“It really incensed me,” Barbra Streisand recalls. “Who was this person who was judging us like that?”

“Oh, sure, I was angry at him, because I know a lot of these people,” says Shirley MacLaine. “I know how serious they are about their feelings.”

The cause of all this Hollywood hand-wringing? None other than Leon Wieseltier.

Not famous in the usual sense, he’s known to the unabashed cultural elitists who’ve mastered his occasional, brooding pensées in The New Republic, the Washington magazine at which he holds the title “Literary Editor.” It is “one of two or three jobs in the country that allows you to earn your living as an intellectual,” Wieseltier explains. “I mean: as a thinker.” Playing the rarefied role of aesthetic and moral arbiter—he once described his job as “policing the culture”—Wieseltier assigns and edits erudite reviews of important and occasionally arcane books, and sometimes is moved to render judgments himself on religious, philosophical, and political issues. Wieseltier’s section is “unquestionably the best literary-culture section of any journal I know of,” asserts writer David Rieff, reflecting a widely accepted view in intellectual and publishing circles. “But when people talk about Leon, they lose sight of that amid all the gossip.”

Thus in May 1993 this Ivy League and Oxford-educated former Judaism scholar was only striving to enhance his thoughtful reputation when he told readers of The New York Times (via his pal Maureen Dowd) that Hollywood—his latest field of study—was a place where “politics is another way of dressing and talking,” and politically active showfolk were “bubble-headed” and “out of touch.”

“Such a negative, jealous, maybe not jealous, but mean-spirited attitude toward this generality of people from Hollywood!” Streisand complains about Wieseltier, who nevertheless has become her friend and adviser, sending her books on Judaica and even giving her pointers on spinning the Hanukkah dreidel.

For intellectual he may be, but intellectual snob he is not. Wieseltier’s luxuriant white locks and beguiling tongue (at 42, he has the experienced mien of a man at least a decade older) are well known to a charmed circle of movie stars, fashion designers, ballet dancers, television hosts, politicians, Supreme Court justices, media moguls, jazz musicians, pop balladeers, journalists, socialites, millionaires, and maître d’s.

“It’s much more important to me when Leon says something really intelligent about a dress of mine,” says couturier Isaac Mizrahi, “than when I hear from a fashion editor who knows exactly what to say.”

“He’s soulful, man, because he believes in things that are soulful,” says trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis.

“He’s wonderful with women—he really loves women,” says Nancy Reagan biographer Kitty Kelley.

“He’s a wonderful guest,” says Ted Koppel, who has hosted Wieseltier on his ABC program, Nightline, and at his riverfront estate in southern Maryland.

“Whenever I have literary questions, Leon’s my consultant,” says Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “I like his mind.”

“The great thing about Leon is that he’s open to everything: having fun is not beneath him,” says restaurateur Brian McNally of New York’s fashionable 44.

Wieseltier returns the favor, saying of McNally, “I love him like a brother.”

Such is the bright little world that Wieseltier, since leaving the yeshiva in Flatbush, has been enthusiastically orbiting, thereby laying claim to a mushrooming extra-literary reputation. In Los Angeles and New York, where he visits, it’s as a deep-thinking Washington insider who pronounces shrewdly on matters foreign and domestic and gives sage counsel to the vice president of the United States—having made the acquaintance of Al and Tipper Gore through the good offices of Gore’s former Harvard instructor Martin Peretz, currently editor in chief of The New Republic.

Wieseltier might be the Jewish, heterosexual answer to Oscar Wilde. “Why don’t you take it a step further,” he suggests, “and call me the ‘Oscar very Wilde’?”

Wieseltier’s image in Washington, where he lives, is that of an offbeat bohemian who dresses in black jeans and cowboy boots, dates famed choreographer Twyla Tharp, keeps a pug dog named Stuffy, prefers to bathe his tall, stooped corporeal self in designer cologne rather than in soap and water, enjoys shopping for exotic female undergarments (at Trashy Lingerie, the members-only Los Angeles specialty store), and affects a Zorro-style cape. Wieseltier is also known—among those who have heard his amusing stories—for having squired Tipper Gore in the 1980s to Washington’s 9:30 Club, where they danced the night away to heavy-metal bands while Al was apparently up in the Senate, protecting the national interest. The vice president’s wife won’t comment. “I never talk about my friends,” she says through an aide.