But Enough About Me (11 page)

I thought for a minute. “I've been researching this, and it seems to me that it was a combination of these things—maybe she was infected with consumption, complicated by a pregnancy, followed by a gastric infection, which finished her off.” I couldn't stop now. “She always had lousy health, and surely she was infected with TB, because she came in such close contact with her sisters. She shared a bed with Anne right up until the end.”

“Why, exactly, are you researching this?” he asked.

I looked at him shyly. “Oh, I just went through a Brontë phase and reread all of their novels. I tend to binge.” He laughed. He was nodding at me with that same kindly look. He's smiling! He doesn't think I'm a weird sad sack! I had heretofore shared my Charlotte Brontë death conspiracy theories with only my bosom chums. Maybe I could regale him with mesmerizing facts about my other recent obsession, the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. Maybe he was unaware that it killed 675,000 Americans, more than the death toll from all of the twentieth-century wars combined? Perhaps it might interest him to know that FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and silent screen legend Mary Pickford survived it? A tiny, still-lucid part of my brain knew that the drugs had surely kicked in, because any sober person would recognize that any mention of Mary Pickford was pretty much a date-killer.

Yet he seemed enthralled by everything I said. Or was that a vacant look? Then I realized he was gazing at me with Concern Face, the very method I use on celebrities. I paste it on when one of them is prattling about their regressive therapy or how yoga centers them or how they are coping with the recent death
of their bichon frise. You regard them with kindly, twinkling eyes, while nodding with a benevolent smile. I care. I do. Go on. Please.

Josh was on a double dose of Ecstasy. Of course I was interesting. “Let's get out of here,” he said abruptly, grabbing his coat. As we walked a few blocks to his parked Porsche, the Ecstasy pulsed through me in a shimmering wave. Wasn't I supposed to feel happy?

“I think my skirt is falling down,” I said, too rapidly. We passed a sidewalk café. Everyone was staring at me. Was my skirt around my ankles? “Josh,” I said. “Is everyone staring at me?”

“No,” he said soothingly.

“Is my skirt falling down? Josh. I think my skirt is falling down.” My words were piling up against each other. He turned around and put his hands on my waist. “Your skirt is on. See it? Your skirt isn't falling down.” We walked on. Where was the car? Where was the car? Where was the car? My foot caught on something. I suspected it was my skirt, which was clearly bunched around my ankles. Was that homeless man staring at me? Is that a ringing in my ears? Josh sighed grimly. “Let's go to my place,” he said. “You'll feel better.” It was a flimsy premise, but I took it. I had to get off the street.

His apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up, was cramped and smelled like cabbage. “I thought you were rich,” I said with my newfound drug-induced candor.

He grinned. “Most of my money is held in a trust until I turn thirty,” he said. “I guess my family doesn't trust me. But I don't really spend much time at home, anyway.” He went into his bare kitchen and opened the fridge. “I like to be out,” he said absently, rummaging through the fridge for beers. “Out and about.” As I waited, I snuck a peek into his bathroom. An open magazine lay on the floor across from the toilet, conjuring up an unwanted visual of a multitasking Josh. Through the semidarkness, I scanned his small apartment, looking for clues about my elusive date. Where were the books? “Here's the living room,” he said, handing me a beer. Then he pointed to the bedroom. “And here—”

Don't say it. Please don't say it.

“—Here is where the magic happens.”

Right. I spotted a lumpy figure on a chair in the hallway. I squinted. It was a Spuds McKenzie stuffed animal. I ran over and gave it a few satisfying punches. Evidently the drugs were wearing off, because I was starting to feel reassuringly hostile once again.

“Hey,” Josh said sharply. “Hey.”

He guided me onto the couch. “Have a seat,” he said, patting a cushion. Then he leaned over and inserted his tongue in my mouth. “You have the greatest dimples,” Josh murmured. I didn't have dimples. His hand slid from my shoulder down to my stomach. Then he stuck a finger in my belly button. It stayed in there for a few seconds, but when someone's finger is lodged in your navel, lightly rummaging around with no obvious purpose, those seconds stretch rapidly into weeks.

