woman producer to win until Lili Zanuck won it 16 years later for “Driving Miss Daisy.” In addition to “The Sting,” they had made the quirky “Steelyard Blues” and were in preproduction on “Taxi Driver” and “Fear of Flying.” Julia Phillips was 29 years old.

And already rich. And famous. She had a limo, a suite at the Sherry Netherland, a baby, fabulous jewelry (I seem to remember an emerald ring the size of a Frisbee) and other rich and famous people ringing her up nonstop. I thought Phillips was the coolest woman I’d ever met.

How could I know that at that very moment she was swacked out of her head on cocaine and already laying the groundwork for her long, long trip down.

The next time I met Phillips was in 1981. She was making her comeback, and once again I thought she was incredibly cool. Here was a woman who made it all the way to the top, became a junkie, lost millions of dollars, her reputation, nearly lost her daughter, her life, but was now clean and strong, and wanting back in. It was all so very ‘70s.

And there is nothing Hollywood likes better than a comeback.

Except in Phillips’ case, the comeback never happened. And the result of this failure appears to be the much talked about “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.”

When I went to buy the book, the woman behind the counter at Dutton’s smiled and whispered: “Do you want it in a brown paper bag?” I now know what she meant. This is an embarrassing book. And vulgar and trashy. It’s not badly written, really, just badly organized. One gets confused easily. And frustrated.

One picks up this kind of book, yes, to learn about all the famous people Phillips did drugs with, but also for a real insider’s look at how things work, get done. And surprisingly, this stuff is sorely missing. Mostly we get to learn about Phillips’ boyfriends, and I wanna tell ya, if any of you women out there think you had creepy boyfriends, wait until you read this.

But mostly this book is mean. Really mean. She says something nasty about virtually everyone mentioned. Ivan Reitman is the “silliest-looking person I’ve ever met, droopy eyes, buck teeth, pear-shaped body”; Mike Ovitz is the “Valley viper”; Goldie Hawn “borderline dirty, with stringy hair”; Ray Stark “looks like a sad queen”; Molly Ringwald has “a fat mouth”; Paul Newman is “seriously weird”; Irving Azoff, “you can’t be that short and not be mad about it all the time”; Warren Beatty is “priapic. Those guys are usually rammers”; James Caan, “a bad nose job”; George Roy Hill,” tall, mean-faced goy”; Mark Rosenberg, “a-tub-of-goo. Every time I get really mad at Paula (Weinstein, his wife) I remind myself that she sleeps with Luca Brazzi”; Erica Jong looks like “Miss Piggy when her face is in repose”; Ken Shapiro could “single-handedly create anti-Semitism if it didn’t already exist”; Al Pacino is “abusive”; Steven Spielberg’s taste in women “is on a par with my taste in men, as in not so hot”; Amy Irving, “better a has-been than a never-was.”

No one escapes. Not her family. Not the people she grew up with. The people she went to college with. The people who worked for her. And with her. She is especially mean to Michael Phillips’ second wife.

But then the book is full of cheap shots. Phillips tells how in desperation she called Howard Koch, explained to him that she was down to 90 pounds, not eating, completely strung out and could he please get her into a rehab program at the Mayo Clinic. Koch, upset, called her back within an hour and had arranged it. “This was obviously a man who didn’t know much about junk,” writes Phillips, “although I suspected that his son, a junior tagged at the end of his name, might.” The son is never mentioned again in the book. The father really cared. What was the point in zinging the son?

It seems everyone is to blame for her failure at a comeback, but mostly her mother and the “men” in the business--the movie moguls of the ‘80s. But her own book, in fact, belies this.

Ray Stark called her when she was at rock bottom, came to her house and gave her a way back into the movie business in the form of a huge deal. She got everything she demanded, including a pledge from Stark to cut a door into a wall of her new office so she could have private access to the ladies’ room (she needed a place to do drugs). She reneged at the last minute.

David Begelman, who was at Columbia when she did “Close Encounters,” gave her a two-year deal at MGM/UA when he became its president. “Unfortunately,” she writes, “I am reforming a serious habit again and doing greater and greater quantities (in) more and more of the day.”

Just as her MGM deal was up, Alan Hirschfield, Norman Levy and Marvin Davis gave her a rich deal at Fox, including her own office building on the lot which she promptly spent $100,000 redecorating.

When that deal went bust, David Geffen went into business with her and was still in business with her until this book, in which she is unspeakably rude about him, came out. What did she expect?

The truth is that Julia Phillips has not produced a movie since “Close Encounters” (except for a failure called “The Beat”). She became a junkie, and despite what she says, never really cleaned up. She stopped doing coke, but on every page of this book she talks of popping pills, splitting ludes, drinking martinis, smoking joints. It has to have taken its toll. It’s a lot of work, making movies, and Phillips’ will and stamina have been zapped. There is no one to blame but herself.

A producer, who is in this book, has suggested that “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again” is Phillips’ “long” suicide note to Hollywood. Sounds about right to me.

Except that it’s always a mistake to assume someone like Phillips is down for the count. She is resilient. And full of ego. In her book, no matter what has gone down, she is the smartest, the funniest, the hippest, the coolest, the hottest. A woman I know ran into Phillips at a restaurant a few months back and asked her what she was up to. “I just wrote a book,” Phillips replied. “You know,” she continued without drawing breath, “for years I thought I was a great producer, but what I realize now is that what I really am is a great writer.”

Never underestimate this kind of ego.