Tales from the Back Row

by Amy Odell

  I’d smell like that, too, if I hadn’t spent an hour sweating in Casa de Unforgivable.

  Later, when Jay and Bey finished their partying in Diddy’s private lair and descended the stairs, I managed to catch Beyoncé herself, dressed in a black satin dress that was very “high school semiformal.” (Maybe it was from Diddy’s Sean John clothing line.) I asked her the same question. She only said she felt “hot”—before fleeing the premises. So I guess Diddy’s VIP suite didn’t feature the one thing everyone in the building longed for more than a paper bag to breathe into, which was air conditioning.

  I spent two hours desperately seeking celebrities and perspiring at the bottom of those stairs. A reporter whom I had befriended over the course of this tedious display of Diddy’s Unforgivable Ego spotted film mogul Harvey Weinstein in the darkness, within the haze of Unforgivable perfume and even more Unforgivable steam.

  “My editor wouldn’t be interested in him. But you can definitely talk to him—he’s so New York mag,” she said. I had no idea who Harvey Weinstein was at the time (this was long before I turned myself into street-style bait and bumped into him at the Plaza), but I was growing desperate for some material I could file. So I parted the sea of models that surrounded him, approached, and asked him the same question Jay Z had liked so much. I would prove myself fearless in the face of such awkwardness yet again. What could possibly go wrong?

  “What do you smell like?” I said, adding that signature fake giggle that says, “I like talking to you!” This helps a party reporter seem at least slightly personable. As Weinstein’s expression darkened, I realized that I had made a bad decision. Very bad. And I was about to get yelled at for my Unforgivable question.

  “What do I smell like?” he growled. “What do you mean, ‘What do I smell like?’ ” He then instructed me to turn off my recorder and growled more nasty things to my face, which I’ve since blacked out from my memory. When the verbal abuse ended, I returned to my post beside the banister, a little embarrassed but not really because Jay Z and I had just had a positively brilliant one-question interview. To become good at this kind of work, you must be impervious to willful interactions with people that end up feeling like self-flagellation. Over the course of my yearlong party reporting career, I loosened up and stopped freaking out about approaching or talking to celebrities and eventually became, if not comfortable, than at least not nervous when talking to fashion people like Marc Jacobs and Tim Gunn. When I started, I refused to drink at the events because I felt I had to concentrate. Several months in, I drank freely and began to treat celebrities like extremely cute pets out for a walk. When it was my turn for some face-to-face time, I coddled them briefly before moving on to the real questions I wanted to ask. At the end of the night, what really mattered was how Jay Z stopped to tell me he smelled like bath soap. All the celebrities who refused to answer my questions became great stories I told at cocktail parties when people found out what I did for a living and wanted to know who’s actually an asshole.

  I should say most celebs you interview at parties are a lot nicer than Weinstein. I believe he was the meanest to me of all the people I’ve ever tried to interview. Most of the time when people don’t want to talk to reporters, they’re nice about it. For instance: once I went up to Kanye West after a Rodarte fashion show and innocently queried, “A couple questions?”

  “No questions,” he replied. I must have looked exceedingly sad at his answer, because he then said, “Awww,” and gave me a side hug—you know the kind—where he didn’t want to fully, intimately hug me front-to-front so he put his arm around me from the side and gave me a comforting squeeze. I can still feel Kanye’s scruff against my cheek from that, the most defining side hug of my career. I also distinctly remember him smelling nice, which meant he was definitely not wearing Unforgivable Woman.

  Some celebrities are really mean to reporters at parties and have a reputation among party reporters for being nasty. When I was on the circuit, Kirsten Dunst was really curt with a friend of mine who interviewed her at a party, and Claire Danes acted awfully unhappy with me when I tried to interview her at the premiere of a boring movie I bet she would never want to talk about now that you probably don’t even remember existing called Evening. (The most significant thing about Evening is that she met her husband, Hugh Dancy, while filming it.) My editor told me stories about Rachel Weisz; other reporters on the scene had stories about how Julianne Moore wouldn’t give them the time of day even if they had a million-dollar check in her name taped to their foreheads.

