CELEBRITY SEX TAPE ETC

In January 2008, I visited Los Angeles for the first time. A shorter version of the essay that followed appeared in The Best Australian Humorous Writing 2008 edited by Andrew O'Keefe and Steve Vizzard (MUP).

Britney Spears tried to force her way into my hotel late last night. This is not the sort of problem I normally face, but this week I am in staying at the five-star Raffles L'Ermitage Beverly Hills. Apparently, Britney (she is always "Britney", never Spears) first attempted to check in to the nearby Four Seasons, but was turned away because she was being chased by an incandescence of paparazzi. She ditched her car in the hope of sneaking into l'Ermitage, but the hotel was full. Had she succeeded in getting a room, it would have been the worst attempt to escape the press in the history of the world since, staying at l'Ermitage, for an E! channel, pre-Golden Globes international press week, are almost two dozen celebrity-watching journalists from around the world. And me.

Before I was invited to LA, I did not know what E! was (I thought it was a show; it is a channel); I did not know what the Golden Globes were (I thought they were TV awards; they are movie and TV prizes granted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association); and I did not know what the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was (but that is okay, because nobody else does, either).

I quickly learn that E! specialises in celebrity gossip and reality TV. Its best known show in Australia is Girls of Playboy Mansion, which purports to chronicle the ambiguously polygamous life of Hugh Hefner and his three blonde consorts. During the week to come, we will interview Hef, and many other stars of E!'s highest-rating reality shows and ask them what can be done about Britney.

 

I have a luxurious "smart room" at l'Ermitage and, predictably, it is much smarter than I am. When it turns on the lights, it takes me almost 10 minutes to figure out how to turn them off, and when it turns on background music, I cannot turn it off ever.

Once I have persuaded my room to let me out, I join journalists from Italy, France, Spain, Brazil, Germany, OK magazine and Adelaide, in l'Ermitage's breakfast room annex, to await the arrival of the Kardashians. Whoever they are.

“I've still got music in the toilet only,” confesses the woman from OK. “In the toilet, in the middle of the night, it was, like, opera.”

In the breakfast room, there is a magnificent case full of tea bags made of a sort of cottony fabric with loads of tiny holes in it, so whatever I do (squeeze, tear, skewer, bite) I can't burst them. And not the only breakfast-room innovation. After the iPod, I thought there was nothing left to invent, but now the Americans have come up with the rock sugar stick, an ingenious bid to solve the nonexistent problem of how to add sugar to tea in the absence of cutlery. The rock sugar stick is a stick (no surprises yet) with big, fat rocks of sugar stuck to its head. It looks like something fairies might use to clean their toilet bowls.
When you stir the rock sugar stick into a cup of boiled water that has earlier been flavoured and coloured by an unbreakable tea bag, it sheds sugar at an easily manageable rate and, harnessing the laws of thermodynamics in tandem with the principle of centrifugal force, achieves an effect that previously would only have been possible using a teaspoon and sugar bowl. Moreover, when you have finished sweetening your tea, you can lick clean the stick like a lollipop.

The Kardashians, it turns out, star in the E! reality show Meet the Kardashians, and they are LA fashion-industry identities of indeterminate ethnicity and perplexing celebrity. The three daughters – Kim, Kourtney and Chloe – are the children of OJ Simpson's trial lawyer, the late Robert Kardashian, and their mother, Kris, who performs in infomercials. Kris remarried former Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner, who also makes infomercials.

Mother and daughters are dark and sultry and dressed entirely in black and white. Before they file into the interview room, E! PR consultant Paul Gendrau asks how many of us have had a chance to catch their show. Nobody raises a hand.

Consequently, the first question the Kardashians face is about Britney.

Britney, apparently, has said Kim has an "amazing figure". What is her secret?

"I work out a lot," reveals Kim, "but my new year's resolution is to eat a little better, because I eat way too much sugar."

"She just had two sugar sticks in the other room," chorus her family.

"Kim actually just finished shooting her new workout video," says mom Kris, infomercially. "And it'll be up on officialkimkardashian.com.”

