Some people read novels at the beach. Gigi Levangie Grazer writes them.
Well, she got the idea for her best seller "The Starter Wife" while walking down the beach in Malibu.
"I saw this woman in her 50s. She had been dumped recently by a big movie star, and she was speaking to this man whom I knew very well and who happens to be homeless," Grazer said. "He walks around the beach in his orange beach shorts. He's fabulous-looking. ... She was flirting with him, and I thought, 'Give it to me! That's a novel!'"
And now it's a six-hour miniseries, which begins tonight at 10 on the USA network. Debra Messing stars as Molly Kagan, the oh-so-perfect wife of a big Hollywood studio executive whose life is turned upside down when her husband calls her on his cell phone to tell her he wants a divorce. Suddenly, she's the "starter wife," and she's blackballed by almost all of her "friends."
Grazer knows a lot about this world — she's married to producer Brian Grazer (who co-owns Imagine Entertainment with Ron Howard). In addition to several best-selling novels (including "Rescue Me" and "Maneater"), she's written four screenplays (including the movie "Stepmom").
For all that, she considers herself "sort of an outsider in an inside world." She grew up in the real Hollywood, which, though only a few miles from Beverly Hills, is worlds away.
"I never even took a bus into Beverly Hills. My father actually thought we would be arrested if our car broke down in Beverly Hills," Grazer said. "I'm not very comfortable in that world. Even to this day, I break out in hives when I have to go into Neiman Marcus."
And she didn't invent the idea of the starter wives. "I encounter them every single day in Los Angeles," Messing said. "And there is a kind of look to the starter wife. There's the polished hair and the beautiful nails and the designer clothing and the white teeth and the very trim body. And, yeah, I think they're everywhere."
Grazer, who's an executive producer, didn't write the miniseries teleplay. (Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon, who wrote "Runaway Bride," make their TV-writing debut.) And there are some changes from her novel.
But the essence remains. After her husband's betrayal, Molly takes refuge at a friend's (Judy Davis) Malibu beachhouse and tries to rebuild her life. She attracts the attention of both her husband's boss (Joe Mantegna) and Sam (Stephen Moyer), the attractive man who saves her from drowning. And she doesn't realize he's homeless.
"The Starter Wife," directed by Jon Avnet, is outrageously funny in spurts as it skewers the people who populate the movie industry.
At heart, however, it's the story of a 40-ish woman who has to rebuild a life for herself and her young daughter.
Grazer herself hasn't been blacklisted for writing the book. "Fortunately, in a novel, if you make a woman thin enough or if you give the guy a big (male organ), everybody is happy," she said. "There were no unhappy customers in L.A., at least not in my experience. I had people flying at me at parties to tell me more stories so they could get in the next book.
"I haven't been disinvited to anything, unfortunately, but I'm working on it."
After tonight's two-hour premiere (10 p.m., USA), five one-hour episodes of "The Starter Wife" air on successive Thursdays at 10 p.m. Repeats air throughout the week.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com