The Bling Ring

by Nancy Jo Sales

  Later, I would learn that Kardashian’s Calabasas home had been robbed on October 18, 2009, and that the burglary bore all the marks of a Bling Ring job. Except for Prugo, none of the kids in the gang had been arrested at the time of the heist. One-hundred-eight-thousand dollars in diamond jewelry, Rolex and Cartier watches had been stolen. Cops were never able to put any of the Bling Ring kids at the scene, but they suspected a connection (and still do; the culprits in that burglary have never been apprehended).

  “It’s boring here,” said the girl in Starbucks. “There’s nothing to do. A lot of people drink.” Now I was sipping sugary coffee drinks with three teenagers, two girls and a boy. They asked me not to use their real names; they said they could speak more freely that way. I’ll call them Jenny, Justin, and Jill. They were recent graduates of Calabasas High School, all attractive and fit and sporting bright, sporty gear. They were enrolled in a local two-year college, Pierce, in nearby Woodland Hills.

  “A lot of people around here get D.U.I.s,” Justin said.

  They talked about knowing Courtney Ames and hearing about her recent D.U.I. “I heard her blood alcohol level was point-thirty,” said Jenny. “You can die from that—or at least go unconscious.”

  Ames’ Facebook page was full of partying bravado and references to drinking and getting high: “Beer pong, keg, the normal”. . . . “Wanna smoke a bluuunt.”

  “I heard she was, like, a white supremacist,” said Jill. “People called her ‘White Power.’ She had tattoos all over her and was always listening to hip-hop and acting like she was some big gangsta chick.”

  One of the arresting officers at Ames’ home on October 22 told me that in her bedroom he found notebook papers filled with numerous “generic white power kinda stuff. And the ‘n’ word.” When he asked her what this was doing there, he said she told him, “I was into that in high school but I’m not into it anymore.” (Robert Schwartz, Ames’ lawyer, had no comment.)

  “She was always talking about going into Hollywood to party,” said Jenny.

  “Most people don’t want to go into Hollywood,” said Jill. “We’re like in a bubble out here. We’re in a bubble.”

  “People hang out at the mall,” said Jenny. “Hang out at Starbucks.”

  “Go to Malibu or Zuma Beach in the summer. Go to the Promenade in Westlake,” said Jill.

  “Make bonfires,” Jenny said.

  I asked them if it was strange growing up in a community surrounded by so many celebrities.

  “It is strange,” Justin said. “There’s a lot of people with money who think they’re better than everyone else. It’s the haves and have-nots.”

  “They act like they’re, like, the people on The Hills,” said Jill. “They wear, like, three-hundred-dollar jeans.”

  I asked them what they thought motivated the Bling Ring kids.

  “Kids are very influenced by the media,” said Justin, looking thoughtful. “They’re constantly seeing movies and TV shows telling them a certain lifestyle is better, and if you don’t live that lifestyle you can’t be happy. You’re like a loser. So people want what they don’t have.”

  “Everybody wants to be famous,” said Jenny.

  “No,” said Jill. “Everybody thinks they are famous. I call it ‘FOF’—Famous on Facebook. It’s like they think they can just put themselves out there and don’t even have to work for it.”

  I told them I’d just seen Kourtney Kardashian.

  “We see them all the time,” said Jill. “They have really big butts.”

  “I saw Britney at the gas station,” Jenny said. “Even though she’s gained some weight I still think she’s really cute.”

  6

  When I got back to my hotel in L.A. that night I thought about what it must be like growing up in an America where everybody wanted to be famous. An awards show was on, the American Music Awards. I watched the stars gliding up the red carpet, and thought of Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee watching it, somewhere, transfixed. Then Jennifer Lopez was singing her song “Louboutins” (2009): “I’m throwing on my Louboutins. . . Watch this Benz/Exit that driveway. . . .” I turned it off.

  If the kids at the Calabasas Commons were right, then everybody not only wanted to be famous, but thought it was within their reach. It’s telling that the most popular show on television between 2003 and 2011—in fact, the only show ever to be number one in the Nielsen ratings for eight consecutive seasons—was American Idol, a competition program celebrating the attainment of instant notoriety. “This is America,” said Idol co-host Ryan Seacrest in 2010, “where everyone has the right to life, love, and the pursuit of fame.” As proof of this, Seacrest is also the executive producer of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

  The narrative of fame runs deep in American culture, dating back to A Star Is Born (1937) and beyond (arguably to the spread of photography in the 1850s and 1868’s Little Women—Jo wants to be a famous writer—which isn’t quite the same as wanting to be on The Real Housewives of Atlanta). But it’s safe to say there’s never been more of an emphasis on the glory of fame in the history of American popular culture. There are the countless competition shows (The X Factor, America’s Got Talent, The Voice, America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway); awards shows; reality television, on which even “hoarders” and “American pickers” can become famous. There are Justin Bieber and Kate Upton, self-made sensations through the wonders of self-broadcasting. Explaining the success of YouTube in 2007, co-founder Chad Hurley said, “Everyone, in the back of his mind, wants to be a star.” There’s the new 24/7 celebrity news industry exemplified by TMZ and gossip blogs. There’s the way in which even legitimate news venues have become infused with celebrity reporting.

