Going Off Script (10 page)

“Downtown at the Hotel Figueroa,” I said.

“That’s skid row,” he told me. “Downtown is a horrible area. You need to find someplace else. Seriously, you’re checking into some crack hotel!”

As soon as we landed, I found a pay phone in the airport and called my sister collect. Monica frequently traveled for her job, and she would surely know the name of a decent hotel where I could stay in Los Angeles. It was four a.m. in New York. The phone jolted her out of a dead sleep.

“Jules, what’s wrong?” she said as soon as she heard my voice. I explained the situation, and asked her if she’d heard of the Hotel Figueroa.

“You can’t go downtown!” she confirmed. “Tell the cab driver to take you to the Mondrian on Sunset in West Hollywood.”

By the time I got to the Mondrian, it was two a.m., and the bar was closing. The lobby was filled with chic, gorgeous people. The Sky Bar, I soon learned, was the white-hot hottest spot in L.A. I stood dumbstruck as Jason Priestley from
Beverly Hills 90210
drifted past. A pretty African American woman approached me.

“How can I help you?” she asked in that polite icy way that lets you know right away that you are a lowly mortal who does not belong in so magnificent a place.

“Um, I need a room, please?” I ventured.

“I’m sorry, we’re oversold,” she promptly answered.

“Well, could you just please look to see if there’s anything at all? I don’t care where it is, if it’s next to the elevator or whatever, I just need a room because I was booked at this hotel downtown but I didn’t know downtown was dangerous and now I don’t have any place else, could you just check again?”

“Nope, no rooms,” she repeated. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll just stay one night and I’ll leave first thing in the morning. I just landed from Bethesda, Maryland, and I don’t have the energy to walk three thousand miles home tonight,” I half joked. I was desperate, jet-lagged, and beyond exhausted. She heaved an annoyed sigh, consulted the computer again, and came back.

“Okay, one room, one night,” she relented, adding, “it’s two hundred fifty-nine dollars a night.”

“Thank you so much, thank you,” I said. I handed her my student Visa card. She came back a few minutes later. A line of good-looking but impatient pissed off people had formed behind me and my suitcases.

“I’m so sorry, but your card’s been declined.”

It turned out that the Mondrian charged $259 a night, but put a hold on another $500 for security. My student Visa couldn’t manage it.

“Look, I just need a place to sleep, I promise not to trash the room and I’ll be out first thing in the morning,” I pleaded. “I won’t even use the shower!”

“There are a bunch of cheaper hotels if you just go down Sunset,” the clerk suggested.

“Okay, thank you so much,” I said. As I started to gather my things, tears began streaming down my face.
I should never have come,
I thought.
Maybe Richard was right; I am going to become a whore.
I was too embarrassed to turn around and walk back out
through the throng of beautiful people. The pretty clerk sighed again.

“Okay, I’ll give you the room and give you my rate and not take the $500. It’ll come to $179.” I thanked her and booked two nights; it seemed stupid not to make maximum use of the great discount she was offering.

The next morning, I went out and commandeered the pool phone to make free calls, dialing everyone I could think of to see if anyone knew anyone who needed a roommate in Los Angeles. A friend of a friend of a friend had a Canadian friend named Justine who hailed from a wealthy family and was trying to become an actress or model or something and might help. I dialed Justine. Justine was incredibly bitchy.

“Who?” she said.

I explained our eighteen degrees of separation and my dire situation.

“I don’t know anyone who wants a roommate,” Justine said impatiently.

“Well, if you happen to hear of anything, could you call me, please? I’m at the Mondrian,” I said.

“Wait, you’re staying at the Mondrian?”

“Yeah,” I said, hopefully. This bit of information seemed to warm Justine up noticeably.

“So you can get into the Sky Bar,” she mused aloud. “Okay, I’ll come by to get you at ten and we’ll go to dinner and then the Sky Bar.”

I spent the day by the pool in my bikini, napping off my jet lag. I finally roused myself long enough to go to the poolside bar for some water. I heard a man’s low whistle behind me as I waited.

“Wow, that’s unbelievable. How’d you get that?”

Some stranger was examining my scar. I wheeled around. Not technically a stranger after all. I recognized him immediately.

Johnny Depp.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s fucking cool. There must be some story behind that.”

