Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (33 page)

Which brings up Justin Bieber. He blew up online before we had a chance to get him into the magazine. The photo shoot in L.A. with one of my shooters out there, the gifted and down-to-earth Joe Magnani, had gone well, but he never posed for us again. Too big. He did make an initial office visit, during which he was a total brat. His mother told us we were way behind in covering Justin, and that they’d taken notice of it, as if we hadn’t been on board soon enough to communicate that we had faith in him. It was probably a two-month lag. The next time I saw him was at the 2010
Kids’ Choice Awards
show in L.A., where I was escorting a lovable contest winner and her brother and sister. I was corralling stars on the carpet to pose for photos with them taken by Joe. I got everyone from Katy Perry to Ariana Grande, but Bieber was attempting to blow past us. I had to physically block the kid while simultaneously directing the girls and their brother to flank him for a fast snap.

Bieber never sold magazines at the level you would think he did. He was an online sensation and that is where he prospered, musically and with photos and videos he released to fans who were becoming trained not to look to magazines as the sources of all the information they craved. As a result, the magazine I’d created—but did not own—was sinking.

My last hurrah was when Disney Channel was shooting
Teen Beach Movie
in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico. I flew down to interview the cast, bumping into the hunky John DeLuca (would you believe his character’s name is actually “Butchy”?) and his equally smokin’ younger brother on the beach, where my professional and personal worlds collided—I snapped sizzling shots of them for my blog before realizing John was one of the “kids” I’d be working with. Oops. Well, to be fair, he had a Charles Atlas body and was old enough to know who Charles Atlas was, too.

All of the interviews with the cast were among my favorites I’d ever done—they were fun-loving, having the times of their lives, and genuinely happy to be doing teen press. On a whim, I asked the Disney Channel publicist if they’d all join me for brunch on my last day. To my shock, they all agreed—every single one of them—and we had a raucous brunch in the hotel with their parents at the next table. Ross Lynch, who also spent some time showing off with the hotel’s collection of iguanas and dancing to Michael Jackson songs while scaling the monkey bars, turned out to be one of the most magnetic performers I’d ever covered, a kid thrilled to be in the position in which he found himself. A solo session with him in L.A. a couple of months later was my last-ever shoot for the magazine and produced one of my best pic-withs when he brought out his biceps as the background. He’s already very successful, but I think he could become another Justin Timberlake or Bradley Cooper, depending on which direction he chooses.

Shortly thereafter, I got word that the magazine had been sold and there was really no place for me with the “new” version of the magazine.

An interesting thing happened when my 14-year career with the magazine screeched to a halt: A charmingly frazzled girl who had previously described me as a role model and who had worked for just about all of the other teen mags as well as mine responded to my announcement by commiserating via e-mail. She then applied for my old job and moved across the country to take it when it was offered to her. I think she was surprised when I no longer wanted to be her friend on Facebook.

The magazine still exists, albeit with far less personality and probably on a budget closer to the one with which I started than the one with which I ended up.

Did I mention the new owners are pornographers who run the teen and titty mags from the same offices? Shortly after the sale was completed, an exposé appeared in the
New York Post
, the exact nightmare that had consumed me in the early years of the magazine, when I was publishing it out of Mavety’s offices. And yet in 2012 the story didn’t cause a ripple. The new owners claimed everything was separate and publicists for teen heartthrobs didn’t mind.

I told you teen magazines and porn magazines are the same.

My life is marred by countless shameful technoconfessions, including: I was so afraid of learning how to type I sweated through my size XXL O.P. top in high school as Mr. Noe led us through finger exercises; I didn’t buy a CD player until 1994 in spite of having bought Madonna’s
I’m Breathless
on CD in 1990 just to be supportive; I didn’t acquire a cellphone until shortly before smartphones were dreamt up.

But the most shameful technoconfession of them all is the fact that I didn’t digitize my physical Rolodex until July of 2012.

I should say my physical Rolodex
es.
Which would be a great Scrabble app word if the app would accept a proper name once in a while and if you played with nine letters instead of seven—oh, another confession: Scrabble was the only app on my iPhone for the first five years I owned one.

My three Rolodexes were with me longer than any dog has ever lived, longer than the longest-running sitcom (
The Simpsons
), longer than Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick were married (wait, they’re
still together?
), and contained an uncomfortable mixture of names from my conflicting incarnations. There were the people I knew when I was a fussy, too-organized kid living at home and that same, somewhat older kid in a series of college dorm rooms; the celebrity names I cribbed from my old-school Chicago literary agent boss; the sex-for-pay day players I encountered while working at that surprisingly boring porn conglomerate; and the myriad of wannabes, gonnabes, onceweres, stillares, and all of their support staff from my 14 years as the editor-in-chief of a teen-entertainment magazine.

That mixture meant I could flip through the cards and see my grandmother on top of crazy porn legend Ryan Idol. I could find Chad Michael Murray’s cell next to Michael Lucas’s, which come to think of it sounds like a bareback jailhouse porn movie at least some people would probably watch.

A lifelong worshiper of ephemera, I
loved
my Rolodexes. And I didn’t see their contents as contradictory, I saw them as complex. Life is diverse, or should be. So why not have sex and innocence and family and friends and enemies and everything in-between side by side? I could thumb through the cards and be instantly transported to all the different compartments of my compartmentalized life and career, much like looking at a stack of scrapbooks.

With teeny-tiny pages.

Rarely, I would decide someone’s contact info was either obviously out of date or no longer useful to me, so I would turn the little card around and recycle it. In this way, I wound up with a card bearing Christina Aguilera’s Pennsylvania home number from the year 2000 on the front and long-dead silent movie siren Pola Negri’s Texas address on the back.

