Tales from the Back Row (22 page)

Once I was all dressed up, it was time for the portrait session. This is where the fun stops, if you ask me. I possess a real talent for sitting in a chair while people iron my hair. Whereas when I get out of the chair and have to look fly in the photo, I feel like the Loch Ness monster in a glass display case.

The photographer positioned me at a table with a blowup of a
New
York
magazine cover behind me. Some old issues were fanned out before me on the tabletop.

I sat there and stared stone faced as he clicked away.

“Hm. What else can you do?” he asked after a few minutes.

Stand on a ball and juggle bowling pins?

“I can smile?”

“Okay, let's try some smiling.”

I sat there smiling. Occasionally the makeup artist would dip in to powder me and the hairstylist would slip in to pet my hair.

“I think we've got it,” the photographer said after a few minutes.

Awkwardness, Part One over. Depressingly, this meant I had to change out of the magical Stella McCartney jacket. I squeezed into the tight Wang outfit and was trotted out into the hallway with the elevators. Awkwardness, Part Two: The Sequel.

This is not to say that getting photographed for a fashion magazine is hard or bad, and I don't even say this because I don't want to be the asshole who complains about “wa wa,
Elle
photographed me, life is so hard, boo hoo” because I complain about dumb things all the time. But having gone through photo shoots, I really see that some people are made for the camera, and some people are not. Some people can make love to a camera, and some people can't help but act like the camera is a proctologist. As a professional observer of celebrities and real human living in the twenty-first century, I frequently wonder what it's like to be famous. And having gotten my photo taken here and there, I have determined that one of the main differences between me (probably you) and them is that they do not act like photographers are about to make them strip and probe their body cavities. As much as I think I'm not doing this, and plan not to do this before the photo shoot happens, I have come to accept that it is just part of my nature.

The photographer crouched on the ground.

“Walk toward me like you're going into the elevator,” he said.

I obeyed. I now wore black YSL shoes that were about as high as my face is long. Coupled with the tight outfit, I possessed the elegance of a dinosaur.

“We should photograph her pushing the elevator button,” Annie said. “Joe's going to want it.”

The photographer made a face. “Really?”

I guess he thought it was cheesy, but I didn't know the difference. After all, pushing the elevator button at work is more realistic than me being at work wearing $3,500 worth of designer clothes at one time. That was something I had never done at work, but elevator buttons I had been pushing multiple times a day every day for months. But I was there to do what I was told, far as I was concerned.

“Joe is going to want a shot of her in the elevator. Let's just take one of her walking in, at least,” Annie said. “We don't have to use it. But then at least we can show Joe we took it.” The best assistants not only do a lot of the things their bosses do, but they can also read their bosses' minds. In fact, this is basically what you hire an assistant for in the first place: to read your mind so that you can enjoy the luxury of not using it for a lot of things yourself.
I've ­really got to get me one.

Behind many a great fashion person are many a great assistant. Assistants make sure great fashion people get where they need to get on time, meet the other greats they need to meet for lunch, borrow all the clothes they need for portrait sessions or events. The best assistants set aside their egos in favor of work experience and are unperturbed by the reality that they'll seldom get public acknowledgment for much of what they do. They often know what their bosses have to do, whom they have to see, and what they need for their various appointments better than their bosses. They also
protect those whom they assist. One friend of mine who worked for a very famous stylist used to get to this stylist's apartment, where they worked, before all the interns got there just so he could make sure the websites this stylist ordered sex from were all closed. At this job, he also assisted in styling a very famous designer who wanted everything he wore to look old, like it had been festering underwater on a sunken pirate ship since the 1800s. To achieve this look, he dipped socks in coffee and baked them in his oven (these were then worn not as socks, but as gloves). He'd spend a full day running over black leather boots with cars. Did he expect to take a bow on the runway after this designer, because he essentially designed and fabricated this man's look? This man, who is one of the world's most famous designers? No. He tells his friends it was the most glamorous job he's ever had, and that is enough for him.

After I tottered in and out of the elevator a few times, we wrapped.

“Okay, the torture's over,” the photographer said.

Shit
, I thought. I was
that bad
?
I took off the shoes right there in the hallway and returned to the conference room I had changed in, where my civilian rags lay like dirty laundry on the floor.

The best outcome I could hope for was that I didn't look like the raging dork I truly am inside. I had a pretty good feeling this would be retribution for every embarrassing high school yearbook photo ever, and not just because I wasn't wearing metal braces but also because I was wearing a
blazer
in the pictures, and no piece of clothing says “I am a put-together woman with a slick job” more than a blazer. Fortunately, anyone who saw me in
Elle
and read me on
NYmag.com
would not necessarily know that I roll into work wearing clothes that make me look like a middle-school student, partly because I still wore clothes from middle school.

Ideally, I'd emerge looking not like a slob with good luck but rather like an imaginary, elevated version of myself.

Elle
published two photos of me side-by-side that were about the size, collectively, of a playing card. Thanks to Annie, I looked glamorous and rich, which, by comparison, made my office look like a real dump.

Annie went on to become an independently employed stylist. She quit her job at
Elle
knowing that she'd have to just do it sooner or later. She had connections, talent, and knew how to work hard. She has graduated from dressing nobodies like me to dressing celebrities for the red carpet and supermodels for high-fashion magazines and has a fancy agent to represent her. She could very well end up as a personality on a reality television program or launch her own line of bow-and-arrow-inspired bracelets.