  Unsurprisingly, the massive growth of the celebrity industrial complex hasn’t failed to affect kids. To put it mildly, kids today are obsessed with fame. There’s already a fair amount of research about this—it seems we’re obsessed with how obsessed kids are with becoming famous. A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds said their most or second-most important life goal—after becoming rich—was becoming famous. In a 2005 survey of American high school students, 31 percent said they “expect” to be famous one day. For his book Fame Junkies (2007), author Jake Halpern and a team of academics conducted a survey of 650 teenagers in the Rochester, New York area. Among their findings: Given the choice of becoming stronger, smarter, famous, or more beautiful, boys chose fame almost as often as they chose intelligence, and girls chose it more often. Forty-three percent of girls said they would like to grow up to become a “personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star”—three times more than as chose “a United States Senator” and four times more than chose “chief of a major company like General Motors.” When asked whom they would most like to have dinner with, more kids chose Jennifer Lopez than Jesus. More girls with symptoms of low self-esteem said they would like to have dinner with Paris Hilton.

  Interestingly, kids who read tabloids and watch celebrity news shows like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood are more likely to feel that they, too, will one day become famous. Girls and boys who describe themselves as lonely are more likely to endorse the statement: “My favorite celebrity just helps me feel good and forget about all of my troubles.”

  The fame bug is more prevalent in industrialized nations than in the developing world. A 2011 survey by the ChildFund Alliance, a network of 12 child development organizations operating in 58 countries, found that a majority of children in developing countries aspire to be doctors and teachers—when asked about their top priorities, they talked about improving their nations’ schools and “[providing] more food”—while their counterparts in developed nations want to grow up to have the kind of jobs that will make them rich and famous—professional athlete, actor, singer, fashion designer.

  Or for the less hardworking, there is burglar.

  It occurred to me, while looking over the careers of the Bling Ring victims,
that not only were they rich and famous, but nearly all of them had been in movies or on popular TV shows about people who were rich and famous or wanted to be rich and famous. They provided the burglars with an enticing image of fame within fame, imaginary wealth rewarded by actual wealth. There was a double mirroring with all their targets, as deliciously full of things that were bad for you as a double-stuffed Oreo.

  There was Paris Hilton, whose “heiress” background was the premise for her reality show The Simple Life (2003–2007), in which she and her friend Nicole Richie invaded the lives of working-class people and made fools of themselves and their hosts. There was Lindsay Lohan, famous since the age of eleven, who had appeared in a movie, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004), about a girl who is consumed with wanting to become a famous actress. And there was Rachel Bilson, who had starred on The O.C., about rich kids in Newport Beach, California. (Josh Schwartz, who created the show, now had another hit with Gossip Girl, about rich kids in New York.)

  The Bling Ring had also burglarized the home of Brian Austin Green, who had starred in the 1990s teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210, about rich kids in Beverly Hills. Their real target in hitting Green was his girlfriend (now wife), actress Megan Fox, who had co-starred with Lohan in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, playing a rich mean girl. Then there was Audrina Patridge of The Hills, a reality show about rich girls trying to find themselves in L.A. Spencer Pratt, another regular on the show, was apparently also a target, but the Bling Ring was busted before it had a chance to rob him.

  Rachel Lee and Diana Tamayo allegedly fled from the home of High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale in July 2009 after encountering her housekeeper at the front door (Tisdale was in Hawaii). The High School Musical phenomenon hit when the Bling Ring kids were entering high school. The first installment in the three-part Disney franchise appeared in 2006. Although it was geared more toward tweens, no one could escape the hype, which made stars of newcomers Tisdale, Zac Efron, and Vanessa Hudgens (all three were Bling Ring targets, although none was ever successfully burglarized). The squeaky-clean movies, shot in squeaky-clean Salt Lake City, are about high school kids vying for roles in a high school musical, but their true message is about the thrill of fame. Tisdale’s character, Sharpay Evans, a spoiled rich girl seemingly modeled after Paris Hilton (she’s a platinum diva who carries a lapdog), announces she will “bop to the top” and have only “fabulous” things in her life. The final number of the first High School Musical movie declares, “We’re all stars.”

  And then there was Miley Cyrus, another target on the Bling Ring’s list. Her wildly popular tween comedy, Hannah Montana, ran on the Disney Channel from 2006 to 2011. It was, famously, about a high school girl who lives a double life as a famous pop star. Miley the regular teen has dark hair, while Hannah the celebrity dons a platinum wig and flashier clothes. “You get the limo out front,” Cyrus sang in the show’s theme song. “Yeah, when you’re famous it can be kinda fun.” Hannah Montana attracted more 6-to-14-year-old viewers than any other show on cable, and 164 million viewers worldwide.

