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Wall-to-Wall Hips. For the Times's Sunday supplement, Haber usually does interviews expanded by well-researched background material. Often sympathetic, especially about her favorites, she can also be sarcastic, as she showed when she cut up Julie Andrews: "There is a kind of flowering dullness about her, a boredom in rosy bloom—she is about as seductive as the average waitress at a teahouse." At times, she can be downright mean. Melina Mercouri, she reported, "had wall-to-wall hips, an ear-to-ear mouth, and more teeth than a pretzel has salt." Occasionally, the sarcasm cuts closer to home. Before she married Douglas Cramer, who is now head of TV production at Paramount, in 1966, Joyce described him in her column as "the kind of man who takes traveler's checks to Santa Barbara."
Some of her victims wish they had a column in which to call her something like Miss VV (Vile and Vicious) or BB (Biting and Bitchy). Sweet Julie Andrews drops her Mary Poppins mask and says of Haber: "She needs open-heart surgery—and they should go in through her feet." Director Blake Edwards charges that "Haber's writing is so blatantly vicious and her motivation so disturbed that she really adds up to a psychiatric case."
Such animosity does not keep her from all the best parties, a rich source of Hollywood dirt, and she does not let her readers forget it. "You sort of get the impression that most parties Joyce writes about are being given for her," says one student of her column. "Not that she thinks so, but so many people are coming up to her to say this or that or sitting next to her (Joyce does not sit next to people; they sit next to her) that you get the feeling she must be the most important person there. It is a little like following the adventures of Mary Worth's niece, who is making it in Hollywood."
Columnist Haber has a sure instinct for social snobbery. As she analyzes it, Hollywood has two kinds of parties: "A" and "B". An A party is served by the host's staff, starts at 9 p.m., and calls for either no tie or black tie. A B party is catered by Chasen's, starts at 7:30, requires a dark suit and has a receiving line. As for her own parties, they are a mixture that rates about B 4-.
Double Check. The daughter of a Philco executive who died in 1942, Joyce Haber is a product of Manhattan's Brearley school for girls and Barnard College. Although her judgment is erratic (she put Candy on her list of last year's ten best movies), she learned as a researcher and Los Angeles correspondent for TIME from 1953 to 1966 to double-check her facts. She now earns nearly $50,000 from the Times and the syndicate, but claims, weepishly, that this only puts her and Husband Doug into a higher tax bracket, so "the column is really an indulgence." Still, she has just indulged herself further by signing to do another column for Motion Picture magazine for an additional $12,000 a year.