But Enough About Me (24 page)

If you are actually invited to conduct an interview inside a celebrity's house, jump on it. This is the bonanza of profiles, because your work is essentially done for you, especially if you're sent to the home of a famous person who has the good sense to realize that they have a civic duty for their decor to be over the top. We regular folk do not want to see a Crate and Barrel sofa, a hair-encrusted dog bed, a non-plasma TV, and a squalid pile of newspapers. We want glitz. We want to see something that we do not have in our own homes.

Star Jones knew this. Her plush Upper East Side apartment in New York was exactly what you would expect of a glamorous TV personality. An assistant opened the door, swiftly glided away with my coat, and returned with a cold beverage. The first sight that greeted me was a capacious oil painting of—who else?—Ms. Jones herself, which hung in the stairway. Every celebrity should have a giant oil painting of themselves in their house. I frankly feel a little insulted if there isn't one. What's the point of being famous if you don't have a likeness of yourself that rivals the one in
Laura
?

Everything was plush, abounding in gold and cream tones, accented with animal prints, and there was a large spread arrayed on the gleaming
dining room table: fruit, crudités, meats. It was all assembled by Star's personal chef, who even had the appropriate name: Bianca. Who wants something prepared by Joanne? Ah, yes, thanks so much, Bianca. Champagne was offered. The lights were dimmed. In swept the appropriately named cohost of
The View.
She was wearing her off-duty clothes: a pink rhinestoned tank top and velour sweatpants combo with a fluffy tan robe. Who doesn't love a girl in sweatpants and full makeup? Diamonds glinted from her ears, fingers, and toe ring as she happily nestled into a couch and got the ambience going by grabbing a remote control to click on video footage of fish, which flitted tranquilly around her enormous TV screen.

Together, we paged through an album of photos of her recent trip to the Bahamas with her fiancé, Al Reynolds, and some friends (“What a good-looking group of black people!” she had scribbled on one). Then, after a chat, it was time for one of the most beautifully thorough house tours I've ever had. “I've got a bidet!” she cried, opening the bathroom door. “And look at this shower! Ten people could fit in it!” Another glamorous photo of her rested on the bathroom counter. As, I might add, it should. On to the office, which had spangly gold stars on the walls and a chair with a large gold S stamped on it, and then the bedroom, where she opened up a couple of drawers to display her towering pile of Louis Vuitton purses. If only every famous person opened up their drawers for you, what a wonderful world it would be.

“You want to see the closet?” she asked unnecessarily, flinging it open. Rows and rows and rows of shoes lay in the light-up, floor-to-ceiling closet, and yes, there were plenty of Payless among the Manolos and the Jimmy Choos.

We trooped downstairs, where her assistant awaited. “The gift bags are here from last night,” he said. “Shall I load them in?” Load? What was in those things?

She grinned. “You know it!” she said with relish.

Being in her house was perfect for the story, because then you could see a person who worked hard for her success—in her former life, she was a Brooklyn D.A.—who was enjoying the fruits of her labors, every cut-up piece.

A home studio can work well as a setting if it is sufficiently large enough to express an outsize personality. Kid Rock's studio, part of his home compound situated about an hour's drive outside of Detroit, was custom decorated to be a NASCAR fan's idea of paradise. Rock led the house tour through the gleaming garage, which boasted some real Vegas slot machines, a fridge covered by the flocked industrial steel that truckers use, and a wall-mounted TV with built-in speakers facing the requisite bachelor black leather couches (with cupholders, natch). Parked right in the middle of the garage was a huge, lustrous motorcycle as well as the orange General Lee car, of which only a handful exist, driven by—cue choir music!—the Dukes of Hazzard.

In the kitchen, sustenance was provided by one Costco-sized vat of pickles. All over the building, vintage record covers were tacked to the wall: ZZ Top, Merle Haggard, and, adding a note of pathos to the proceedings, many tributes to Joe C., Rock's deceased dwarf pal: photos, plaques, posters. On to the basement, which housed a bar with neon signs ( just what a twelve-year-old fantasizes that his den will look like), a guitar shaped like an Airstream trailer propped against the wall, and, the pièce de résistance, a small stage with lights featuring a stripper pole. It wasn't shiny, either. Its surface was a tad opaque. From use. My job was done.

