It's late Sunday afternoon, and Christoph Meili, his wife, Giussepina, her parents, and their host, Bill Elperin, the chairman of the 1939 Club, a Los Angeles-based Holocaust survivors organ-ization, are sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel bar, sipping tea and nibbling dainties. A cell-phone rings - it is comedian Tommy Smothers, now a wine-maker, who wants to shmooze with Giussepina ("Juicy") about her father's vineyard.

Juicy, who is 28 and of Sicilian stock, has never heard of the Smothers Brothers. But Tommy isn't miffed. "You were either too young or too poor to know who I am," he tells her.

What's odd about this is not that the erstwhile Swiss security guard, who lost his job and his country after rescuing documents about Jewish assets from the shredder, or his wife, who urged him to get the word out on the cover-up, never heard of Tom and Dickie Smothers. I'm somewhat more amazed to discover that the Smothers Brothers - and a number of other people in Hollywood who have invited Meili to meetings to discuss a possible TV documentary, a made-for-TV movie and a book - are taking such an interest in the couple's exploits.

Meili, 31, with his brush-cut blond hair, wire spectacles and stiff, almost Teutonic demeanor, the first Swiss citizen ever to receive U.S. political asylum, was inspired by another Hollywood connection: Steven Spielberg's dramatic account of the life of Oskar Schindler. Meili understands that he rescued documents, not human beings, from destruction. He also understands the ultimately problematic nature of Schindler's postwar years, both personally and in terms of his increasingly dependent relationship with his Jewish benefactors.

"I am a regular person," Meili tells me. "I did what I did for a good reason, and everything else is fantasy. I deal in my life with day-to-day things, normal things. I have two kids who don't care if I'm a hero. For them it is important that they have a father who comes home and puts food on the table."

This is not Meili's first trip to L.A. After settling in New Jersey some 18 months ago, he flew out here as a guest of Spielberg's. Quite apart from the meetings with Hollywood types (generally, he says, these result in a lot of hot air and little else), he likes the weather and the ambience, which he calls more European than his current digs.

This time, though, Meili is looking into the prospects of coming to Southern California to attend university, possibly in Orange County. Toward this end, Elperin and his associates have been drumming up the necessary financial support. The best way Jews can repay Meili for his own good works, both men believe, is by helping him attain self-sufficiency.

"Obviously Chris didn't go through the Holocaust," Elperin says. "But in many ways he is in a similar predicament with the one my parents faced coming to this country. They too didn't know the language, they too had small children, and they didn't have relatives to help them either. I'd like to think that we are his relatives."

"We are only looking for a quiet life," adds Meili. "I would like to study science, maybe history. But we are a little bit in the air now. What we need is some security."

Meili tells me he visited Israel at the invitation of a Knesset member in charge of a task force created in the wake of the Swiss bank crisis. He did so, he says, against the advice of his Swiss lawyer, who felt he'd be tainted by visiting a country vilified for impinging on human rights. The head of the Swiss Jewish community, he adds, "also wanted to keep me away from Israel because he had a problem with Netanyahu's policies."

In Israel, Meili toured Yad Vashem, and received a Righteous Gentile award from a Jerusalem yeshivah. But his sojourn was fairly low-key, and there was no talk of possible financial assistance. "The chief finance officer of the World Jewish Congress," he says, "told me that (the Swiss company) Nestle invested a lot of money in Israel, and therefore the Israelis would not want to make them angry. Also, the Swiss army buys weapons from the Israelis." So, unlike in L.A., "they didn't make a lot of fuss about my visit."

/ Los Angeles