by JULIET WATERS

Imagine a guy who could easily be mistaken for another long-lost child of Steven Tyler. He arrives at a Versace boutique opening on Via Rodeo (a European-flavoured annex to Rodeo Drive) hobbling along faux cobblestone in four-inch platform boots that "once belonged to one of the members of Ratt." He's wearing a vintage '70s knee-length white mink coat (on loan from a swanky retro shop) over a black shirt on which is written, in rhinestones, "Fuck Me I'm Famous."

While not exactly a household name, Steven Cojocaru is famous enough as West Coast Style editor for People and Access Hollywood's "Secret Weapon." This last job generally involves a campy post-awards show critique of red-carpet fashion that might involve drawing Groucho Marx eyebrows on Angelina Jolie to accent a style faux pas. It's why we're getting Cojocaru's autobiography, Red Carpet Diaries: Confessions of a Glamour Boy a couple of weeks before the Oscars.

He sneaks out to the balcony for a smoke and there's Donatella. She's even more "fabulously, aggressively Donatellian than I imagined," her hair a liquid-paper shade of blonde, every inch of her skin BBQd to perfection. Cojocaru's first thought when some guy "screeching in a foreign tongue" starts hitting him is "I'm being pounded on by an envious party maggot because I look so fetching tonight." He's wrong. His coat is on fire. Turns out Donatella has been using it as an ashtray. "I don't know what pisses me off more: finding myself swathed in a scorched time-share mink or that my assailant stands by during the bonfire and barely blinks… a look in her bored eyes that says, 'Big deal. I light people on fire at all my parties.'"

Welcome to Steven Cojocaru's world. It's a world that becomes even more amusing when you know something about his roots (and I'm not talking hair). When you can really picture the day he arrived at his Côte-St-Luc elementary school dressed in clogs, elephant Howicks and a John Travolta disco shirt, all bought from money he'd begged from his dad to go shopping at the Cavendish Mall Le Château. Needless to say, the less stylin' boys in his class were not impressed.

But if it's true that he was the first Jew at the mall to wear cowboy boots, I'm impressed. From what I remember of Montreal JAP fashion in the '80s this was a widely embraced trend that died a slow and painful death. I'm also impressed by how much of this book is devoted to his life in Montreal, a full third, which is a lot for an L.A. celebrity.

There's his childhood as the son of a Romanian seamstress, and the teenage years where he eventually achieved some status as fashion advisor to the most popular and evil girl at his high school. There are the Dawson days where he entertained the cafeteria crowd with his serialized "smash trash" novel, The Exploits of Inga; and the Concordia days where he found himself academically. There's his first important job at CFCF's Telethon of Stars, where he scored a coup booking one-hit-wonder Laura ("Gloria") Branigan, and his last Montreal job as publicist for Just for Laughs, at which he readily admits he sucked.

Confessions is like getting a brief personalized history of Montreal written by People. Fine reading for those who admit that People can be fun sometimes. Generally he lives up to his claim of being the journalistic equivalent of cheese soufflé. "I was born to be fluffy." And just when his charm is starting to deflate, he'll pull out an endearing story. Something like the time he had to phone Jerry Seinfeld, who had offered him two backstage passes for his parents to his Montreal show, and grovel to change it to five. His parents wouldn't go without his sister, aunt and uncle. It's like an episode of Seinfeld, but with bigger hair and better bagels. :

Red Carpet Diaries by Steven Cojocaru,
Ballantine, hc, 192pp, $35.95