His presence in my own childhood had been mythic - a Jewish cultural influence more imposing than anyone I’d ever learned about in Hebrew school. He last sat for a magazine profile in 1996, not long after his comic ur-text, “Billy Madison,” came out. This overt gesture toward comedic lineage, done for a reporter’s benefit, was exactly the kind of stunt that Sandler had avoided for years. He’d taken us there to look at old photos of a group of Jewish comics called the Hillcrest Round Table, who met for a standing lunch throughout the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Sandler stepped inside to consider the buffet, then quickly refocused himself on our mission. “You’re always welcome here,” the maître d’ replied. He vetted the outfit before the hostess’s stand. That day, Sandler was wearing cheap surf-shop shades, untied and toe-creased Jordans and capri-length silky basketball shorts. The club’s dress code, a three-page document, betrays the legislative eagerness of a people only recently allowed to make the rules: Hat bills must face forward at all times jeans will be worn only in the Men’s and Ladies’ Card Rooms. Today Hillcrest is an upgraded Eden with 18 holes, a pool, tennis courts and an initiation fee of more than $200,000. Barred from joining the WASP establishment, they banded together to forge a simulacrum, a place where self-proclaimed “Jewish big shots” could unwind in semiassimilated fashion. Hillcrest was founded in 1920, when Los Angeles’s Reform Jews started earning major cash and no country club appeared willing to let them spend it. Alongside the row of town cars and coupes, it looked like an airport courtesy shuttle. He whipped the van into the valet station. “You’re going to like this,” Sandler said. We were bound for Hillcrest Country Club, the oldest Jewish country club in Los Angeles. The cup holders jangled with suburban odds and ends - a pair of tiny glasses belonging to his daughter a bottle of Dry-n-Clear ear drops. We cruised down West Pico in Adam Sandler’s ride, a custom Chevy passenger van tricked out in the style of an orthopedic shoe.
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