The List (17 page)

“Definitely not,” replied Julia. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard about her dating anyone
even. Nothing like that. She just lives to serve the
Capitolist
army.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. Julia paused and thought about it. “I’m sure,” she said finally.
“Are you asking because of that weird pen?” She held up her pink Tory Burch pencil
and waved it in my face.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“It had to be a knockoff or something,” said Julia, going back to marking up a book
she was reviewing with her loopy writing. “Maybe something she picked up on a press
trip to China. She dresses in rags. There’s no way she’s writing with a pen that cost
more than my car.”

“But maybe she just does that so she looks like a journalist. You know, people in
this town take you more seriously if you look like crap,” I suggested. It was true.
If I wore badly cut suits instead of my usual Parisian prêt-à-porter, I would probably
have more Hill cronies. I just couldn’t get myself to do it. Polyester gave my soul
hives.

“I don’t think she has any significant money,” said Julia. “She doesn’t walk around
here with an heiress vibe.”

“But what about her car?” I asked, not letting it go. “Have you seen what she drives?
That’s an eighty-thousand-dollar BMW she spins around in.”

“Yeah, maybe she murdered someone for it,” said Julia. She looked totally serious.
“Or maybe Upton gave it to her for racking up a bazillion Web hits in one day. Who
knows how Olivia lives her life; all I know is that I don’t want to be a part of it.”

I did want to be a part of it. At least enough to understand it before splashing her
intimate moments on television screens across the globe. Olivia might have gunned
down some yuppie for her wheels, but it seemed more likely that Stanton bought them
for her. I doubted she was stupid enough to accept lavish gifts from her illicit lover,
but considering the photos I had on my computer, maybe she was.

T
he week soon launched us through town like note-taking, party-going Adderall addicts.
We curled our hair, waxed our everythings, wore cocktail dress after cocktail dress,
made excited small talk with everyone who had vocal cords, chased celebrities, begged
for quotes without looking like we were begging, kissed up to bouncers, had PR girls
kiss up to us, and recorded all of it before passing out for a few hours of sleep.
“A few” as in “three.”

By the time Saturday rolled around, I felt like I had fought in the front lines of
the Crimean War and lost. I had covered so many parties that I no longer could discern
famous people from unfamous people. At the Quinn Gillespie party I asked a guy refilling
an ice bucket for a quote. He looked at me like I was on acid and said, “Brrr.”

But Saturday was D-Day. I had to be upbeat and spunky and celebrity-friendly and ready
to stay up all night long. By 9
A.M.
I was in D.C. with my dress in my trunk and my exhausted body in a chair at the Red
Door salon. “I need everything done,” I told the woman at the front desk. “Exfoliate
my eyes, dye my hair, tattoo my eyebrows, I don’t care. Just make sure it will all
last from now until five
A.M.
”

She handed me some cucumber water and led me to the inner
sanctum of the salon, where women got naked and had aestheticians pluck, prod, and
remold them until they were ready to face the world again.

“Coffee?” asked a woman in white scrubs as I looked longingly at a silver urn. “Triple
espresso, three Splenda, no cream. And I really appreciate it,” I said before curling
back into the fetal position. My hair looked like yarn and my eyes were bloodshot
and dry. I felt as sexually appealing as a cactus.

My attempt to have a caffeine drip while re-creating my time in the womb didn’t last
long. Three hours later I was on the red carpet at the Washington Hilton in jeans
and a sweater with the hair and makeup of a Las Vegas showgirl. My dress was steamed
and hanging from someone’s camera light, but I was waiting five hours to slap myself
together in a public restroom. For now, I just had to sit like a yogi front and center
on the red carpet, behind a rope, so no one dared take our space. I didn’t pee, I
didn’t take a leisurely walk. I just sat, caffeinated and dehydrated, until 5
P.M.
rolled around.

“Lie down in our space!” I hissed at Simon. “Don’t let anyone take it. I have to change.”

He lay on his back with his knees bent and his camera on his chest while the TV crew
from
Entertainment Tonight
glared at him. “Don’t try to take an inch of our floor space, Mr. Hollywood,” I heard
Simon warning as I walked to the bathroom.

I threw my jeans on the floor, apologized to some poor tourist woman who walked in
and saw me creeping around in my underwear, and zipped up a dress so fantastic that
my last editor had allowed me to wear it to the Met Ball. It was so not Washington.
It was not what a reporter should ever wear, anywhere, but I didn’t care. I felt like
a cross between Marilyn Monroe and the girl who was painted gold in that Bond movie.

