Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (32 page)

As much as I liked Susan, I knew we’d never stay pals. For one thing, she was a diehard right-winger. One of the Bush girls had babysat the Duff girls, and Susan had Clinton Derangement Syndrome. She took me to breakfast once (we both liked to eat) and told me that Hillary Clinton must have murdered Vince Foster because he’d been found in a locked room with no weapon. Which wasn’t true. Also, she was—like most stage moms—single-minded when it came to advancing her daughters’ careers, so it was only a matter of time before Hilary’s star power meant she was too big for the magazine that had first put her on the cover. To be fair, Hilary’s appeal was on the wane (naturally aging out) when it happened, but Susan did eventually pull her from my orbit, and did the same to my photographers, who had become friends of the family. No hard feelings, though—Hilary was a very talented and tenacious young woman to cover and she was there when we needed her, and I’d love to read her mom’s memoir. Ultimately, it was a joy to work with her and her mom and her sister.

Lindsay was another story.

In one of her interviews, Lindsay—who was the most inappropriately, delightfully open of interview subjects after Miley Cyrus—said, “A lot of mothers get overly involved with their kids and it’s kind of intimidating. Luckily, my mom’s not like that at
all
…she was a Rockette dancer before. She’s only 39 years old now!” Her mom also told me at an L.A. shoot that her daughter wasn’t like all the others, who were into the party scene and dating around. It was like Opposite World with the Lohans. You knew things were heading in the wrong territory when she went from calling herself “LOW-han” to insisting it be pronounced “LOW-in.” (BTW, Hayden Panettiere’s name used to be pronounced Hayden “Panna-TEERY.”)

Lindsay was the best actress. Loved her in all her movies. She was a knock-out. Loved all of her photo shoots. But she was messed up even as a teen. For my first major shoot with her, I hired a classy photographer and rented a big studio and her entire, obscenely priced glam squad. She showed up jittery, immediately picking up a white Styrofoam cup filled with cream and upending it all over herself.

“Oh, my GOD!” she exclaimed. “I thought it was empty because it’s white.”
After demanding that we go and get her a very specific, hoity-toity sandwich which was being made exclusively in Soho, she enlisted the aid of her entourage to wall off a corner of the studio for her to get made up and have her hair done…and do anything else she wished to do in private.

During the shoot, she vamped like she was posing for
Maxim
, catching my eye and playfully, saying, “You look like you’re thinking, ‘Uh-oh!’” I wasn’t; most teen editors stress about inappropriate images, I just let them happen and choose around them. Then the shooter, who usually retains all rights after first publication, has fantastic and racy shots to sell for zillions to other sources. That way, I didn’t have to pay them as much. One second-rights set of photos of the
High School Musical
cast sold for nearly $100,000. Imagine making that for an afternoon?

Lindsay was really into pushing the boundaries. When we’d interviewed her for
Freaky Friday
, she’d asked, “Oh, have you met The Chad yet?” We assumed this was a showbizzy nickname for co-star Chad Michael Murray, which poked fun at his ego, but I was later told it was what she called his penis as well.

The funniest story in my old mag about Lindsay was the one that appeared in the issue on which Lindsay had the cover and her momentary best bud Raven-Symoné had the flip cover (an upside-down cover on the back). Raven was all excited about the fact that she and Lindsay were becoming “bi-coastal” roomies in a “bachelorette pad.” But Lindsay never stayed a night in the apartment. I loved Raven, but she could be a little odd, too; her phoners were sometimes whispered like she was giving them from inside a closet with “Michael Myers” hovering nearby. She actually
was
in the closet, which explains why she really chose her words carefully about why she didn’t date in high school. She had a domineering dad who got on her about her weight in front of our photographers, which I personally would have found more distressing than either lesbianism or being subjected to friendship with Lindsay Lohan.

As our magazine became more and more successful, the deep-pocketed new owner paid for a private jet to whisk Aaron Carter and his twin sister Angel to a resort he owned in Turks and Caicos. Big mistake on my part. It was an idyllic setting, but Aaron—in spite of being one of the more popular hotties at that point—was no Justin Timberlake or Zac Efron. The oddest part was his mom and dad were on the trip, too, and even though he was 14 years old and extremely exhibitionistic, having been raised posing in swimming pools to promote his music for the German media (which ran soap operatic spreads showing naked minors miming sex), they just handed him over to the photographer and me and said, “Do whatever you want.”

Luckily, both Tony and I are trustworthy. The shots were beautiful—probably the best Aaron ever posed for—and capture him young and healthy and in paradise with his sister. I’ve since had offers of thousands of dollars to sell copies to his adult male fans, including one who impersonated Aaron on Facebook.

Everything came to a head in 2006. We’d laid the groundwork by hyping Zac Efron since our December 2004 issue, so by the time he was making
High School Musical
in Utah, we were the only teen mag on the set. By then, my assistant editor was an overwhelmingly overqualified journalist who’d toiled in all aspects of media and wanted to work her way up in the world of magazine publishing. She got the story and we were the first to run Zac on our cover. We loved him and he loved us, and suddenly, our little “mascot” turned into the #1 draw in the teen world since launch.