The key word here is "official". There are many Kim Kardashian sites on the internet, but all the rest point to a 30-minute hardcore sex-tape made by Kim and her then boyfriend, Ray J, a rapper and actor who is known for neither his rapping nor his acting.

The tape, Kim Kardashian Superstar, is notable for its unusually high production values, and looks more like a pilot for a series than Kim's friend Paris Hilton's single-camera tragedy. Episode one of the first season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians deals with Kim's mortification about the sex tape, and her appearance on The Tyra Banks Show to talk about it. In a later episode, she attempts to put the notoriety even further behind her, by posing nude for Playboy magazine.

Kim has a boyfriend, and he doesn't mind the media attention that she generates. “We're both kind of in the business,” she says “so we understand that there's different rumours and different things get made up.”

But what business is Kim actually in?

"I think that I really love modelling,” she says. “I am shy inside, so when I can play this role of being someone else, I think that's kind of like acting too. So I just started taking acting lessons and, you know, singing lessons. I'm just trying to, like, do everything."

The Kardashians later announce "our goals are really fashion driven" but, by the end of the interview, Kim identifies her chief interest as "definitely acting".

E! has barred questions about the sex tape, so there is not much to ask the Kardashians, The most entertaining moment in the press conference comes when a French journalists announces herself as from Le Figaro magazine, and the family hears it as Go Figure magazine.

What kind of a man does Kim like?

"I think that now I definitely want someone who has a really good body," she says, "who's really fit. I've dated people who haven't, and now I'm like,'What was I thinking?' I'll never, you know… look back."

Like Kim Kardashian Superstar and Kim's support bra, Keeping Up With the Kardashians is essentially a vehicle for Kim's breasts. It is only a reality TV in the sense that it is more real than, say, Shaun The Sheep, or Telly Tubbies. It feels rehearsed, staged, and very badly acted, particularly by Kris, who seems unable to play herself with any emotional authenticity. Similarly, Kim is not a very good Kim Kardashian, which augurs badly for her stated ambitions to star in other, more challenging roles.

 

There are two kinds of people: those who watch pay TV, and those who have no idea what the other kind are talking about. Those who watch pay TV tend to watch everything on pay TV, and are the only people in Australia who might have heard of Kimora Lee Simmons, star of Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane.

Lee Simmons, a former model, owns the clothing brand Baby Phat, and is the ex-wife of Russell Simmons, co-founder of the Def Jam record label. Part-Japanese, part-Korean and part-Afro-American, she calls herself "a pop culture phenomenon". Much of her appeal seems to rest on the regularity with which she uses the word "fabulous", from which she has derived a new noun, "fabulosity".

Lee Simmons has skin the colour of pawpaw, and lush, liquorice hair like a Gaugin muse. She sits sucking a rock-sugar stick, and talks about Carla Bruni ("always very fabulous"), Victoria Beckham ("fabulous") and Amy Winehouse ("I'm not saying she's not fabulous. She's quite fabulous in her own lane. Which is not my lane." )

Lee Simmons does not stop talking, even when her sentence is finished, and her idea is clearly exhausted. It is as if she cannot stop, does not know when to stop, has no idea of structure or punctuation or logic. She consistently contradicts whatever she said last, and appears to be speaking not so much to communicate as to drown out the competing voices in her head. When she says "negative" she adds "connotation", even when nothing is connoted. When she says "talented" she appends "bunch", even when she means only one person.

She says she tries to talk to "those people who are a little left out, for whatever reason, be it that they're mixed or they're ethnically challenged…"

Ethnically challenged!!?

Was she worried about putting her two children on the show? "I don't think my kids know that they're different because they're on TV," says Lee Simmons, "because that's their world. Their nieces and nephews have a reality TV show too."

 

Lee Simmons' niece and nephew star in MTV's Run's House, about the family life of Russell Simmons' brother, the Reverend Run, once a rapper with Run DMC. Kim Kardashian, before Meet the Kardashians, guested in reality shows Sunset Tan (about a tanning salon) and The Simple Life. Even her sister Kourtney has appeared in Rich Kids: Cattle Drive. When Kim posed for a Playboy centrefold, she cemented a link between two competing LA unrealities, the Kardashians and the Playboy Mansion.