  • • •

  But truly, most celebs are nice if you approach them properly. And then there are the people who are exceedingly nice. Like Sarah Jessica Parker, with whom I once enjoyed a groundbreaking eight-­minute encounter at a Ralph Lauren fashion show.

  This fashion show was nicer than most people’s weddings, and practically every guest was a celebrity or socialite. Celebrities are vital to many labels. They help draw reporters to a designer’s events, increasing exposure for the label, and, because they’re ­usually dressed by the designer before showing up, serve as templates for that designer’s version of glamour. The night began with me learning the event was black tie. Normally, to reporters, black tie just means “no jeans” unless you’re a female or male television red carpet personality, in which case you show up to everything wearing full sparkles and spray foundation. I don’t own any ball gowns and had low expectations of the fanciness of the event—often dressing in true “black tie” seems unnecessary because many people just show up wearing cocktail dresses and suits anyway. I just needed to find my least offensive dress, one that would not make people who wear designer clothes daily feel repelled by my presence. I was between a printed wool Banana Republic shift dress and a black jersey halter dress I dug out of a bin at the ­Calypso St. Barth sample sale. The black Calypso dress was obviously a better option, as it did not make me resemble a 1960s area rug. However: this dress did not allow for a bra. And was I mentally prepared to go braless into the celebrity wild? This was a huge ask of my psyche considering how easily I embarrass.

  I tried on the dress, which had a wide piece of fabric that wrapped around my chest and tied in the back, leaving slivers of skin exposed around my outer upper rib cage and back. I had to pull it as tightly as possible in the back to minimize the risk of nipping.

  Is this see-through?

  It didn’t look see-through in the makeup mirror in my bedroom. I am small-chested and my boobs looked like sideways hardboiled eggs underneath my dress, but that was probably less embarrassing than showing up in something arguably hideous. This was clearly my most elegant wardrobe option, and my boobs would have to brave being one layer of jersey fabric away from whichever famous people we had to speak to. If all else failed, I could always cross my arms.

  As soon as I arrived at the show in Central Park, I realized this was the opposite of a hippie-dippie leave-your-bra-at-home rendezvous. No one would collapse in a fog of hallucinogens inside a teepee here, most definitely not. Rather, this was the kind of place you went only if (1) you actually owned formal evening wear, (2) employed a stylist to tape your bust into your bra-prohibitive dresses, or (3) designed much of the evening wear in attendance yourself.

  Fuck.

  Prior to red carpet events, publicists send reporters a “tip sheet” that tells you which celebrities are expected to attend. You have to view tip sheets like horoscopes—they may be right; they may be pure fantasy. This event was not the latter—it had so many celebrities, the staircase they entered from was a veritable celebrity waterfall. Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Vera Wang, Donna Karan, Martha Stewart, Mayor Bloomberg—one after the other, they pummeled me with their fame and accompanying scariness. At least they couldn’t be scarier than Harvey Weinstein post–“What do you smell like?”

  I was nervous, less so about the high concentration of famous people than the reality that if I failed to come
back with an assload of printable material, my editor would never give me another assignment ever again. But I imagined physically setting my fear aside in a bush and rapidly intercepted one after the other, lobbing them question after ridiculous question.

  “Barbara Walters! How do you survive Fashion Week?”

  She looked at me with wide eyes. “You’re very pretty, but I cannot answer your questions.”

  On to Diane Sawyer: “Diane! Can you share a good story about Ralph?”

  She recalled going to interview him for the first time. “All of a sudden, I’m thinking, Why did I wear these shoes? How could I inflict this outfit on him?”

  YES! Vera Wang, please bestow your wit upon my tape recorder now?