Christina’s info I’d gotten when I was contacted to conduct a phone interview with her for the teen mag. It was to be the last time I’d ever speak to her (we are literally not speaking to each other anymore, more because she has no idea who I am than because we’ve fallen out). My only previous (aborted) interaction with her had been going on a junket to her concert at Walt Disney World and being stood up by her in the press area because she’d been dumped by her dancer/lover and had boarded a plane in a fit of pique directly after.

But I did also remember seeing her and Britney Spears and a slew of other rising-star acts at the KTU Miracle on 34th Street 1999 concert in the early months of Christina’s rise to national prominence and just after Britney had already established herself as the girl of the moment. Everyone knew they’d been Mousketeers together, and everyone assumed they must have grown into rivals because that is how girls work, right? Britney, being the bigger star, was scheduled to come out on stage last. I recall Christina coming out somewhere in the middle, but I can’t be sure when because what was more memorable was her legendarily botched entrance.

As “Genie in a Bottle” came on (this was a track date), it became clear something was amiss. The CD was skipping, causing the wiry male dancers on the stage to attempt to copy it, jerking around in a way that was so artfully bizarre even Martha Graham might have thought, “WTF?”

For some reason, Christina thought she was going to overcome this, so she came running out on cue and promptly tripped over a dancer who was not in the spot he would have been had the music been right. She fell flat on her then-skinny ass. As the CD continued to skip erratically, she got up and stormed off the stage. We were all delortified, which is what you are when you’re simultaneously delighted and mortified. I think everyone felt bad for the girl, but if YouTube had been invented yet, we would have had her
alllll
over that shit by morning.

It was especially horrifying for her because we all knew that the person she was being compared to, Britney, would be coming out later, and that such a technical error would be unlikely to strike twice. When one does nothing
but
lip-synch, one takes precautions to ensure that a CD malfunction will never,
ever
occur. Once Britney bopped out and blew everyone away by miming “(You Drive Me) Crazy”, Christina, a much more powerful singer—a singer,
period
—would be driven crazy herself by the unflattering comparison.

Instead, Christina came back out a while later, after a couple more acts, with a stool. She sat down and told us something along the lines of, “I’m sorry about before, but I just wanted to come back and give you guys something
real
.” The way she said it was clearly a jab at Britney and all the other track acts (um, including herself…she had obviously been about to lip-synch “Genie” before being stymied by a scratch). This kind of bitchery was not common in the teenybopper world, and it only intensified the Davis/Crawford aura around Spears/Aguilera.

Then Christina sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in a way that was neither merry nor little, but was instead a vocal throw-down the likes of which none of us would ever forget.

Her stumble and vocal recovery is what I asked her about when I got her on the phone for that interview—I asked it by saying I thought it showed remarkable resolve and that she’d sounded great, the perfect way to handle an unexpected disaster and come out ahead, and Christina responded with an edge in her voice,
“Thanksss.”
She said “thanks” but it sounded like “I hate you.” It’s like when your significant other says, “Sweetie, don’t forget to do those dishes,” and “Sweetie” really means, “Fucktard.” It was that kind of a really juicy interview. Look, I may have edited a teen mag, but I was not known as the editor to ask about nonsense like, “What’s your favorite color?”

I’d saved Christina’s home number because of that phoner. Even though I’m sure that number has been changed 100 times since, I still have it, a genie waiting patiently in a bottle, or maybe just a bottle whose genie has long since moved on. I wonder if I called it now who would answer? I enjoy wondering more than I would enjoy finding out.

An important aspect of being a starfucker is not only treating yourself to the stars who mean a lot (or even just a little) to you, but also pushing yourself to get there first on the stars who
will
mean a lot (or even just a little) to everyone else.

As for Pola Negri, I did not—alas—get to interview the woman (once photographed in Paris walking a Cheetah on a steel leash), not even on the phone.

Born in 1897, when her given name “Barbara Apolonia Chałupec” would have been rather out-there, she died when phones still had dials and cords back in August of 1987, when her given name just sounded like she might know Prince.

I didn’t know Ms. Negri had just died, although I was pretty up on my silent movie stars, so when I began working for Jane Jordan Browne’s literary agency on Michigan Avenue in Chicago in the fall of 1987, I nearly gagged with excitement upon spying her name and address on one of Jane’s Rolodex cards. I think I may have written her for an autograph. Imagine if I’d gotten one back—a great idea for Stephen King’s next book. (Or mine.)

Jane later talked about Pola, referring to the actress as a “lesbian lady”, a phrase she used to always follow up with a lightning-fast flicker of her tongue between her lips. It wasn’t accidental and it meant exactly what you think it meant. For Jane, a John Birch Republican with a discordant bohemian streak, it was not demeaning; she found lesbians and artists and showbiz people and, ultimately, offbeat writers to be fabulous people to be admired. She’d been a rival of Sylvia Plath’s in school—they’d been the Britney and Christina of poetry slams—and while she had detested her doomed classmate, she was also very respectful of her talent and the tragic glamour of her legacy. Jane’s own path in life was as the architect of other people’s creative successes, something she excelled at because she was well connected, had a patrician sense of entitlement (“They owe us money, so I’m going to sit in their offices on my trip to New York until they cut me a check.”), and possessed a clear vision of other people’s artistic value. She was such a supporter that she and her hubby sat through my one and only turn as an actor, playing the Matthew Broderick character in the University of Chicago production of
Torch Song Trilogy
. It was said by no less an authority than the school paper that I was “funny, charming and energetic” in the part, but what I most remember was speaking a line one night and catching a glimpse of Jane’s gigantic, excited-for-me smile two rows away in the semi-dark, her prematurely white, professionally poufed hair impossible to miss since my spot was backlighting her.