Apron Anxiety (4 page)

Unchained from school, my confidence soared as I conquered the city, at least in the wide eyes of a twenty-something wannabe writer. I rented a tiny studio off Central Park, quit my MTV and nightclub jobs, and started freelancing for multiple advertising agencies and PR firms. I wrote whatever they
needed on topics ranging from gastric bypass surgery to prison reform. And because I wanted an employee discount, I also created a “publicity manager” job for myself at the stunning home furnishings empire ABC Carpet & Home, absorbing everything I could about design and architecture while browsing cassis-scented candles and pineapple-shaped chandeliers. On weekends, I waitressed at the ebullient, uptown café Sarabeth’s. Every hour of my week seemed to be occupied by one job or another, which was totally fine because I didn’t have many friends from college, and my true pals—Anzo, Kates, Court, and Jean—were still living in Massachusetts. So the hustle and bustle became my life.

On my twenty-first birthday I splurged on a low-cut leopard-print Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress from Saks Fifth Avenue, and my sister threw a party for me, inviting all my acquaintances from my various workplaces to a groovy tiki lounge. I made her invite a bunch of her friends, too, as space-fillers, just in case. That night, about sixty people showed up; I felt like the star of my own movie. “Sorry, Lys, but you really can’t say you have no friends anymore,” toasted Rachel. Then, under a plastic palm tree, over a rum punch, Rachel introduced me to Gary, a great-looking guy with big green eyes and a starter job on Wall Street. He reminded me of my dad—not as playful and funny, but similarly good and honest. He was definitely on the square side, but he became my first serious postcollege boyfriend.

Speaking of my dad, around this time my mother had threatened to divorce him if he refused to move to New York City so they could be closer to me and my sister, who was attending college upstate. He put up a fight for a full three hours, and then closed his uniform shop and did as she said. Their plan was for her to sell real estate and for him to keep his regular
uniform clients via a home office. They swapped our lovely home in New England for an apartment the size of an armoire, and arrived on the Upper West Side with no savings, one subway map, and not a second of regret.

Money became tight in my folks’ transition from Longmeadow to Manhattan, so I’d insist on comping meals for them a couple nights a week at Sarabeth’s. Like most of my customers, they’d salivate over the famous, velvety tomato soup, slurping up spoonfuls and spoonfuls with pure delight. I finally had an appetite again and drank the yummy soup now and then, but by in large, I remained uninterested in food. I would eat whatever didn’t sell from the Sarabeth’s bakery, or grilled chicken salads on dull double dates with Gary, or anything that I could find in the mini-fridge at my studio. Food didn’t turn me on or off, and it certainly didn’t make me moan. But the sexy struggling actor who worked the night shift at Sarabeth’s, while my oblivious boyfriend put in banking hours, took care of that.

Life was good, back in early 2001.

And then one morning, I got off the subway downtown on Fourteenth Street and saw a big crowd on the street. It sounds crazy, but my immediate reaction was
Sample sale?
I walked to the corner deli and ordered an egg-and-cheese sandwich, and everyone was acting strange in there, too. When I went outside, already unwrapping my breakfast, a woman had dropped her dry-cleaning bags and collapsed into tears in the middle of the street. And then I looked up. The second plane had just hit, and my mom was calling.

AT TWENTY-FOUR
, I began my career as a professional journalist by way of a news editor at
Us Weekly
named Marc Malkin. I befriended Malkin while at ABC Carpet & Home, after I leaked
to him a story about Julia Roberts’s shopping spree there. After I aggressively insisted that he give his staff the night off on New Year’s Eve 2002 and relinquish their red-carpet duties to me, I spent the night running around in the freezing cold, barelegged and beaming, interviewing an unknown named Scarlett Johansson and a little girl named Lindsay Lohan. My sister, who had finally broken out of her shell, tagged along and ended up making out with Mark McGrath. We jacked his yellow puffy vest and gave it to my dad for his birthday. The night was too magnificent to comprehend.