• • •

People like Annie who work “behind the scenes”—who aren't in front of the cameras or trying to be in front of the cameras—are hard to find. Even publicists—a job that's supposed to be invisible—get their own reality shows. Lizzie Grubman, who represented Britney Spears, was perhaps at the forefront of the current movement of publicists who practice their own black magic on themselves. In fact, maybe only the best publicists are on reality TV shows because it demonstrates they know how to do their job. Either that, or the whole proximity to fame thing has made them believe it might be worthwhile to pursue the at-times humiliating scenarios you'd think they'd want to try to keep their clients out of.

Grubman got her own reality show that premiered on MTV in 2005, several years after she became New York–famous for back
ing her SUV into a crowd of people at a Hamptons nightclub, injuring sixteen and initiating an avalanche of bad press and many millions of dollars in lawsuits. What better way to make people forget about all that than by going on reality television, which, by law, makes people look like a more grotesque and generally worse version of themselves? The show lasted only six episodes.

But it continued to set the stage for the culture of fascination with the metaphorical hairdresser to the rich and famous. The fashion, music, and film industries—pushers of “glamour” as the tabloids know it—are most subjected to this. You can hardly work in these businesses and expect to be left out of the scrum where everyone can, and seems to want to, be famous.

A more successful instance of publicist-as-celebrity came in the form of Kelly Cutrone, who appeared on
The Hills
and
The City
, shows about twentysomething perfect-skinned, blond women Lauren Conrad and Whitney Port
finding their way
in the glamorous world of fashion publicity. We watched them sit in windowless magazine fashion closets. We watched them stand next to racks of clothing in Cutrone's East Coast and West Coast offices. We watched them dawdle backstage at fashion shows next to—omigod, the blessed life—
real live fashion models!
Kelly played the part of the scary boss who would accept nothing less than the standard she had set. She was scary because she'd tell you exactly what she thought. She was positioned as a high-powered, easily disappointed work­aholic with no patience whose job was, in theory, to clink champagne flutes with glamour. And she'd come at any slightly depressed woman with blond highlights doing a mediocre job in her office like a wrecking ball.

Cutrone had a reputation for calling reporters who wrote about her. I always thought this was a scare tactic, but that's probably be
cause I was scared of her. Once in my early days at the Cut, I blogged a silly item about her being on TV with what appeared to be ­unusually curling-ironed hair. I treated the “news” as I would any other thing—spent ten minutes writing it, posted it without thinking too hard about how anyone might feel about it, and moved on to the next post. Cutrone was known for not caring about what people thought of her appearance. She's not the woman who spends time heat-­styling her hair and obsessing over the angle of her winged eyeliner before she goes to work in the morning. She throws on something black and then something else black, and barrels out of her apartment ready to instill fear and anxiety in whoever slows her down.

After my “OMG in Unusual Move Kelly Cutrone DOES HER HAIR” item went up, my phone rang.

I heard her hoarse voice, laughing. “So you liked my hair,” she said.

“Yes, I did notice it?” I replied. You know how sometimes you have absolutely nothing to say to someone and having the conversation with them feels like you're watching yourself live through an awkward moment you would witness from across a restaurant and congratulate yourself for not having? That's about how I felt at this moment.

“We have to have tea,” she said through more laughter and chatter I couldn't make out.

“Okay, sure,” I said. “Our offices are close to each other.”

I got the distinct feeling that Kelly had called me to hear my fear for her own amusement. After promising we'd spend time together in real life, she hung up. We never had tea. It's for the best. I worried I'd have about as much to say to her as I would someone who wanted to talk to me about football.

Of course, I had to encounter Cutrone in real life at Fashion
Week. One season when
The City
was still on the air, she put on a group show that included two of her clients and Whitney Port, aka Lauren Conrad II. Port had launched a clothing line consisting of shiny miniskirts and other stuff that wasn't terribly memorable. Of course, since Port was on a reality television show and the other two designers weren't, she was pretty much the reason anyone, including me, showed up. Backstage after the show, Cutrone arranged the designers of the three labels in a semicircle. Reporters clustered around, eyeing Port like the only free cupcake left in the building. Three cameras hovered around Port and co., ensuring that no dramatic brow furrow or eye roll would go undocumented for whatever episode of
The City
this might be dramatized for.

A brunette who was on the show with Port came up and gave her a hug and said congratulations in such a way that suggested this was
supposed
to happen. This would lend the episode that flavor of realness and emotional authenticity you seldom find at a fashion show. Everyone watching could live vicariously through Port and her now-­realized everywoman dream of showing a chintzy clothing line on a real New York Fashion Week runway. When it's all over, you'll be enveloped by the media, but first your friend will swoop in and remind you of where you came from and how great you are without all of this.

Once she was alone, standing awkwardly for a moment that was probably her scripted cue to look
reflective
, I took advantage of her vulnerability and thrust my tape recorder in her face.

“Hi, we're waiting for Mara,” she said, referring to Mara Hoffman, the designer, who had been forced into this unfortunate position of having to show alongside Port—who was stealing all attention from the two other designers who, well, had labels that didn't just exist seemingly because they were on reality shows.

Cutrone breezed in with Mara and a distinctly manic energy, muttering her stream of consciousness in such a way that she sounded like an even more intense version of her usual self.
I
was certainly intimidated.

I resumed questioning Port about the brevity of her miniskirts. She reacted as though I had just tried to trick her into saying she hates gay people.

“This is, like, a waste of everybody's time if we're going to do one interview,” she said to Kelly, as though I was not a person standing next to her asking her questions but merely a decorative houseplant.

“Are you trying to interview all the designers together, or do you just want to talk to Whitney?” Kelly asked.

The other reporters and I claimed we wanted to talk to everyone because, clearly, if we were going to get quotes from the only real-ish celebrity before us, we'd have to feign interest in the other designers.