But Enough About Me

by Jancee Dunn

  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.

  8.

  What most people find festive—a weekend at a beach shack with friends, a boat trip down a river, a crackling bonfire on a summer night—I see as a bleak nightmare to be grimly endured. I would sooner put lit cigarettes in my eyes than share a vacation house with a crowd. Inevitably there is one bathroom for ten people, so there is a constant line, and when it’s time to do your business, someone outside of the rickety door decides at that moment to take the CD out of the player as you furiously pull up your pants in the silence. Later, you are thwarted again as you realize that if you can clearly hear your friend’s newspaper rustling as he reads the Times out loud for everyone’s amusement, then they can all hear you. The days crawl by as you swell like a tick. No, thank you.

  I do not want to stand in the kitchen with the car keys, seething, while one person makes a grocery list and another hunts for cash and a third announces to the housemates playing touch football that all fourteen of us are going to the grocery store in one car for a shopping expedition that should take ten minutes but will stretch fo
r three hours, do you want to come along?

  Every eternal day revolves around the meal. If you’re at the beach, there’s always someone who feels that it’s their duty to boil lobsters, a joyless process of liberating the creatures from their muddy prison at the fish market, praying for the water to boil so they’ll stop struggling, mustering your appetite as you wrestle the meat out of the shell, and then cleaning up the carcasses, the stench of which hangs over the kitchen for the remainder of the week.

  If you’re in the woods, you try to devise a menu from the macaroni and cheese mix and Vienna sausages offered by the bait and tackle shop that also sells toiletries and food, or, with noisy fanfare, you open the spider-corpse-encrusted grill out back to barbecue some dubious meat, which will be cold and raw in the middle and burned on the outside. On another night, you will make spaghetti, which the cook keeps tasting with the same spoon and putting back in the sauce, and you can count on someone throwing the cooked pasta against a cabinet door to see if it sticks, done to much hooting and clapping. When it comes to meals, everyone pitches in, so that your food is lovingly touched by fourteen sets of grimy hands, and since everyone is usually drunk by cleanup time, there will always be at least one chunk of beige food stuck in your fork tines when you eat something the next day.

  The mantra of the gathering is always “Do your own thing,” but of course you can never really do your own thing without acute self-consciousness. If you bring up a book that you’re dying to finish, someone will plop down next to you and ask about what you’re reading, or a group will gather around you and talk loudly so that you read the same paragraph three times. Somebody always brings a dog, usually a black Lab, and no matter how carefully you edit the guest list, there’s inevitably one really annoying person in attendance, either some girl who gets too drunk and cries, or a meathead who likes to repeatedly remind her about it the next day when he’s not checking all the various sports scores on TV as the birds chirp merrily outside. You buy flowers at a roadside stand to decorate the house, and in the tumult, nobody puts them in a vase. Days later they’ve turned to mulch on the counter where you left them, buried under a mound of moldy kitchen rags.

  Silence is not going to happen, because silence doesn’t mean Good Times, so there’s constant chitchat, and one guy who takes it upon himself to play deejay. After lunch, time halts completely and gets stuck at four thirty for what seems like days, so the whole cabal bumbles around until someone cracks a beer and everyone else, relieved, follows suit. Then it’s time to go to the grocery store.

  After dinner, you can’t go to bed early because everyone feels compelled to do the late-night Big Chill thing, and besides, there’s an uncomfortable undercurrent because one couple claimed the “good” bedroom, despite having just joined the group this year. Then it’s activity time. No, thanks, I don’t play cards at home, so I sure as hell don’t want to do it here. Or Boggle. Or charades. But you finally give in, and you drink more than you want to, and Boggle starts to seem sort of fun, and you think, Hey, this isn’t so bad.

  But then the next morning, after a restless, sweaty sleep on yellowed sheets and a musty dog-hair-covered afghan that the original house owner’s aunt knitted during the Eisenhower administration, you jolt awake at dawn to the sound of the stereo blasting courtesy of the one early-riser guy who’s annoyed that no one else is up after he has already run five miles on the beach. Fuzzy headed, you make your way downstairs, where there is always a person eating cereal and making chipper small talk before you’ve had your coffee in a seventies earth-toned mug that’s cracked and glued back together and has an ancient lipstick mark that has never been washed away. You grab the carton of warm orange juice that a housemate has left out on the counter overnight and pour it into a glass that foams up from the dish soap that somebody forgot to rinse during the drunken group cleanup.

  Then, all you want to do is bike into town to that quaint little scone shop that you spotted during the drive in, the one that looks like an English cottage with morning glories covering the sun-dappled front patio, and buy yourself a scone, a cappuccino, and a newspaper and quietly read, but that is not what this weekend is about. Because even though the unofficial motto is “Do your own thing,” if you actually do break away, there are raised eyebrows and hurt feelings, or, worse, as you make your escape and pedal desperately to the scone shop, you discover that you’re playing Follow the Leader to fourteen bikes. Then your boisterous, hungover mob noisily overwhelms the tiny scone shop. All the gentle regulars flee as the girl who drunkenly cried the night before complains that the store doesn’t offer soy milk and the whole posse rearranges all the tables with loud scraping noises, so that everyone can sit together. God forbid you have two newspapers.