Johnny Depp wanted to hear how I got my scar. This was the kind of “how we met story” that Letterman would eat up when Johnny Depp and I became a power couple. This was a moment that was destined to change my whole life. It was why fate had made sure I got that one night at the Mondrian. And I knew that fate would not want me to screw it all up by telling Johnny Depp that I had scoliosis. Johnny Depp wanted a fucking cool story to go with the fucking cool scar.

“Oh, yeah. I was bungee jumping off a bridge and the bungee snapped,” I said nonchalantly.

“What, are you fucking kidding me?” Johnny Depp was hooked. “Where?”

“The Potomac River,” I said.

“You must’ve gotten huge money off that lawsuit,” Johnny Depp surmised.

“No, it was illegal,” I said. “It was at night.”

“Whoa!” Now Johnny Depp was
really
impressed. Hell, I was impressed with my improvisational skills. I was a fugitive bungee jumper with incredibly bad luck and a fucking cool scar, and I wasn’t done yet.

“Yeah, with a bunch of Australians.” (When in doubt, blame the Australians. Hey, it made as much sense as the rest of the story, and Australia just adds three cups of crazy to any lie.)

I got my water. I willed myself to walk away from Johnny Depp. Who does that? Who just exits a most amazing conversation with a movie star?
The cool chick with the fucking cool scar,
I told myself.
The one Johnny Depp will be so intrigued with, he will beg to see again. The one who will become Mrs. Johnny Depp and live a fabulous life and bear his fabulous children.
I kept walking knowing he would yell after me.
Slower, slower. Give him a second.

Johnny Depp did not come running—or even urgently sauntering—after me, but Justine picked me up that night in her cherry-red Mercedes Benz. We ended up having the best time, and Justine ended up letting me crash on her couch, after all.

Three days in, I had to say things were going pretty well in L.A.: I was technically homeless but no longer entirely friendless, Johnny Depp had admired my body, sort of, and I was not yet a prostitute.

That first night, Justine and I were on fire: we hit the Sky Bar and immediately met Dean Factor, the handsome great-grandson of the legendary Max Factor. Dean, who had just launched a cosmetics line called SmashBox, was a hot bachelor about town. The music executive he was with that night took an instant shine to Justine, and Dean became like a big brother to me. All four of us would frequently hang out at the Sky Bar. Justine and I made friends with the bartender and the doorman, a giant Aussie (yes, really) named Stewart, who slipped us past the velvet rope after that whenever we wanted, even when Dean wasn’t with us, sweetly ignoring the fact that we didn’t meet the criteria of being either VIPs or hotel guests.

The Sky Bar became our fantastically hip
Cheers.
I was forever trying to sidle my way up to the perimeter of the Beverly Hills 90210 circle and work my way into the center where Jason Priestley, Shannen Doherty, and Tori Spelling reigned. I got close enough: I caught the eye of a guy who had a guest starring role on the show, and we went out a few times. One night, he invited me to go to an after, after, after-party at a place called the Mousetrap. It turned out to be this tiny, derelict house in a shady neighborhood off Pico Boulevard. A scary-looking guy let us in. The kitchen had been turned into a bar, and people were sitting around in circles in the little bedrooms off the hallway. I didn’t recognize anyone famous.

“Follow me,” my date said, pulling me by the hand into a
room where seven people sat on chairs in a circle. As soon as we sat down, this totally beat-up looking woman with gold teeth and weird hair came in with a tray. “Sorry to keep y’all waiting,” the waitress apologized. “I have your order.” Oh good, I was starving and hoping they were serving something good like cheeseburgers or tacos.

I was the closest one to her, and the first served. She offered me a little bag full of white powder. I’d never been around cocaine before, but I knew instinctively that that had to be what it was.
Omigod, what do I do? Pretend to take it?

“Go ahead, grab one,” my 9021-blow date urged me.

“Um, you know, I’m going to pass tonight!” I said uneasily. I got up to leave. He followed me.

“I’m sorry, I don’t do coke,” I told him.

“I thought you said you partied?” he said.

“Well, yeah. I do like
dancing
,” I explained. That was what I thought partying was—going to a club and dancing, just having fun.

