Boston, where the famous come to hide
The category is: famous people who live in the Boston area, except that you have no idea why.
The classic example was the late Nguyen Van Thieu, the former president of South Vietnam, who lived on Valentine Street in Newton for at least a decade without anyone knowing. I'm kicking myself; I know the neighborhood. I can't believe I didn't bump into him at the West Newton Cinema, so I could have asked how it felt to be one of the world's million-plus citizens to be sold down the drain by Henry Kissinger.
If you do the math, it is possible that Thieu may have overlapped with another improbable Newton celebrity: Cory Aquino, the first post-Ferdinand Marcos president of the Philippines.
The Boston area is a refreshingly celebrity-free zone. What a blessing that the Donald Trumps and the Paris Hiltons of the world confine their activities to the
But why is former
I remember when Liv Ullman, then married to Donald Saunders, was Boston's only celebrity; she once graced the cover of Time magazine. That mantle passed briefly to Lindsay Crouse, a Boston magazine cover girl, who was married for a while to another highly unlikely Bostonian: playwright and scriptwriter David Mamet.
Until recently, Mamet lived on West Newton Hill, not far from Seiji Ozawa (OK, we know why he was here) and just up the street from -- Nguyen Van Thieu. I wonder if they hooked up at the West Newton Cinema. I could see a cameo for Thieu in "Wag the Dog," one of Mamet's magisterial confections. Mamet and his wife, actress Rebecca Pidgeon, have since decamped to Los Angeles, where they landed a husband/wife, writer/actor guest shot on my favorite TV series, "The Shield."
Hollywood is now modestly represented by the wildly overexposed Oscar winner Chris Cooper, who lives on the South Shore, and by Cambridge's equally underexposed John Malkovich, who is occasionally spotted under a beret at Darwin's, Ltd., or at Legal Sea Foods. Cambridge is fairly blasé about headliners. The city is crawling with Rockefellers (nice Rockefellers, to be fair), who are pretty much left alone. One of them changed her name, but that was because her surname received the wrong kind of attention in Europe, not in Cambridge.
Why is former CBS president Frank Stanton here? He explains that he became involved with Harvard's Kennedy School many years ago -- CBS endowed a chair there in his honor -- and he stayed in Boston because he made so many friends. My hero, former
While we're at it, why is my friend Margo Howard, the only child of the late Ann Landers, here? She visited Cambridge in the mid-1980s with her former husband, actor Ken Howard, and warmed to the fact that "people were purposefully dowdy. When I told them I was 51 years old, they said, `My, you're glamorous.' Cambridge is a very good place for old babes on the loose. This is the anti-Los Angeles."
I was in the real Los Angeles attending the big event of my family's summer vacation: the premiere of "Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid." (It's true. I'm wired.) My two sons were floating on air when we bumped into Seth Green in the lobby after the movie. And you, dear readers, are asking yourselves: Who is Seth Green? And that is why I love you.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His
e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