Soon after, in 2003, Malkin offered me a well-paid reporting job, my first real gig in magazines. Forever thankful for the position, I would have done anything to please him. I stalked Britney Spears in Kentwood, Louisiana (where I was warned, with a straight face, not to reveal my religion or ethnic-sounding last name), sat for months on a stoop belonging to the Olsen twins, and shopped for silky corsets beside Angelina Jolie at Saks. I adored Jessica Simpson’s then-husband, Nick Lachey, one of the nicest guys I’d ever met. The magazine had me interview him so many times that we couldn’t help but feel like real, and completely platonic, friends after a few months. Once, we spent so much time talking off the record at a nightclub that someone took a picture of him whispering into my ear, and days later, he and I were falsely linked together on the cover of
National Enquirer
. The silly, short-lived buzz around the story resulted in paparazzi showing up at my grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving because they thought he was there with me, followed by relentless phone calls from publicists, snoops, and lawyers throughout the entire holiday. It was terrible, and gave me a small taste of my own medicine.

But the most stellar part of the job happened when I met my colleague, co-conspirator, and future best friend, Shelley.

Shelley’s temperament distressed me a little at first, but not enough to stay away. On the inside, she was a nice Jewish girl from Michigan—good-hearted and hilarious, my two favorite qualities—and at our core, we shared an instant, unspoken familiarity, an easy closeness, like that of first cousins. But on the outside, Shelley was a real flamethrower. Physically incapable of taking no for an answer, professionally or personally, she owned the New York nightlife scene, never having to wait in lines, always getting what she wanted when she wanted it. She could barge into the ultra-exclusive Bungalow 8 without blinking an eye, and torpedo into a Brad Pitt movie premiere guarded by the feds. She was a bull, and sometimes a bully, but I’ve never had more fun with anyone in my life.

Meeting Shelley, with all her contacts and connections, was like landing on a new planet. She was constantly bellowing into her cell, or banging out e-mails on her Sidekick, demanding to know “Where is
ehhhveryone
tonight? … I heard
ehhhveryone
is going to Marquee.… Wait, is
ehhhveryone
there, already?” I’d listen to her carry on, slightly stunned by the high-school-ish tone, but totally mesmerized by her sensational fast-track life. Eventually, I had to ask her, “Who is this
ehhhveryone
we’re always chasing?” She didn’t answer, but I wasn’t really that dense. We were playing with
the popular group
.

Shelley was deeply in the cool crowd. Backstage passes to the Kanye West show? Easy. Free haircuts at Frédéric Fekkai? Obviously. Private jets to the Hamptons? Of course. With enough finesse, she could make anything happen. Especially reservations.

We used our corporate cards to eat at New York’s most fabulous and flashy restaurants. Nobu, where even fancy people save up for celebratory meals, was our daily cafeteria. The owners of Tao, which was absolutely on fire in 2003, treated Shelley
from Detroit like the Queen of Dubai. We
never
got a bill at the booming Dos Caminos, where we’d bounce from table to table like sangria-stained bunny rabbits, because the overgenerous publicist was a pal. I loved going to these restaurants … but not for the food. It was the energy, the electricity, the heartbeat, and the buzz. The truth is I knew nothing about the menus, wine lists, or grass-fed whatever, but that didn’t make the meals any less luminous.

It was a glamorous time, jetting around from the MTV Video Music Awards in Miami to Hollywood premiere parties at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, feeling all shimmery and self-entitled. I was absolutely enamored with Heath Ledger, whom I’d bump into every now and then on the impossibly guarded third floor of the Spotted Pig. He once touched my shoulder and asked if I wanted to smoke a cigarette together, and for the first time in my life, I fucking froze. We could have been friends.

But we ran with a cutthroat subculture, often dealing with druggies, lies, mean girls, and manipulation, too. Celebrity handlers were always using us to get into the magazine, or abusing us for working there in the first place. (As they say, the only thing worse than being in
Us Weekly
is
not
being in
Us Weekly
.) The rat race—euphoric and evil as it is—can really scrape at your soul. I never would have lasted long without Shellz.