“You know what? It’s cool,” he said. “Want me to drive you home?” I did, and after he dropped me off, we never saw each other again. I still have notoriously bad drug radar. One time, I came out of an E! interview all excited because the celeb had been so lively and seemed to just take to me. We had been like instant BFFs.

“That was the best interview ever!” I told my producer. The star and I were probably going to become lifelong friends. He looked at me and shook his head.

“Did you not see the residue of white powder in one of her nostrils?” he asked drolly. I hadn’t, nor had I seen it years before when 90210 boy was asking me to party, which I foolishly interpreted as dancing on tables. But who needs prime-time actors when I was about to come face to face with the hottest young movie star in the world?

A
s a new arrival to Hollywood, I quickly fell into the familiar groove of most young hopefuls, patching together enough money from working in restaurants or retail to sublet a room. Mine was in a creepy old house in the Hollywood Hills that my sister’s college roommate held the lease on. I had my car put on a train from Maryland to L.A., only to have the steering wheel lock one day on the 405 freeway. I got over to the side safely, but the Lexus and I were through, and I gladly let go of my last tie to Richard D. I was able to trade in the Lexus for a cheap Jetta that didn’t even have power windows, a hugely embarrassing inconvenience when I pulled up next to any cute guys who wanted to flirt at a stoplight.

I landed my first job in “the industry” as assistant to a small talent manager who worked out of her living room in Venice and tried to get commercial auditions or little plays for clients
hoping to break into acting. I spent my day stuffing envelopes for $250 a week. It was an hourlong commute each way, and by the time I paid for rent, gasoline, and the four-dollar coffees my boss made me fetch but never reimbursed me for, I was pretty much broke.

I used to spend all of my free time with Justine, sitting at the Coffee Bean on Sunset, waiting to be discovered, along with a similarly luckless assortment of hopeful actors and models yearning to be in front of the cameras. We would go through the trade papers, network with people we’d met at the Sky Bar (“Hi, did you say something about an independent film you heard was casting?”), and scour the ads for useful classes to take.

I’d been in California for eighteen months when I heard that an upstart talent agency was hiring. Mike Ovitz, once described by the media as the Most Powerful Man in Hollywood, had left his job running Disney to launch a one-stop talent agency called Artist Management Group. AMG proceeded to lure marquis clients like Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, and Samuel L. Jackson from established powerhouse agencies. When I dropped off my résumé, the AMG recruiter asked me what position I thought I might fill. I suggested I could be a junior manager.

“You gotta be an assistant first,” I was told.

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’m happy to do that first.”

“No, before you can be an assistant, you have to work in the mailroom.”

“I have a master’s degree!”

My objection was met with a smirk and a shrug.

“You’ll be in good company. Some people down there have their PhDs.”

I was hired to work twelve-hour shifts, five days a week, for minimum wage with no overtime. There were nine of us in the pool, and our job was to deliver scripts all over town. The worst were the Valley runs. It was always boiling hot, and the Jetta’s
air-conditioning snuffled and wheezed and drooled like some asthmatic bulldog. Plus, no superstars lived in the Valley. Those were usually studio runs.

I quickly established myself as AMG’s best runner: I was fast and reliable, and had a great sense of direction, which, in L.A., is like having a second brain. I showed up for work in hand-me-down Ann Taylor suits from my sister and demure flats, but in my car, I always kept heels and a backup outfit for the Naughty Librarian in a Van Halen video, because you just never knew, right? When I got tapped to become the personal mail runner for Mike Ovitz himself, I was excited by the near guarantee of face time with some major players in Hollywood. Martin Scorsese. Matthew McConaughey. Maybe a reunion with Johnny Depp.