  When you can’t put off taking a shower any longer, you wonder why you didn’t bring your flip-flops as you behold a rainbow assortment of pubes on the floor of the mildew-scented stall. After you’re done lathering up in a trickle of cold, rusty water with Prell—always Prell shampoo, bought from the local tackle shop that sells toiletries and food—you reach for your one towel that you had carefully placed on the third hook, only to find it in a wet, fetid pile next to the john after it has clearly been used to swab your friends’ nooks and crannies.

  Your mind races. Who used the shower before you? Was it one of the clean ones? Was it one of the guys in the nice gay couple or was it the husky one who came out of the bathroom after breakfast cheerfully announcing that he needed a plunger? Who is having actual fun here except the meathead guy, and the couple who don’t have a good relationship and are just relieved to be around others? As you prepare to go on a communal trip to the ancient movie-rental place that has Jaws in the New Releases section, and the long debate commences as you all try to find the one movie that hasn’t been seen by all fourteen of you, you vow to yourself, Never again. Never, ever, ever.

  So why I thought a hayride would be any different, I don’t know.

  A new friend from Rolling Stone had invited me for an upstate idyll, and in my eagerness to be included, I had ignored the red flags. Every year the family held a hootenanny at a farmhouse estate. I loved farms. Maybe it would be lambing season! What could be the problem?

  As it happened, it was the roster of events, which would seem like great fun to anyone else but was, to me, the lowest depths of misery: a tennis tournament, a square dance, communal sleeping quarters, and a hayride. And so I found myself sitting on a scratchy bale of hay, bouncing over pristine farmland in a truck driven by a stalwart farmer type. The celebrants around me, most of whom I didn’t know that well, were throwing hay at one another, tossing back drinks, and occasionally bursting into song, a living, squirming, shouting Ralph Lauren photo spread. I, meanwhile, was calculating how long this trip could reasonably last. Two hours? An hour? The tractor had to run out of gas, eventually. Why wasn’t anyone looking at their watches?

  I surveyed the ring of faces. All were merry, pink-cheeked, chatting animatedly.

  Except one. She had wedged herself into a corner, and her ghastly isn’t-this-fun smile matched my own. She had the same careless blond good looks of the privileged people around her, but somehow I sensed that she was approachable. I made my way over to where she sat, fighting to keep my balance as the truck heaved over another rock.

  I assumed a pleasant expression. “I haven’t been on a hayride in years,” I said. I tried to be upbeat, but that was the best I could do.

  “I never have,” she said. “Jews don’t do hayrides.”

  I scrambled to sit closer to her. “This may be the most awful day of my life,” I said in a low voice.

  “I was once in a car that caught fire,” she said. “This is worse.”

  Julie was a high school friend of the host. She had been visiting her folks nearby and decided to stop in. “No matter how much I drink,” she said, “I’ll never attain the level of drunkenness to appreciate this.” She told me that she lived on the Upper West Side and had gone to NYU film school
. She was single, dating here and there, and she wrote scripts for the National Geographic Channel.

  “I’m a reporter for Rolling Stone,” I said. This was not strictly true. I had only recently become an assistant editor.

  “I know a guy who works there, named Peter Sloane,” she said. “I took riding lessons with him.” Ugh. Smarmy Peter Sloane, Mr. Ski Tan. Mr. “Can I get you ladies a drink?”

  “Oh,” I said carefully. “I know him.” Then I cracked. There was something about her that made me want to drop the facade. “He’s…he’s…what’s the word?”

  She laughed. “How about ‘horrible’? There are three people I hate in the world. Frank Stevens, Providence Insana, and Peter Sloane.” I didn’t have time to ask about Frank or Providence as the conversation bounded along.

  She leaned forward. “Listen, I don’t work at National Geographic. I just sent them in a test script. I don’t have an assignment yet. Lately, to pay the bills, I’ve been working as a clerk at an insurance company.”

  “Well, I’m not a reporter at Rolling Stone. I compile the charts page.” Around us, the group decided to chant the farmer’s name in what they probably thought was a friendly, inclusive way, but he did not turn around.

  Julie and I talked for an hour in our own bubble until the hay wagon rattled its way back to the farm. As everyone jumped down and dashed off to the next activity, Julie walked over to thank the driver, who was picking beer bottles out of the piles of hay, and I knew that my instincts about her were correct. Julie was missing the hard edge that afflicted so many of my city sisters and brethren. Julie, I would soon find out, was the type of person who wouldn’t feel the need to comment on the lopsided wig that a diner waitress wore, who refrained from ordering in food during bad weather because she didn’t want the delivery man to have to ride his bike in the rain. Tourists constantly asked her for directions, old ladies flapped over to her in the grocery line to compare purchases.