  “He asked me what I thought about a jacket [during a job interview] and I said, ‘Well I don’t know if I really like it,’ and then he hired me.”

  Martha Stewart talked about Ralph’s loud and expensive cars. I was flourishing like the most popular girl at the party who came alone and made everyone fall in love with her. I was the opposite of a centerpiece. I was like Carrie Bradshaw at a sorority mixer.

  After the arrivals, the black-tie Mega Event officially began with a runway show with the kind of stadium-style bench seating that allows you to see the full torso of everyone in attendance. This gives everyone who’s not seated in the front row a fair chance at seeing the clothes. It also—and this is just as important at a fashion show—lets everyone judge their compatriots’ outfits across the aisle and makes everyone feel like everyone else is staring at them, which fashion people obviously want all the time. Because I wasn’t wearing a bra and, therefore, felt that much more nervous about being in this place, I was extremely attuned to the possibility of famous people staring at me. What if my boobs are showing through the dress under the bright lights?

  Once the My Fair Lady–themed show ended, Ralph Lauren took his rightful spot at the end of the runway, flourished his hand like the Wizard of Oz, and the runway backdrop painted with a scene of horses at the races magically parted behind him to reveal a garden party low-lit with candles. A fountain spurted. Champagne awaited. I felt like I was entering the enchanted land of FernGully only instead of fairies dotting the landscape there were celebrities. Hooray! You just had the feeling that Halle Berry or Renee Zellweger was somewhere within the twinkling darkness, perched atop a fantastical glittering mushroom. Everyone sighed in pleasure, utterly enthused by the fanciness Ralph was revealing to them, and applauded wildly, for here was a level of spendiness that perhaps even this crowd had not seen within the past two weeks.

  I pushed forth into the great beyond, past Diane Sawyer, past Barbara Walters, past all the people who spent my monthly rent on a single pair of shoes, determined to reach Ralph before all of them.

  “Ralph! Amazing show. How do you choose your opening models?” I began.

  No special openers, he said. His shows include only “the most beautiful models in the world.”

  Great! “Are you going to other shows this Fashion Week?”

  “No. No one invited me.”

  Hilarious! By then, the space surrounding Ralph had filled with so many of his devoted luminaries that I had been out-star-­powered and the interview was up. This is what’s magical about being a fashion designer: the world’s most fabulous people are constantly groveling about you. Because who would they be without your fabulous clothes to wear? Fashion designers play a crucial role in celebrities’ success, considering they’re minimum 75 percent defined by how they look and whether or not that look conveys the certain je ne sais quoi required to keep people looking at you. (The other 24 percent comes from their talent, and the other 1 percent comes from people like me. Because all you have to do to be famous these days is show up and get photographed wearing outfits. If you feel like you want to be quoted somewhere, you write a caption for a selfie and post it to social media.)

  One extreme upside to the elegant party lighting was that no one would be able to decipher my lousy braless look.

  Once the crowd dispersed into the conservatory, I set about interviewing the rest of the celebrities positioned around the central fountain—spurting so hard it was splashing guests with nearly the same frequency as the plants. It was like a wax museum.

  And right by the fountain was she, the deity worshiped by every New York twentysomething woman: Carrie Bradshaw Sarah Jessica Parker.

  She looked every bit Carrie Bradshaw in a strapless glittering gown with an ankle-length tulle skirt. She wore a thick brown men’s belt around her waist and had her hair pulled back tightly into one of those buns that rivals all baked goods. This was my chance not only to get a great quote, but, most importantly, make best friends with Carrie Bradshaw.

  I double-checked my dress before gliding over to the fountain. She was alone save her husband Matthew Broderick, who is short and therefore easy for me to talk over.

  “Sarah Jessica! Hi! I’m from New York magazine and—”

  “Oh, I love New York magazine!” she said as though she wanted to just leave with me immediately and go dancing at the gay nightclub Splash.