Right off the bat, I was handed an envelope to deliver for Mr. Ovitz with very strict instructions to handle it with care and be extremely discreet. I glanced at the name: Morty Weinstein.
This blows,
I thought. Who the hell was Morty Weinstein? Probably some paunchy bald accountant auditing the junior managers’ expense accounts. And of course, Morty had to be somewhere in the friggin’ Hollywood Hills on a smoggy, sweltering day where the temperature was already in the triple digits before noon. To make matters even worse, I couldn’t find his address for the life of me. Keep in mind, this was long before the luxury of iPhones and GPS. I relied on a Thomas Bros. map book hundreds of pages thick to get me from point A to point B. Searching for Morty Weinstein, I kept looping through a canyon, up and down the same winding roads, until I finally decided to ask for help. I was starving to death, so I went back down the hill and pulled into a 7-Eleven to get a snack and a better map. I was looking at the candy bars when I noticed the greasy hot dogs riding that weird little hot-dog Ferris wheel that only 7-Elevens have, and I thought, implausibly,
Those hot dogs look really good.
I
got one with relish, sauerkraut, mustard—everything. I hit the road again. After eating a few bites of my hot dog, I felt infinitely better by the time I found Morty Freakin’ Weinstein’s address and buzzed the gate. I wolfed down the last of the hot dog in the driveway. The house looked really nice. Really, really nice.
Maybe I should take off my blazer and put on the Van Halen heels,
I thought.
Nah, who cares what Morty Weinstein thinks, anyway?
I rang the doorbell and smiled perkily into the camera I knew would be watching me. The door swung open.

Leonardo DiCaprio answered.

“Hi,” I said.
Act cool.

We stood there, just looking at each other like goofy lovesick seventh-graders at the school dance.
He’s going to invite me in, and we’re going to go out on the balcony and have champagne.

I stared at him expectantly. Flashed a big pageant smile.

Leonardo started to laugh, then checked himself. The kismet was throwing him off balance, too. He reached for the envelope.

“Thank you,” he said. Another awkward pause. “See you later.”

He shut the door.

On me.

On us.

I get it,
I told myself, climbing back into the hot Jetta, which now smelled like boiled sauerkraut,
he’s trying to play it cool. He’s going to call the agency demanding to get my number.

Driving back, I worked myself into a prenuptial delirium.
Omigod, I’m going to start dating Leonardo DiCaprio. I wonder if I was blushing? Did he see me blushing?
I pulled the visor down to check the mirror and see how badly I was blushing, but it wasn’t my pink cheeks that were noticeable. It was my green front tooth, where a giant piece of hot-dog relish was lodged! No wonder Leo was stifling a laugh.

Leo would come to the agency now and then, and I’d spot
him in the hallway. He was always nice to the staff, and would wave or nod and say hello to everyone. But any hopes I had that he might remember some special spark with me were doused the first time I interviewed him as an E! reporter.

“I used to work at AMG and delivered your mail,” I confessed.

“You’re kidding! Yeah, you look familiar,” Leo said. I waited for the thousand-watt lightbulb to go off in his head, and for him to say,
The girl in the crappy Jetta, right?
I would even have settled for
The gorgeous mystery girl with relish on her tooth, right?

Nada.

He more than made up for it at one of my first times to cover the Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony. Where reporters are stationed along the red carpet at these events isn’t random, or first-come-first-serve. The prime spot, or first position, is standing at the start of the red carpet. I was in last position, the spot where stars quickly pass just before they enter the building. Everyone’s in a hurry by then to get inside and get to their seats. On this particular occasion, Leo, who was up for Best Actor for his role in
The Aviator
, was running late. He hurried down the red carpet without giving any interviews, apologizing along the way as everyone called his name, trying to snag his attention. But when he caught sight of me, he grinned and said, “Hey!” and jumped over the rope to come talk for a second. “Sorry, I’m not doing interviews because they are rushing me inside,” he said. “But I just wanted to say ‘hi.’ ” I was able to get a quick sound bite from him about how excited he was, and felt like Barbara Walters as I heard the other reporters frantically telling their producers, “No, we don’t have Leo! Only Giuliana got him.”

After paying my mailroom dues at AMG, I got promoted to assistant. The manager I was assisting was named Pam Kohl, a no-nonsense boss who wouldn’t even make eye contact with me, so deep was her contempt. I did nothing to change her low opinion
of me. Running a day planner was never my strong suit. The Sunday night before my second week on the job, I called her up.

“Obviously you hate me,” I said, “so I’ll just quit.”

“No, you won’t,” she said. “You’re going to come in tomorrow.”

Pam was only four years older than I was, and little by little, she began to open up and we forged a tentative friendship. I was still terrible at my job (again with the phone messages—seriously, people, they’ll call back eventually), but she kept thinking I would get better with experience. I’d been with her a year when she called me in one morning to go over her schedule.

“Giuliana, who am I meeting with at one?”

“That agent and his client?”