“That’s an interesting dress. It looks heavy,” said Simon when I came back outfitted
and roaring to go.

“It is! It’s woven with real gold. Real gold! John Galliano gave it to my former colleague
during the Paris couture show, but she didn’t want it. Can you imagine. I mean people
used to wear armor. What’s a little gold? It’s not that heavy.”

It actually weighed about fifteen pounds and felt as if you had a dumbbell tied to
each shoulder, but it was worth it. It’s not like Catherine the Great complained that
her coronation gown was seven feet across the rump.

“People wore armor to prevent long iron spears from stabbing them in the heart. Why
do you need to wear a precious metal?” said Simon, still inspecting my amazing dress.
He touched it and screamed. “It’s cold, too! Why are you wearing that?”

Why was I wearing this? Because it was a ten-thousand-dollar dress stitched together
by the supple hands of John Galliano and a herd of magical Italian grandmothers!

“Just . . . I dunno. It was a gift,” I mumbled.

Ten minutes later, I was sweating from the weight of my dress. Simon had me shoved
against the red velvet rope with a microphone, and we were elbowing reporters trying
to encroach on our space. “Back off,
Washington Post
girl,” Simon threatened as we heard the front door open and watched the first famous
guest walk in. It was six o’clock. It would be nine hours of reporting and stalking
and filing stories before I could slump into my Volvo and drive home.

Lincoln Town Car after Lincoln Town Car pulled up to the front of the hotel. Each
one spat a polished and prepped celebrity out into a wave of oohs and aahs and camera
bulbs. Rockers, aging rockers, starlets, cinema icons: they all walked the carpet,
popping their hips for the press and blessing the rows of salivating reporters with
their presence, if they felt like it. Some refused to come near us, all hungry and
roped off like zoo animals. Others walked slowly down the line, giving everybody the
sound bite their editors were harassing them for.

“What are you wearing?” I called out politely. Nothing. Kate Hudson completely ignored
me. I raised my voice a bit. “Kate! Kate! Who made your dress?” I tried, a little
louder.

“Get her over here!” hissed Simon. Well, sheesh, it’s not like he was helping very
much. I needed a fishing rod to nab these people. If I could just reel them in with
precision and a worm it would be so much easier. “You have to be more aggressive!”
he chided me. “We’ll never get anyone if you keep whispering like that.”

So I stopped with the indoor voice. When Matthew McConaughey walked through the door,
I whooped and hollered at him.

“Are you a fan of President Obama’s?” I asked as he smiled for Simon’s lens. “I don’t
talk politics. Sorry, darlin’,” he said, grinning and crossing his brawny arms as
the cameras flashed.

Really? No politics at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where the president
is appearing. Fine, make my job just a little more difficult. Perhaps you’d like to
fling sulfuric acid in my face.

After we nabbed five interviews, thanks to our precious front-and-center red carpet
space, Simon suggested we give it up and start chasing celebrities around the building.

“File that story,” he said, watching me pound out words on the miniature BlackBerry
keyboard as fast as I could. “Then let’s get the good stuff where no one is around
us to eavesdrop. I saw that
Washington Post
reporter write down your Jessica Alba quote word for word.”

We packed up our journalist junk and headed into the crowd. As soon as we began moving,
it was obvious that my feet were most definitely broken. I tried to wiggle my toes.
Nothing. Clearly, I would have to have them pieced together by scientists tomorrow.
“Is this a bone? Or part of a pencil?” they would ask as they picked at the appendages
I once called feet.

“Can you move any faster?” said Simon, watching me trying to walk in Louboutin platforms
and a metal dress. Ignoring my death glare, he hoisted his camera up on his shoulder
and waited for me to catch up. “Adrienne. We need at least four more celebrity interviews
or we won’t have enough footage for a ten-minute montage. I need you to find someone.”
He scanned the crowd. “There’s Ben Affleck!” He pointed to a speck of a person all
the way across the room, surrounded by a gaggle of guests.

“I think that’s actually Congressman Aaron Schock.”

“No way! That’s Ben Affleck. Go run and see. I’m right behind you with the camera
rolling. Go, go!”

