A Life in Celebrity Encounters
by Catherine Nicholas
When I was little, maybe eight or so, my family accidentally met Bill Clinton on a visit to Jamestown. It was exciting, but it also felt kind of natural at the time. Like, yeah, of course I’ll run into him eventually, how many people’s names do I even know in the world. Basically like 15 at that point, not counting “Emma’s mom,” and “the babysitter.” But Bill Clinton, that one I knew. He was overwhelmingly charismatic. I can still remember how good it felt just to stand near him, like I was in a little pocket of fizzy yellow happiness. “Hello,” he said, “I like your shirt.” For a while I continued to believe that life was like that: Some days you meet the President, some days you don’t. The President likes your shirt. Great. Of course he does. It’s a cute shirt. Great things will drift near you by accident and history will walk right up to you every once in a while just because. Now can we PLEASE go to the gift shop PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.
On the morning of my first full day of residence in Los Angeles, I saw Turtle from Entourage brunching with Meadow Soprano. So, okay, this was LA. Okay. I squinted at them across the patio. I hadn’t realized that wearing sunglasses constantly was not a stupid West Coast affectation but an actual necessity. It’s different from East Coast sun, it’s so much more. Eventually I also gathered that the bobblehead brunching one table over was Ron Livingston, which I only realized because I kept glancing half-fearfully across the street at the humongous blue Scientology Center that loomed over everything in what I learned was called the L. Ron Hubbard District. Men in tucked-in white collared shirts circled the Center on bikes. Were they guarding it? Could that possibly be what was happening? I sat there sweatless in the dry heat. Jewel-bright fruit dripped off of every tree I could see. So much muchness. I no longer had words for what the world around me was like. All of these things that had seemed like distant rumors turned out to be so real, right there, I could reach out and touch them, pick the fruit off the trees, bop a TV star on the head. It was too real and not real at all. That day set a tone for the rest of my three years in Los Angeles: combo dream/nightmare.
Salma Hayek started taking smoke breaks outside my internship office every day for about a week. She was tiny. Tiny-tiny, like a sexy little famous bird. It made me happy to see her, like maybe I was closer than I realized to the right track (I wasn’t). Maybe it was a lot of being stomped on day after day with no end in sight, sure, but then one day maybe suddenly Salma Hayek would appear to save me (nope!). One day, we got stuck in that uncomfortable, should-I-open-the-door-or-should-you-oh-my-god situations. She opened it for me. I felt a rush of gratitude perhaps greater than any I have ever felt for any of my friends or family members. In the corridor that led to both or offices, she grabbed my arm and cooed, “I like your purse!” I said, “Thanks! Yours was probably more expensive.” I mean, what? She laughed like she forgave me and glided into her office. I walked into mine, and felt fine for a minute before her glow faded and I resumed my main internship duty: pulsing with boundless dread.
A D-List actress I am still too frightened to name once wrote me a series of emails so cunty and rage-filled that I literally shut down my work computer in terror after receiving them. Then I turned it back on, deleted them, and deleted them from my trash, then turned it off again.
At the tail end of my involvement with “The Industry,” I served as Adam Carolla’s “handler” for part of a night, which, I don’t even know. In the elevator down to the basement parking garage: “Seriously they sent you to protect me?” “Haha. Yeah. Well. I can scream really loud.” “Okay.” Elevator doors open. Bye forever.
I was leaving LA just as my friend was starting to look for apartments there. His mom took us out to dinner at an old school steakhouse, the kind of place Philip Marlowe would sit and be sad in. Larry King sat at a table near ours, which I don’t know, I was so tired, so exhausted, it just seemed very funny to see him there. I mean, of all people. He won in LA, I lost. It’s fine. My friend Tweeted about it, suggesting that Larry King looked like something of a goblin. Some months later, Larry King read this Tweet on Jimmy Fallon and made a face like it had hurt his (goblin) feelings. Everything is connected, and the world is too, too strange. Also my mom produced Larry King’s show for a week in the ’80s, when it was still on the radio. I get the feeling she didn’t like him overly much, but she doesn’t care about celebrities anyway, so.
Now I’m back in my hometown. I’m looking for ways to make money without working full time, so I took a day of extra work on a pilot that’s shooting way out in the country. If one costume fits me, I’ll be an Affluent Citizen. If it doesn’t, I’ll be A Prostitute. “Is that okay??” they ask. “I guess?” I say. The first costume fits. I wear it, I walk and mouth some words, it’s fine. I run into one of my mom’s friends, who’s doing costumes. I’m now pursuing my ~goals~ in a way that makes some sense instead of no sense at all, but it gets dispiriting explaining it over and over again to people. “Yeah, I’ve been working on this thing. It’s been almost a year, which I guess is kind of a long time.” “It’s not a long time at all,” she said. “Not at all.” I felt a lot better hearing that. When I took off the Affluent Citizen dress, the wardrobe lady was like, “You know Joely Richardson wore that dress in The Patriot.” I was like, who’s Joely Richardson? I Google it on my phone. Ohhh the mom from Nip/Tuck. Haha oh my god. That show. This life! I spent a lot of my early twenties feeling really anxious all the time. But now I more feel like, okay, things happen, and sometimes they’re bad, but often they’re also funny, and no one cares, so just be happy if you can, and you never know, you just never know who you’re going to run into next.
Catherine Nicholas is descended from the inventor of dried yeast. She once met Stephen Sondheim, and he didn’t laugh at her joke.