“Okay, and what time is my Kaye Popofsky meeting?”

“One o’clock.”

“Okay, you see the problem?”

My penance for the double booking was to entertain Kaye Popofsky while Pam finished the first meeting. Kaye was a former agent friend of Pam’s who was part of a new startup called LOAD Media. When Kaye arrived, I went out to greet her, apologized profusely, got her some coffee, and stayed to chat. She couldn’t have been more gracious about my scheduling blunder, and we ended up having a great conversation. She asked me all about myself, what brought me to L.A., what my aspirations were. It turned out that LOAD had an entertainment division. After Kaye had her meeting with Pam and had left, I went into Pam’s office.

“Kaye said I could audition for a reporter gig at her new company,” I told her. “I know it’s really hard to find a good assistant,” I apologized, “but I’m not a good assistant.”

LOAD was my cool dream job—a hip, fun start-up using the Internet to compete with the likes of
Entertainment Tonight
and
Access Hollywood.
I would do press junkets, premieres, and set
visits to interview celebs. People could then download the segments on their home computers to watch whenever they liked, avoiding the hassles of streaming. It was a brilliant idea, but ahead of its time—the software kept crashing users’ computers. My own parents ordered me to stop sending them my videos. I didn’t care: I was having the time of my life, standing next to
Access Hollywood
and
Entertainment Tonight
reporters with my big, funky-ass microphone to thrust in famous faces at red-carpet events.

At the premiere of
Gone in 60 Seconds,
a forgettable thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie, I snagged great interviews with Angie and Billy Bob Thornton. In those days, they were wearing vials of each other’s blood around their necks and were all over each other making out. The segment got tons of attention, and I felt like I was maybe starting to make a small name for myself. I kept sending my résumé, headshot, and samples of my work to the big leagues, waiting to be discovered. I was getting a ton of practical experience, working with real editors, writing my own segments, and honing my interview skills.

I’d been at LOAD for six months when I showed up one morning at nine o’clock and got word that there was going to be a staff meeting at ten. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but my radar was definitely picking up a weird vibe, and after Angelina and Billy Bob, that bar was pretty high.
Something’s off, get your tapes
, the shrewd voice inside my head commanded. The tapes technically belonged to the company, not the individual reporters. I spent the next hour surreptitiously packing mine up and sneaking them out to hide in my car. My delinquent teenage years had given me balls of steel when it came to bending or breaking rules, and there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t known when and how to go rogue. When the appointed meeting time rolled around, we were taken into rooms ten at a time and summarily fired. LOAD was in its death
throes, and only twenty of the 120 employees remained at the end of the hour. We were told that we would be allowed to go back to our desks to collect our personal belongings only—under supervision—before being escorted out of the building. If I hadn’t taken my tapes, I would have had nothing to show any prospective employer. All my hard-won experience would have evaporated forever right along with LOAD itself.

I didn’t have time to sit there and congratulate myself for foresight, though: I spent what little savings I had on an editing session to turn my LOAD work into a demo reel. I was ecstatic when MTV called.

“Do you have a very wide knowledge of music?” I was asked.

“Oh, yes. Vast knowledge,” I said. I’d grown up with Kurt Loder and Downtown Julie Brown. My musical taste ran from Madonna to Beastie Boys to Frank Sinatra to New Kids on the Block and everything in between. I was a natural for MTV! These were my peeps. I was ecstatic when I was invited in for an interview.

I appeared before two interviewers, who held out a bag and told me I had forty-five seconds to go through it, pull out a CD, and succinctly describe what it meant to the world of music.

First up: Madonna. “Madonna is known for constantly reinventing her image, but with this album, she is also reinventing her sound.”

Michael Jackson: “How do you top
Thriller,
the best-selling album of all time? Well, it’s not easy, but if anyone can do it, the record breaker himself can and this album in my hands may be the ticket.”

P. Diddy: “Having started out in the biz as a talent director before founding his über-successful label Bad Boy Records, Diddy is a force to be reckoned with in the industry and this latest album proves just that.”

Jennifer Lopez: “J. Lo recently debuted her first studio album,
On the 6,
after achieving success as an actress…In fact, she was recently the first Latina actress to get paid over one million dollars for a role in the hit
Out of Sight,
opposite George Clooney.”