I can't do this.
This was the kind of debauched evening that I had eagerly read about in
Less Than Zero.
Why couldn't I just play along? Josh was cute, if opaque (did he keep calling me Rock Chick because he couldn't remember my name?), and despite his disquieting attachment to Spuds, had a kind of insouciant charm. I suddenly felt overwhelmingly sad. I wanted, if I was being honest with myself, to be home in bed. Alone.

I clutched wildly for my purse. I needed oxygen. As I broke for the door, John Waters's words came back to me. “Who,” he had said with a shudder, “would want to
love
everybody, on Ecstasy?” Drugs required an abandon that I just didn't have. Either I became green and fetal, twitchy and paranoid, or filled with gloom for the whole human condition. Some Rock Chick.

Have you ever noticed how many profiles start with a starlet nibbling on a salad at a restaurant? That is because 90 percent of celebrity interviews take place in a restaurant in Los Angeles, usually a quick drive from your subject's house or manager's office. Some magazines have a ban on the dreaded restaurant interview because it's so clichéd, but few have the power to actually enforce it, so usually the only “color” you will get is a recitation of your subject's lengthy dietary requirements to the fawning waiter. (“Well, is there oil in the dressing? Are you sure? You know what, can I just have lemon juice on the side? I'm thinking there's probably dairy in the corn chowder, and that's really, like,
not cool.
And I'm allergic to nuts, so do you use any peanut oil? Could you please please please just ask the chef? Theeenk yew.”)

If this is the case, use the classic writer's trick of starting the piece with a dramatic event in your subject's life. That way you have a grabber for the first couple of paragraphs, and then you can ease into establishing the scene in the restaurant and how your subject picks at a plate of steamed kale. If the person is in the midst of living down a drunken episode or custody battle or rehab recidivism, by all means commence with that, even if he offers a “no comment.”

Like so: “It's hardly a secret that last month, Mr. Star was caught scraping up a half-gram of coke that he had dropped onto the men's bathroom floor of his favorite local strip club, Titz.”

“My lawyer told me I can't comment,” he says, digging into his pear and Roquefort salad at a Santa Monica restaurant. See how the boring setting was slipped in there? Who would even notice?

If the person is not enmeshed in some scandal and only has a record or a movie to promote, pry an answer out of them that could serve as a lead. Have they ever stolen something? What was the best day of their lives? (This works especially well for a heartwarming, soft-focus profile. “Mr. Star will never forget his tenth birthday, the greatest day of his life. His father was still alive, the girl he had a crush on was coming to his party, and he was years away from his first snort of coke.”)

Another question that can occasionally elicit a dramatic, lead-worthy answer is “When was the last time you were completely alone?” This should only be posed to the upper-echelon famous, the ones with a fleet of minders and omnipresent security. Often, they have not been by themselves for months, or even years. “When I go to the toilet” is a common response. This is one of the strangest things, in my mind, about being famous. How can you never have any contemplative time to let your thoughts range over hill and dale? How are you ever able to fully recharge if there is always someone around you? I asked Madonna this very question and her response was “Twenty years ago.” The only time in that period that she was well and truly alone was during a vacation in Greece with her family. She paddled out in the ocean on a raft. Then she paddled back. That was it.

If you can manage to steer your celebrity's handler away from a restaurant, you must cook up the Contrived Activity, in which the two of you will go to the dog run, or play miniature golf, or do laundry—anywhere but an “eatery.” The thinking is that if a famous person is distracted by an activity, he or she will magically open up and chatter away, free from the tyranny of facing you across a table.

If you get a few moments of “walk-around time” after a restaurant meeting, think fast. I was once grilling Cameron Diaz at an appealingly ratty New York burger joint called the Corner Bistro. Afterward, we were scheduled to walk around the West Village together, which was about as relaxing as it
seems. She was friendly and pleasant but not warm, like a fluorescent light. As I matched her long strides, while trying to make it seem natural and easy that I was holding a tape recorder near her mouth, I scanned each block in a mild panic. What could we do? You must always be plotting and planning, because you usually get an hour or two to spin into five thousand words. For activities, you need a Plan B, C, and D.

We ducked into a bar for a quick drink, but a bar is almost as glaring a cliché as a restaurant. As we walked onward, I tried to tamp down my anxiety because I could tell she was getting a little impatient. Aha! I spotted a fortune-teller's window. Would she like to get her palm read? “Sure,” she said. Fabulous! Oops, not so fabulous: She wouldn't permit me to come in with her, so I waited outside. When she came out, she wouldn't tell me what the soothsayer had said. Another bust.