At a Tommy Hilfiger party in Bryant Park, I once spotted a drop-dead-gorgeous guy sitting all by himself. So many people in “the scene” were lonely and hurting—I could never find
any
correlation between fame and happiness. He looked like one of those lost souls. By this point, I was more or less committed to Gary, so I wasn’t shy about walking over to meet the tall drink of Fashion Week. (It’s always easier talking to cute guys when
you genuinely don’t care if they like you or not.) I did notice, as I got closer, that this was the most handsome man I’d ever seen.

“Hey, you okay over there? What’s your name?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just tired. Thanks for asking. That was nice. I’m Tom.” Holy Hilfiger, Tom was hot.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Shelley spontaneously combusting in her platform shoes, trying to send me some sort of telepathic message. Maybe she knew him? Maybe she’d slept with him? I waved her over.

“Shellz,” I said with a nudge. “This is my new friend, Tom.… Wait, what’s your last name, sweetie?”

“Brady.”

Oh boy.

I’d find myself in crazy situations like this all time. In the winter of 2004, at the Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, Shellz and I were dropped off by a taxi at our private rental home on the highest point of a mountain, in the middle of the night, only to realize after the driver sped away that we were completely locked out, with no cell phone reception whatsoever, wearing stupid, skimpy outfits and strappy, open-toed stilettos. It was pitch-black and frigid, without any neighboring homes in sight, and no streetlights or passing cars. We were screwed. Like, dead skanks in Park City screwed.

Then, as we were shaking from fear and frostbite, trying to figure out how far we’d have to walk for help—it felt like miles—Nick Nolte stumbled out of the woods, stinking of whisky, holding a walking stick, and saving the day. He couldn’t explain how or why he was up there, but he managed to call a van of angry butch filmmakers (we’ve never figured out the connection), who barely knew him and deplored the ditzy, decked-out Shelley and me from the start, to drive us to shelter
in a baby blue minivan. Nolte, in the meantime, scurried back into the arms of Mother Nature before our teeth could stop chattering, and we could say thanks. Miraculously, all ended well. Except no one believed a word of it.

Shellz and I had so much fun being the Thelma and Louise of the gossip scene. I am sure many people found us obnoxious with our Jimmy Choo shoes, diva-like mood swings, and smudged, morning-after eye makeup, but we had each other and that seemed to be enough. The only other person we took care
never
to offend was Yolandá, the feisty Filipino lady in accounting who signed off on all our expenses for the price of a black ’n’ white cookie. Bless her.

At age twenty-six, while I was half paying attention, I got engaged to Gary and moved into a great apartment with him in the Flatiron district. I dismissed my ambivalence about the whole wedding thing with the excuse that I was too busy with work, calling myself an “Indie Bride,” which I think translated to “screw this.” Following the marriage proposal, I took as many travel assignments as I could, ate most of my meals “on the field,” and avoided domesticity as much as possible. At our beautiful new apartment, I never once turned on the stove or attempted to cook. I never bought groceries or so much as made a cup of tea for my hardworking future husband.

Gary was a more imaginative eater than I was, perhaps one of the first foodies I ever knew. He was always on a mission to evolve my palate, so when an acclaimed new Indian restaurant, Tamarind, opened just down the street from our apartment, he dragged me right out the door. I was reluctant—mostly because it meant skipping a night out on the town, and also because I had never even contemplated eating Indian food. But the staff was so warm and gracious, and the decor so tastefully done, that it was hard to keep up my gastronomical guard.

Gary delved into the menu, eager to please me, as always. He ordered us basic but authentic-enough dishes like biryani (a casserole of saffron-scented rice with vegetables and meat), saag paneer (cubes of unaged cheese floating in warm, creamy spinach), lamb samosas (big, fried triangular pockets filled with meat and spices), and chicken tikka masala (chicken in a rich red sauce). When the food came, I threw a napkin on my lap, pulled back my hair, and crammed as much curry down my esophagus as humanly possible. To say that I liked it would be an understatement. “Um, Indian food is everything,” I texted Shelley.