Certain stars have such a unique persona that you just know their house will follow suit. When Stevie Nicks invited me to her Los Angeles home, it was suitably magnificent. Garlands of red silk roses snaked up the walls and lined the ceilings. Fringed shawls were strewn over every available surface—on the piano, as a tablecloth. A massive painting of a big-eyed gypsy girl hung in the living room near the piano. Stevie's taken a lot of grief for her Tolkein-ish nightbird image—the spinning skirts, the white-witch imagery—so she was guarded at first, but when she saw my irony-free rejoicing in her décor, she began to warm up.

It was no act. I loved her unabashedly. One of the sturdily reliable questions that I ask musicians is “What song will put a lump in your throat, no matter how many times you have heard it?” Well, for me, it was “Silver
Spring,” a sorrowful rebuke to a man whose interest is waning. I could barely listen to it without fumbling for a tissue and thinking
God, why couldn't she and Lindsey Buckingham make it work?

Barefoot and in a demure floral sundress, she padded up the stairs to show me her clothing-stuffed dressing room, which was lined with suede platform boots in every color imaginable, like a groovy box of crayons. And, joy of joys, she let me try on one of her shawls! “And these beads belonged to Janis Joplin,” she said, putting them on me. Heaven!

Stevie had a squad of young blond assistants who were stationed in various parts of the house. “Want to see my new video?” Nicks asked at one point, but she couldn't work the VCR. “I can't—how do you…” she flapped helplessly, trailing off, before an assistant rushed in. Another set out lunch, a variety of healthy salads, on the kitchen island. Then Stevie and I sat close together on her couch as she told me—in gloriously uncensored detail—about her former coke addiction and tortured romance with Lindsey. Interviewing people who came of age in the sixties or seventies is so much more rewarding than talking to today's bland, p.r.-schooled youngsters. During one week, I chatted with Justin Timberlake and Grace Slick. Timberlake, so cautious, so eager not to offend, weighed and measured everything he said. As a former Mouseketeer, he was trained from a young age in how to handle the media. As a result, he was pleasant, but mostly stuck to safe fare such as how it's not about the fame, it's about the work, and his appreciation of his fans, and that being on the cover of
Rolling Stone
was really cool. Slick, meanwhile, cheerfully talked about how she couldn't fully participate in an orgy that sprang up in Jefferson Airplane's San Francisco office because she wasn't good at multitasking, added unapologetically that her lungs were “two black bags” from smoking, and mused that her only regret in life was that she never nailed Jimi Hendrix or Peter O'Toole.

But back to Stevie. After we covered the coke and the romances, she brought out her velvet-covered, poetry-filled diaries from 1979's
Tusk
tour, when she had started an affair with drummer Mick Fleetwood, and we read them together, sometimes aloud.

After a few happy hours, Nicks and her rambunctious assistants broke out the binoculars to spy on the neighbors. “You can stay over, you know,” she said to me. “There's a fabulous guest bedroom.” She showed me the impossibly high guest bed, which had a dramatic red drapery hanging from the ceiling. They all planned to make a little dinner, play some music, watch
Golden Girls
reruns—really, up my street in every way. I was tempted, but I thought I should maintain a professional boundary and declined. How stupid was I?

I learned my lesson when I was invited to the Tennessee ranch of Loretta Lynn. If she asked me to stay, by God, my bags were packed. Sadly, she didn't, but I did get to spend a long afternoon making peanut-butter fudge with her in her kitchen.

When you roll up Lynn's driveway—overlooked by a house on a hill inhabited by her oldest son, who likes to watch over his mama—a sign was posted that said
NO TRESPASS'N
.
The first thing you noticed was a vegetable patch, because Lynn still grew and canned her own vegetables. Parked in the driveway was a two-toned purple bus with
LORETTA LYNN
written in cursive on the side.

Lynn greeted me with a big kiss on the mouth, which didn't faze me in the least. Having read her two autobiographies, I pretty much knew where she had been. (Her first kiss came courtesy of Doolittle Lynn, the man who would end up being her husband of forty-eight years.) In fact, I was touched that she gave me a kiss, not knowing where
I
had been. She was wearing black pants and a purple shirt with rhinestones. No shoes, just those black knee-high nylons that some ladies wear instead of socks.

