Glamour

IS Paris Hilton glamorous? She meets all the criteria. She's young, shiny, obscenely rich and reckless. She does precisely as she likes. She's an heiress. Old money! (Mature, anyway.) She is pure, uncompromised artifice. Noel Coward or Preston Sturges could have made her up -- if it weren't for the sex tape. And the hamburger ad. And the album. And her mother. What does it mean to be glamorous anymore? What did it mean in the first place?

Mae Brunken wanted a home with a past. And in a plot with an only-in-Hollywood ending, the interior designer and set decorator found her period piece -- one with a film noir pedigree. Perched high in the hills of Hollywood, her 1927 Spanish Colonial Revival appeared prominently in "Double Indemnity," starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson. A black-and-white still from the Billy Wilder-directed classic hung in the house when Brunken first visited in 2000.

The Times has just told us that the governor and his wife are bringing glamour to politics ("Governed by High Fashion," by Booth Moore, Dec. 2). Sacramento, however, does not require glamour because no amount of it will help solve the state's fiscal crisis. Telling us about it is meaningless. All we need to know about Schwarzenegger is whether and how he will balance the budget. Everything else is irrelevant. Poor Marie Antoinette had a great deal of glamour too and it didn't do France or her the least bit of good.