The Girls of Playboy Mansion press conference is the only one held off site, at Hef's place itself. The mansion is the expected mix of culture and kitsch, with a Picasso on one wall and a portrait of Hef with three lions on another. The exterior is Gothic, the interior eclectic. There are peacocks in the grounds, and cabin rooms with beds, magazines and tissues, for party guests (but not journalists) to “get to know each other”.

Hef appears first. At 82 years old and dressed, as usual, in his pjyamas and dressing gown, he somehow manages not to look as if he has just torn off his drip and escaped from the hospice.

He may have had a bit of surgery on his face, and a lot of creative work done with the remains of his hair. It is impossible to say where his parting is, and a dark streak that perhaps once grew down from the side of his head now turns upwards and shelters his crown, but he still looks good. He has bedroom eyes, lizard eyes, laughing eyes, rich man's eyes, and the lines on his face flex then fade when he smiles.

In the savagely compelling show, the jewel in E!'s navel, Hef sleeps with the oldest "girl", Holly Madison, but the two others, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson, live in as his "girlfriends".

“My relationship with Holly is a real one," says Hef. "What you get on this reality show is reality, unlike most reality shows, which have been scripted. The reason we are able to go on despite the writers' strike is we have no writers.”

The Writers Guild of America's writers' strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has caused problems for everyone in the room except Hef. The writers have asked the actors to boycott the Golden Globes awards night. The journalists are supposed to be here to attend the Golden Globes after-party. All over the world, newspaper and magazine editors are wondering why they have dispatched their top writers – and me – to cover an event that looks increasingly unlikely to happen.

The dispute has also had the awkward side effect of focusing attention on the essential nature of the Golden Globes. On movie posters, DVD sleeves and actors' CVs, a Golden Globe seems to have the cachet of an Oscar, but the Oscars are awarded by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which has about 6000 members, all of whom are in the movie industry. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, meanwhile, has 82 members, many of them only part-time journalists. They are not a representative section of the foreign press corps (the big international broadsheet newspaper correspondents are not members), most are not film reviewers, and, in any normal situation, their collective opinion would be only marginally more important than a consensus among LA burger flippers, or car valets.

Hef says he supports the right to strike, but would like to see the dispute settled, and talk soon moves on to the real issue facing Hollywood – Britney.

There were rumours, says a journalist, that Playboy asked Britney to be in the magazine and she said no, or that Britney asked Playboy to be in the magazine, and the magazine said no.

“I think," says Hef, "that there was a period of time – and it is still going on – in which the need to invent stories relating to Britney Spears was everywhere, and all the tabloids and other publications made up stories as they went along.”

A journalist asks if there is anywhere in the house the cameras are not allowed to go (somebody asks this of every star in every session).

“Well, you won't see me in the toilet very often,” says Hef.

“We leave the best part to the imagination,” he adds, referring to the bedroom rather than the toilet.

Hef wanders back to bed, or wherever it is he spends all day in his pjyamas - and the girls take his place. They are all blondes (of a shade not often found in nature) and big-breasted (of a shape not often found in nature).

Kendra Wilkinson introduces herself.

“I just got my boobs done,” she says. “Re-done,” she corrects herself. “They're bigger, too. Bigger and better. I was going to go smaller but I decided not to.”

The journalists are keen to know what the girls' parents think of them being on the show.

"My family loves coming here," says Wilkinson. "My mum just got a plastic surgery makeover," she adds, pointing to her own breasts.

Everybody else in LA seems to see themselves as role models. Do the "girls"?

"We encourage people to work out, get an education, follow their dreams," says Bridget Marquardt.

"Be themselves," says Wilkinson.

"We're not encouraging them all to date the same guy," say Marquardt.

Wilkinson, 22, describes her career to date as "I graduated when I was 18. I was a general assistant. I got my boobs done, then - bim! - I'm here."

A reporter wants to know if all the girls' periods are in sync.

