MEET MISTER WIZARD

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The emergency-room pace seems to have governed all Crichton's working life. "Whatever the word is that's the opposite of lazy," says Gottlieb, "is what Michael is." He has written 24 books and directed seven movies--including Westworld, Coma and (based on his own novel) The Great Train Robbery. He mastered computers in their nascent stage and wrote one of the first texts on information technology (Electronic Life, in 1983). He ran a software company. He designed a computer game. He wrote essays for Wired, the hot computer magazine, even before it was hot. He collects modern art and once wrote a book about Jasper Johns. He has married four times, beginning a sort of anthropological study of the institution at age 22.

Crichton and his wife of eight years, Anne-Marie Martin, currently live in Santa Monica with their six-year-old daughter Taylor. He allows no visitors from the press there, and works hard to play down the trappings of celebrity. "People say, 'How do you do it?' I say, 'Stay away from show business,'" Crichton said earlier this month. He was driving to lunch, headed inland from the coast in one of those heavy-browed Ford things that take a lot of fossil fuel to slake. A couple of years ago, he was peeved that a Vanity Fair article said he drove a tonier, more expensive Land Rover. Then, he had marched this interviewer to the window in his office and pointed at the brawny Ford in the driveway: "Does that look like a Land Rover?"

"One of the things that's important to me," he said, turning west on Wilshire, "is that feeling of being out here, being a consumer of all this stuff." Fifteen years or so ago, he had an office at 20th Century Fox, "an itinerant director's office. I had my own furniture. It was very pleasant. But I found all kinds of things drying up inside of me. I thought, I've got to get out of here."

Eventually he secured a bungalow on a manicured, middle-class street in Santa Monica and made that his office. It was just a little two-bedroom deal, and he worked there until a few months ago, when he moved to grander surroundings closer to the ocean. He cites the need for space, not success, as the reason, and is almost apologetic about the splendor of the present arrangement. Compared with the old office, this new place has majestic scale; there are university presidents with smaller offices than one of the bathrooms in this house. "It doesn't have a Hollywood pedigree," Crichton said, slightly defensively. Out back, the swimming pool is covered over. The projectors in the carriage house screening room have been removed. Crichton's actual workspace is within four rather close-together walls. He gives the impression he would be happy if visitors were led directly to his desk and then back to the curb, wearing blinders.