Just when despair set in, I heard some loud music throbbing in the distance. How could I have forgotten that it was Gay Pride week? It was almost time for the parade! I steered her quickly toward Christopher Street, and I will always be grateful to the float of gyrating Asian men in scanty geisha costumes for providing me with a much-needed scene.

When I met with the Olsen twins in Los Angeles (“Please call them Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen,” entreated their rep), our first endeavor was useless: the photo shoot. In most articles, you can't really place the action in a photo shoot because then it's painfully obvious that you have been wedged in there to save time. Also, the majority of photo shoots are not that exciting. Most of the ones I've attended take place in the morning, and they run most of the day, while tons of people stand around with their arms folded and watch the photographer and his assistants, or duck into the hallway to make cell phone calls.

When I arrived at the warehouselike studio, the photographer was setting up and the twins had just arrived in their separate Range Rovers: Mary-Kate first, the “bohemian” one with an armful of rubber bracelets and hoop earrings with birds in them. “Hieeeee,” she said in a reedy voice. I commented on her earrings. “These are my doves, my love doves,” she
said. “I got them on the street in New York.” Even according to Hollywood standards, she was absurdly tiny—five feet tall and emaciated, with her kid-sized sweatpants hanging off of her bony butt. Then Ashley walked in, the more polished, reserved twin, also wearing sweatpants and flip-flops. They were both beautiful but completely sexless.

Simultaneously, they spotted a Ping-Pong table in the lobby of the warehouse. Without talking, they made their way over to it, picked up paddles, and silently began to play, their faces blank. It was hypnotic to watch these mirror images wordlessly lobbing the ball back and forth.
Clip-clop. Clip-clop. Clip-clop.
Maybe that could be a kind of scene, I calculated. As they were called over to try on clothes for the shoot, I watched them smoothly snap into gear, as they have done since birth. In a stroke of genius, the photographer wanted to dress them as Brooke Shields in the famous eighties Calvin Klein ad. As the camera clicked away and the wind machine amped up, blowing their hair back, they pressed up against each other, and stared at the camera, unblinking. During a break, they teetered in high heels over to the craft services table. Ignoring the sandwiches that were piled high on a platter, they clutched some nuts and nibbled on them, looking like the world's most glamorous squirrels. The scene wasn't much to go on, but I was still to meet them the next day at the requisite crunchy L.A. restaurant.

As we stood in line, the two of them scanned the menu. “What's gaz…gaz…,” said one, her forehead wrinkling in confusion.

“Gazpacho?” I said kindly. “It's a spicy tomato soup, served cold.” Then I added, absurdly, “You wouldn't like it.” How the hell would I know if she'd like it or not? But she nodded in agreement.

Afterward, our contrived activity was a shopping trip to Lily Et Cie, a vintage emporium favored by the red carpet set. I drove with Ashley, who could barely see over the dash of her enormous Range Rover. Ashley kept phoning her sister in her corresponding Range Rover, because the two of them weren't sure of how to get to the store. “Okay,” Ashley would always sign off when her sister called, “love yoooou.” Good stuff, thought I. She rounded a corner a little too sharply. How hideously fitting, how beyond
ironic, if I were to get in a fatal car accident alongside one of the Olsen twins. People would trample on me in their rush to help her, and then I would be consigned for all eternity as the “unidentified woman” who died next to Ashley Olsen.

After finding the place, they flanked me on the sidewalk as we headed for the entrance. Between them, I felt like a lumbering wildebeest, galumphing down the street. They were so delicate, with their huge sea green eyes and their cornsilk hair, little fairies lifted from an art nouveau print. As we entered the store to great fanfare, a very large man in a plaid shirt suddenly materialized. He briefly conferred with one of the girls and then took her keys.

“Who was that?” I asked their publicist, who said it was one of the girls' bodyguards.

Huh? “I haven't seen them once,” I said.

He nodded. “Exactly. They're supposed to be invisible. The girls want to keep things as normal as possible.”

I never saw them the entire time. Presumably they leaped into a hedge or something if one of us looked around.

The point is: A contrived activity can yield hidden gems. I certainly didn't use anything from the session at the store, where I stood around while they tried on dresses, but I did rejoice at the stealthy bodyguards.