Wilkinson pulls on the belt of her pants, looks down into her underwear, and says, "I think I've just started mine, actually."

It is Wilkinson who makes Girls of Playboy Mansion so ferally watchable. Like everybody else in LA, she talks all the time but, unlike everyone else, she says exactly what she means. This, oddly, has given her the reputation of being a bit thick.

 

Nowhere is the disconnection between actions and words more apparent than in the press conference given by Dr Robert Rey, one of several cosmetic surgeons who feature in the E! reality show Dr 90210. Oleaginous, predatory, handsome, slim and egomanic, Rey laughs confidently, nervously and hysterically, talks patronisingly, excitedly and apparently disinterestedly, flirts, flatters, takes us into his confidence “(“I'll be very honest with you…”), calls us baby, calls himself baby, and at one point appears to refer to a penile implant as “baby".

Rey, the story goes, was born to a poor family in Brazil, and brought to the US by Mormon missionaries.

“Let's start with a question from Brazil,” says PR Gendrau. So a Brazilian journalist asks a question in Portuguese.

There are no lines on Rey's face, and there is no fat on his casually displayed midriff. Somebody asks the secret of his youthful good lucks. “It's diet!” he says, “Diet and exercise! And happiness! You can decide to be happy and, when you're happy, you don't age!”

This is the first in a series of bizarre replies that avoid entirely the question of cosmetic surgery and are punctuated with audible exclamation marks.

“Coffee's no good for you!” he declares. “Eat like Paleolithic people!” he advises. “Spirituality!” he spruiks. “I don't care what you call your God,” he says, “Mohammed, Jesus, Moses…” although no one calls any of these prophets gods.

Rey then gives a spontaneous presentation about fashions in contemporary cosmetic surgery.

“[Implanted] chins are very popular," he says. "We are androgynising women. The little nose that went like this [he presses his nose upwards], like Barbie, that's long gone. Today, a natural nose is in. I had my nose done so it's a natural look” he says, and I think it is the strangest thing I have ever heard.

There has also been “a shocking increase in butt augmentations”, he says. “We do lots and lots of butts: either the ‘Brazilian butt lift' [What ever happened to impenetrable Latin names for operations?], which is the transfer of fat from one area to the behind, or, for girls too skinny, we put an implant in.

“We're doing a lot of vaaaginoplaasty,” he says. He relishes the word, drags it out. “Laaaaaaaaaabioplasty.” He almost flicks it with his tongue.

“Women have these beautiful lips down below,” he says. When they give birth, those lips may get dragged down.

“And sadly, sadly – remember, I was brought to America by Christian missionaries – sadly, fashion in sex is unfortunately driven by the porn industry," he says, and "unfortunately”, today everyone shaves their genitals.

“Hair, you don't see anymore," he announces. "I've undressed about 11,000 women – about 50 girls per day – and, I tell you today, no-one is hairy. So what you could hide before, today you cannot hide. So that little extra lip down below now starts to erode the girl's self confidence.”

“It” can be inherited – “from your mom”, he adds, helpfully – or it can be a result of pregnancy.

Luckily, however, "It can be fixed by a half-hour operation”.

“I'm glad plastic surgeons have took over this area,” he says. “I've got nothing against gynecologists, but they're not delicate. They don't care so much about the looks. They're just worried about function.”

Rey later explains that somehow, bafflingly, a situation has emerged where there are people who want cosmetic surgery but don't really need it. Objectively speaking, their butt might already be Brazilian enough, or the nose they were born with might be sufficiently natural. The reason they might want to change it is as puzzling to Rey as it to you or me. It is medical condition with a Greek name: dysmorphia.

Rey says this is “a huge problem”.

So, what makes somebody beautiful?

“We are all sons and daughters of the Heavenly Father," says Rey, "so there's none of us that is ugly.

“Beauty starts from the inside,” he says, and advises us to help mothers struggling with prams, and we will find we “seem to radiate light”.

“If you want to erode the inner core, if you want to hate yourself, if you want to have a very bad self opinion: live one thing, and preach something different,” he says, astonishingly.