“Ben! Ben!
Ben!
” I screamed, running toward him like a stalker who has a future of solitary confinement
and newspaper clippings to look forward to.

The tall, frowning actor didn’t even turn around. Like a man in deep meditation, he
completely ignored my screeching.

“Hi, Ben!” I said, pushing aside a ruddy-faced rod of a man. “My name is Adrienne
Brown. I’m a reporter for the
Capitolist
. We’re just thrilled you came down to D.C. for this important event.”

“Mr. Affleck is not doing interviews right now,” said the thin man.

“I’m with the
Capitolist,
” I responded, giving him a “know what I mean?” smile. “Would Mr. Affleck have time
for just one quick on-camera comment?” I flashed the media credentials around my neck
to prove that I worked for the esteemed publication.

“I’m afraid he does not,” replied the handler. “He’s not doing any interviews. Just
here to enjoy the evening.”

Not doing any interviews? Why would he fly to D.C. and flaunt his famousness if he
was not doing any interviews? I knew his causes. Sudan, the African Diaspora, child
hunger, Canadian strip clubs. I could speak his language. But Ben Affleck just stood
there ignoring me, perfectly still, perfectly mum. I looked up at his face with my
best girl in need of a kidney expression. He didn’t crack a smile. He just looked
at me like I was a talking worm with a notepad and then turned away.

I left my pride on the floor and headed back toward the rope line with Simon in tow.

“Why are we leaving? They were about to say yes,” said Simon, pouting and switching
off his camera’s fluorescent light.

“His agent told me to go out back and hang myself,” I replied, skulking toward the
press pool. “He offered me his shoelace. Do you really think it would be a good idea
to keep trying?”

“I do. I do,” said Simon, shaking his head up and down.

Before we got back to the media rope, one of the security men spotted us and approached
us angrily. “Get out of here and back behind the media rope. If I see you off the
rope again I’m going to kick your bony ass out forever,” he said, expectorating in
my face. One frown from Simon and the spitting man declared, “Really, video boy? You’re
both out of here.” Out of Simon’s skinny, sweaty hands, the bouncer grabbed his huge
video camera like it was grandma’s rinky-dink Polaroid.

Won-der-ful. This would be easy to explain. “Me? Oh sure, I’m fine. Just lounging
here in prison. Making friends fast. No, no. Not Lisbon.
Prison
. Also, Simon and I managed to lose a fifteen-thousand-dollar video camera to a man
who looked like he ate human skulls for Sunday brunch.”

This was not going as planned. I had a big fat
Capitolist
name
tag with my picture on it dangling from my neck. This was supposed to be my entrée
to everything. Instead, Simon and I found ourselves slipping the bouncer a fifty to
give us the camera back and promised to stay behind the rope at all times.

That lasted for about ten minutes. “I’m going to take the camera and get some B-roll
in the pre-parties. You take this Flip cam and get some more interviews,” said Simon.
“If we have any chance of getting on E!, we need more. Get more!” He handed me a camera
the size of a credit card and ran off to capture famous people shoving canapés down
their throats. I turned it on, held it up, and pressed record to make sure there was
still time left on the tiny device. No one wanted to talk into a camera the size of
a cube of cheese. It wasn’t great for the ego.

Leaning against a large marble pillar, I panned slowly across the room, happy not
to be chasing anyone or worrying about racking up celebrity interviews. I felt like
a documentary filmmaker, blending into the background, rather than a journalist stomping
through the human jungle.

I was ready to turn the camera off and resume the hunt for fame when my lens caught
a group of
Capitolist
reporters. Isabelle, with her rippling muscles and pretty blond hair, was one of
them. I lifted my hand to wave at her, until I saw that standing in the middle of
the group of four was Olivia. Why was Isabelle talking to Olivia?

I was too far away to capture any of their audio, but I zoomed in on Olivia’s face
to watch her as she spoke. With her fiery hair curled and arranged high on her head
like a Jane Austen heroine’s, she looked softer, less ready to take out a Glock and
threaten someone’s life if she wasn’t chosen for White House duty. Her fair skin glowed
pink; she looked much better out of the harsh fluorescent lights of the newsroom.
As she spoke animatedly, letting her ethereal forest green dress swish around
her, you could almost imagine her having friends, warm blood, the ability to smile.
She was talking assuredly to Isabelle and the other two. None of them was drinking;
they seemed to occupy a tiny invisible box of personal space.