  A study of the effect of celebrity culture on the values held by kids found that the TV shows most popular with 9-to-11-year-olds have “fame” as their number one value, above “self-acceptance” and “community feeling.” “Fame” ranked number 15 in 1997. “Community feeling” was number one in 1967. I searched YouTube for a typical episode of The Andy Griffith Show from that year, and found one that showed Aunt Bee fretting over the responsibilities of jury duty (and mind you, this show was a big hit). Meanwhile, a typical episode of Hannah Montana from 2009 has Hannah fretting over her overbooked schedule—how will she juggle a concert and a radio show? Or for older kids, there was a 2008 episode of Entourage in which Vince the movie star (played by Adrian Grenier) worries over whether he should take a part in a movie, and what it will do for his image.

  But it may be too easy to blame pop culture and the media for promoting the “value” of fame. Movies and TV shows and popular music are often more of a reflection than an engine of cultural trends. I think when we talk about the obsession with fame, we’re also talking about an obsession with wealth. Rich and famous, famous and rich—they seem connected as aspirations. Interviewing teenagers over the years, I’ve often heard them talk about wanting to be famous, but almost always in the context of being rich and the “lifestyle” fame ushers in. “Lifestyle” is a word that comes up a lot. “We put them up in the nicest hotels,” said X Factor judge Demi Lovato of the contestants on the show, “because we want them to get a taste of the lifestyle that fame can bring them.” (Sadly for Lovato and also former X Factor judge Britney Spears, “the lifestyle” of fame has also included time in rehab, where they both landed in 2010 and 2007, respectively.) When the kids in the Starbucks at the Commons in Calabasas started talking about fame, they immediately started talking about money. It’s striking that while there seems to be much consternation about kids wanting to be famous, there seems to be little concern about them wanting to be rich.

  America has always offered a dream of wealth; in “the land of opportunity,” anyone who is willing to work hard can make a good life for himself and his family. But the idea of what constitutes a good life hasn’t always included private planes and 50,000-square-foot homes and $100,000 watches and $20,000 handbags. We are living in a new Gilded Age, with a “totally new stratosphere” of financial success.1

  As we’ve become aware in the national conversation about the one percent, income inequality has increased dramatically since the late 1970s. Then, the top 1 percent of Americans earned only about 10 percent of the national income; now they earn a third. In terms of total wealth, they control about 40 percent. Meanwhile the 99 percent has been going into debt trying to keep up with the newly extravagant lifestyle the one percent inhabits.

  “While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall,” wrote Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair in 2011. “All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top.” At the same time, Stiglitz wrote, “People outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real.”

  When rich people started having more money—a lot more money—they started coming up with bigger and fancier ways of spending it. The explosion in demand for high-end consumer goods has been called “the luxury revolution,” although it’s anything but revolutionary. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) was a scathing look at the materialistic (and ultimately criminal) culture created by Wall Street players like his main character, Sherman McCoy. But while yuppies might have been portrayed as loathsome in movies like Wall Street, they had stuff, and their stuff was coveted. A bemused Michael Douglas said in a 2012 interview that young men routinely come up to him and say, “Gordon Gekko! You’re my hero! You’re the reason I went to Wall Street!”—as if Wall Street were an inspirational film rather than a cautionary tale about a financial crook.

  Greed was suddenly good, so was shopping. In the wake of 9/11, then President George W. Bush elevated it to a patriotic act. (“Some don’t want to go shopping,” after the terrorist attack, Bush said. “That should not and that will not stand in America.”) Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City became our lovable over-spender, trolling for Manolos she couldn’t afford in between too many cosmopolitans. The show, which ran from 1998 to 2004, and could be credited with mainstreaming a familiarity with designer brands, became very popular among tween and teenage girls, who took to showing off their hauls from shopping expeditions in online “haul vlogs.” Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? (1999–2013) another popular show asked. Well, who didn’t? “Everyone wants to be rich,” said David Siegel, the private timeshare mogul profiled in the documentary The Queen of Versailles (2012). “If they can’t be rich, the next best thing is to feel rich.”

  By t
he 1980s, there weren’t songs on the radio anymore about loving your fellow human beings. “Come on, people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now,” sang the Youngbloods in 1967. “People all over the world, join hands, start a love train,” crooned the O’Jays in 1973. Now there were songs about loving yourself—and stuff. There was Madonna singing about being “a material girl,” “living in the material world.” There was Puff Daddy, in the 1990s, rapping, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.” In 2008, the R&B group Little Jackie proclaimed, “The world should revolve around me.” Jay-Z goes by the nickname “Hova”—as in Jehovah—and calls himself “the eighth wonder of the world.” The shift in values could be seen on television, too. There weren’t shows about poor families anymore, like Good Times (1974–1979) or The Waltons (1972–1981)—there were shows about rich people, Dynasty (1981–1989) and Dallas (1978–1991) and, of course, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

  Lifestyles had a long run, from 1984 to 1995, and its impact was enormous. Now regular people could see what it was like to be rich from the inside—and they wanted it. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” (1996) by rappers Kool G Rap and DJ Polo, trumpeted the delights of having a “yacht that makes the Love Boat look like a life raft.” Quite a change from the Intruders’ 1974 anthem, “Be Thankful for What You Got.”

  When I got a chance to talk to Nick Prugo and asked him why he thought Rachel Lee was so obsessed with their famous victims that she would steal their clothes, he said, “I think she just wanted to be part of the lifestyle. Like, the lifestyle that everybody kind of wants.”