“I'm going to ask this question for everybody," says Gendrau, helpfully. "Do you feel like putting yourself on television, and doing what you do, in front of the whole world, has held you up to a higher standard of ethics? Has it made you a better doctor?”

“I always get the best questions with the foreign press,” says Dr Rey, apparently unaware that Gendrau is his PR.

The answer is yes, he does, and yes, it has.

The funny thing is, though, the show is pretty good.

 

There are two kinds of stars, real stars and reality stars. The difference between them is the difference between rapper Snoop Dogg and everyone else we meet over the week. When Snoop enters the lobby of L'Ermitage – fabulously late – he glides across the floor on a sheen of impossibly relaxed charisma, fueled by joints as strong as his two colossal bodyguards. He must have helped a lot of mothers with their prams, because Snoop glows like an amber light at an intersection.

An interview with Snoop is worth serious money to any jobbing journalist, so we are divided into four groups of six, to make sure nobody in the same market gets the same quotes. Snoop disappears into a room, the smell of burning dope fills the corridor, and an announcement comes through the haze that Snoop will only do two sessions, which means Australians - and other nationalities that are represented by more than one correspondent - will have to double up.

It is fine by me, and almost everybody else, but there are two kinds of journalists: the visiting foreign press and members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (whose Golden Globes ceremony has just been officially cancelled). Today we are joined by one of the latter, and she is furious that she might lose her exclusive. The rosters are revised over and again, but it is impossible to cosset her in a room with only Spanish and Hebrew speakers. Eventually, as even the appointed hour for the two sessions passes without Snoop emerging from his cloud, she storms out without meeting him, while the rest of us sit or stand or pace, waiting for our 45 minutes with the most honey-voiced, treacle-tongued, molasses-music-making rapper in the world.

When Snoop finally blows out, his eyes are half closed. He folds himself onto a throne (a throne!) at the front of the room. He is wearing glass beads in his hair braids, and what looks like the gusset of a stocking over his head.

He says he made the show Snoop Dogg's Father Hood to present himself to the public in a positive light, not as a playa and a gangsta, but as a loving husband and devoted father.

"I'm a French journalist," announces a woman from the floor (This is always a sign of a perplexing question to come).

"You're addicted to chicken," she says.

Snoop smiles, as if this were a great compliment.

"Aren't you scared to eat all the chicken of the world?" she asks.

This thought is alarming enough for a man who is so stoned that his hair beads are weighing down his head, but there is more to come: it is a probing, two-part question. "What would you eat if there is no more chicken?" the French journalist asks.

"Erm… if there's no chicken…" says Snoop, stroking his chin. "I don't know about it. Hopefully, that'll never happen."

It is left to the Brits to give voice to the question on nobody's lips.

"You've had loads and loads of fame," says a man from the tabloids, reasonably, "and, obviously, Britney Spears has gone through nightmares. You've probably met her in the past." He corrects himself. "Of course you have. How do you think she could get herself out of these problems? Is there any advice you could give her, coming from where you've been?"

Snoop looks at his crotch for inspiration.

"Association by affiliation," he says. "You've got to associate with people who are doing the right things in life, and that rubs off on you, you know. If you hang with nine killers, you're gonna become the tenth. You hang with nine doctors, you're gonna become the tenth."

 

It is disappointing to leave LA without attending E!'s Golden Globes after-party but, considering I did not know what the Globes were until a couple of weeks ago, I am happy enough that Snoop Dogg shows me how to do gang signs and I manage to steal a pad of stationary from the Playboy Mansion.

The star-struck, car-crash cacophony of E! channel makes perfect sense in LA, where the whole town really does feel like a reality TV set, and where everyone – except perhaps Kendra Wilkinson – is acting. But I still do not understand why people would want to open their lives to reality TV, no matter how scripted and managed the final product turns out to be.

“They think that they will become popular, and people will watch them,” says E!'s Gracia Waverly. They believe people will love them if they see what their lives are really like. Snoop wants to be known as a good father, the others want to move from the D-list to the A-list, to be written about in the papers.

“Kim Kardashian," says Waverly, "she just wants to be... known.”