  I did foresee one immediate downside to being best friends with Carrie Bradshaw, which is that I couldn’t be Carrie in our friend group. Sadly, I would have to be Miranda, because I didn’t sleep around enough to be Samantha, and I definitely wasn’t nearly as into the color pink as Charlotte. Miranda is obviously the one no one in a girls’ friend group wants to be because she’s so bitter and probably shops at Eileen Fisher, but I decided I could resign myself to such a fate if Carrie Bradshaw were the person I called when I didn’t want to go to Pinkberry alone.

  Carrie began telling me how much she loved New York’s restaurant reviews. I basically acted as if I wrote these myself, even though I had as little to do with those as I did making the Sex and the City movie, which she was currently working sixteen-hour days producing. (Shooting would start in ten days.) (I hoped this would leave us enough time to visit all the new cupcake stores.)

  She revealed that she loved a recent feature on food carts in particular. “I’ll eat anything if it’s off a cart,” she said, explaining that her favorite was this one on Sixth Avenue between Forty-­Seventh and Fifty-Fifth.

  “Um, do you worry about hygiene?” I asked.

  “I think they’re actually pretty vigilant about it,” she answered. “They’ve got these businessmen standing in line for three hours to get their lunch . . . and you don’t hear a lot of reports about intestinal issues.”

  “And how about dining options not on wheels?” Will we get to eat at any of those together because I’m not really into food trucks, sister?

  “I don’t know how to pronounce it correctly. S-f-o —” she began, referring to Sfoglia, a fancy Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side.

  Then the conversation turned to Fashion Week. She was too busy to go to anything but this Ralph Lauren show. Besides, “There’s so much scrutiny now,” she said, referring to how the media picks apart everything about every celebrity. “People are so cruel, so I go to as few things as possible.”

  After eight minutes of thrilling conversation, another surefire SATC fanatic pulled my new best friend away from me, which created that awkward situation where I was forced to converse solo with her significant other, Matthew Broderick. Again, stuck with a dad.

  “Can I ask you a few questions?” I asked. If his wife was so gleeful about talking to me, he should be, too. But, alas, he let out his sass.

  “What did you think of the show?” I asked as a soft opener.

  “I don’t know anything about this stuff,” he said, like he was so over the situation. Like he had been dragged there to this girly event and, oh God, why wasn’t there a TV playing football, and would it have been so much to ask for the tuna tartar spoons to be sliders? You would think a theater actor would be right at home at a fashion show that resembled, well, thea
ter, but no.

  “What was the last show you went to?” I asked. If you’re dating the world’s premiere fashion icon, you have to have been to some of the best fashion events of all time.

  Sure enough, he had been.

  “I went to the big Valentino show in Rome.”

  “Oh! His retirement extravaganza.” (You can watch footage of legendary designer Valentino Garavani’s final show in the biopic about him, in which waiters wearing white gloves serve guests everything from foie gras terrine to, like, Triscuits.) “And how did that compare to this?”

  “That was by the Coliseum,” he said. “This is in Central Park.”

  I thanked him for his sassiness and then left to see people I have physical rather than imaginary friendships with at a normal bar.

  Nothing ups your party game like an exchange with a celebrity. No conversation with a friend could be anywhere near as awkward. The downside is you naturally fall into interview mode and start talking to everyone as though everything about them could be a story. Fortunately, most of these people are flattered to know you think they’re fabulous and actually care about where they bought their outfits.

  5

  Editors

  the time i refrained from barfing on my idol, anna wintour

  One hot summer afternoon the year following sweatpantsgate, I had prostrated myself on my sundeck for my annual two-month project of trying to turn my skin from translucent to a darker-than-white shade of opaque. Fortunately, I had not smoked any pot when my cell phone rang. “It’s Mark Holgate,” said a British-­accented voice on the other end of the line belonging to a top-level editor at Vogue who had recently been promoted. “Would you be interested in interviewing for a fashion writer position at Vogue?”