She was so welcoming that I instantly felt at home, and because my mother's family is from Alabama, the whole scene was all very familiar, starting with the preponderance of sweets. Arrayed on the kitchen island were a cake under a glass container, a tray of brownies, and another of no-bake cookies (a tasty mixture of oats, peanut butter, brown sugar, and butter).

Usually, celebrities do not think to feed you during an interview (I always toted some variation of food that you find in a birdfeeder: nuts, seeds, and
dried fruit, just in case), but Lynn offered up chips and salsa, some coffee—dark and sludgy, the way she likes it—and the best part: bologna sandwiches. She pushed some homemade bread over (she bakes a loaf every week) and pointed toward the fridge, urging me to help myself to the bologna. The door had a magnet on it that said
IF MOMMA AIN'T HAPPY, AIN'T NOBODY HAPPY
. Tentatively, and then with more assurance, I opened the fridge and rooted around.

Then came the tour of the house, which was built by her husband, Doo, who died in 1996. There were dozens and dozens of dolls all over the place—antebellum dolls, some of them waist-high, with frothy, candy-colored gowns, and Indian dolls (Lynn is part Cherokee). Often, people who grew up poor are comforted by the presence of lots of stuff, and Lynn was no exception. Thus, there weren't just a couple of baskets hanging from the kitchen's ceiling; there was a flotilla of them. On every available surface were Native American dream catchers, ceramic flowers, and plaques with inspirational sayings on them.

Gifts from fans were everywhere, because the tenderhearted Lynn couldn't bear not to display them. In one room, there was a crocheted afghan draped over the couch that said
COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER
, made by an older lady in a wheelchair. Lynn's assistant, Tim, showed me another present that was housed in a glass case. It was hard to tell what it was. It looked vaguely like lollipops in a jar. Further scrutiny revealed that it was a bouquet of “flowers” whose petals were made of plastic spoons in different colors. In a more formal room, there was a large oil painting of Loretta done by a guy in prison.

Almost as fun was a tour of the Loretta Lynn Coal Miner's Daughter Museum, which was also on the grounds, along with a replica of the cabin she grew up in, a campground, a racetrack, and a country and western wear store. The woman saved everything (she even had Tim save and dry the flowers that fans gave her, for potpourri), so the museum had a display of her fabulous gowns, Doo's old Jeep, her daughter's report cards, and even some presidential memorabilia, including a pair of immense yellow pumps donated by Barbara Bush that looked like something a trannie would wear.

When it was time for our sit-down, we ensconced ourselves on the couch, shoveling down chips and salsa while she talked about her old friends Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette and life in her birthplace of Butcher Holler, an isolated area in eastern Kentucky. As a kid, she went without shoes, didn't see a toilet flush until she was thirteen, and often ate bread dipped in a makeshift gravy of browned flour and water. She was a link to a time and place that seemed incredibly remote, and the forces that shaped her as a child do not exist anymore.

She was a born storyteller—which is why the songs that she wrote were so masterful—so it was easy to wind her up with a few key words while we repaired to the kitchen to make peanut-butter fudge. She bustled around, directing me to get her the butter and to dump some nice big globs of Jif into the bubbling pot. I wanted to stay the weekend. You could ask her anything and she would answer. Her publicist had said that Lynn had no filter, and it was true. After a while, I asked her about a chapter in her first autobiography,
Coal Miner's Daughter,
in which she talked about getting pregnant at thirteen. She had written that when the doctor told her she was pregnant, she didn't know what the word meant. She was similarly mystified when she first got her period, and ran down to the river and jumped in to get rid of the blood. She thought that she was going to die.

She talked so much that we neglected our candy, and it ended up hard and crumbly. “My pot done gone to pot,” she said. Unfazed, she stuck some spoons into the pot and brought it, still warm, over to the table, and we gleefully dug in.

A few days later, when I had returned to my New York apartment, a package arrived in the mail. It was from Loretta. It contained a gingham apron and a big block of peanut-butter fudge. Also a note: “I wanted to send you some to show you how it's supposed to be!” she wrote on
LL
-emblazoned stationery. “Love you, Loretta Lynn.”