That same editor, who worked with me for years, became a pain in the ass. She was smart but to the point where she always let you know she knew better. She would passive-aggressively communicate that through withering questions. She was too young for it, but acted motherly toward a lot of the talent, worrying that we were somehow exploiting them if we didn’t do things her way. She was very assertive as to how things should be done in general, attempting to make me feel like an amateur at every turn. It was unbearable. We had friction. But in the end, she accepted a job offer from our biggest rival, thanks to a phone call made to her in the office while I was there—so I felt like that was the best answer to all of her posturing as the most ethical person in the room. Her entire career has been in progressively gossipier magazines, so there goes that concern for exploitation.

All that said, as much as I resented her and as inexcusable as it was that she tried to warn her successor Christina that I was a terrible person to work for (didn’t work and we became fast friends), I do still have a lot of respect for her writing ability and her wide range of knowledge in the field of publishing. Our personalities mixed about as well as Hilary and Lindsay, but she was still a plus for the mag.

I only ever picked one employee who was a fucking dud, and she was such a waste of space she isn’t worth wasting space on here, except to note that she asked on her first day if she could come in at 10 a.m. instead of 9 a.m. going forward, spent her time taking pictures of herself using her computer and being too chummy with the talent (I actually received a complaint), and left lots of her belongings in the office when she eventually quit. Her computer was choked with thousands of selfies when we went through it, plus a bonus picture of her boyfriend’s bare butt.

The end.

Along with Zac and the whole
High School Musical
cast, the Jonas Brothers and
Hannah Montana
heated up that same year. I’d ordered the first shoot that the “Jonai” (as we called them) ever did for teen press the previous year, an event their dad later told me was “a big deal” and made them feel like they’d arrived. I loved those kids. They were so bright and full of personality—Nick was the little musical genius who, since he was so damn young, didn’t at first camouflage his initial resentment for having to carry his brothers, who in turn had to carry him since they were the right age for fans to dream of dating; Joe was an adorable and hilarious cut-up who marched to his own drummer and who probably fell more often than he should’ve; and Kevin was the perfect little publicist, who made sure he and his bros were sending thank-you notes, answering MySpace messages, making teen editors feel special, and giving their all to photo shoots.

My readers fell hard for the Jonas Brothers, who had a perfect mix of goofiness, cuteness, and religiosity. They even wore purity rings proclaiming their intention to save themselves until marriage, and not just as a publicity stunt. When Kevin’s disappeared and they were asked where it was, the accidentally classic line, “Kevin lost it in the Bahamas!” was born. Plus they had killer butts stuffed into girl jeans.

Their dad was their manager, but unlike so many other parents who filled that role, I think he did everything right (I’ll await the boys’ eventual autobiographies to see if my hunch is correct), up to and including allowing them to take a break and to eventually break up as a band in order to pursue their own, non-purity-related solo projects. Those boys gave a lot to my magazine, well past the point when they could have instead been standoffish A-holes. I even saw an all-grown-up Nick at one of those abs-baring club events in NYC in 2014 and he gave me a muscly hug and we chatted. It’s just crazy that he was such a fetus when I started working with him, and he’s now an adult man. Time flies when you’re being famous.

Miley was someone we ran early, but I can’t take credit. Signed to her own Disney Channel series, she was a superstar even on paper: Daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, country girl, show about a famous popstar posing as a normal girl. Her impending success was written quite clearly in the stars. When I first met her, she had honest-to-God pigtails. She was always talkative, airing the dirty laundry of her various feuds with people like Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez (a snippet of an audio interview I did with her in 2008 has 14 million views and counting on YouTube) and giving every press opportunity her undivided attention. She was famously miserable in her omnipresent blonde wig, but it never showed when the cameras were around. I worked closely with her team, plugging a Web site called MileyWorld often. In light of Miley’s career path, I have to laugh thinking back to the time when Vanessa Hudgens was suffering a nude selfie scandal and a man who worked with Miley sniffed that he would be embarrassed to be associated with that “trashy” Vanessa Hudgens. Fact is, Miley really looked up to Vanessa, so it’s not a shocker that it didn’t take long for Miley to engage in her own scandals. We’d heard that Miley and Vanessa’s little sister Stella had mischievously stolen a peek at Vanessa’s cell and gotten the surprise of their lives, learning a major personal secret of Vanessa’s that would’ve been far more damaging than the already pretty alarming naked selfies.

When I met Demi and Selena on the Puerto Rico set of their Disney Channel Original Movie
Princess Protection Program
, I fell in love with their cute personalities. Both were in prom gowns for their roles and raved about their status as BFFs. I began telling my staffers—by now, my editorial dream staff of Christina and Dory was in place, that they were going to love these girls, too. Not long after, Demi agreed to do a photo shoot for us. I was out of town, but having just met her, I had no qualms about leaving her alone with those smart, professional, engaging young women. But just as had Eden’s Crush before her, Demi had my employees almost in tears over her inexplicably unpleasant behavior. She spent the entire shoot with a sour expression on her face, to the point where her smile, usually so tight the insides of her mouth squished out between her teeth, looked like it was mocking everything around her. They were almost unusable. Sullen and nasty, she wrapped by telling the girls, “Sorry, I’m going through something.”

“Photoshop my thick legs,” she demanded during one shoot, which happened the day after she and Joe Jonas broke up. We always had good timing with that girl.

As we later found out about her, she was going through a lot of things, some of which she actually admitted to publicly. I was glad to read that rehab had saved her. She later became an empowering advocate for embracing your curves. I’m telling you—I was always a little too early.

The best was yet to come with the rise of
Twilight
in 2009. As with
High School Musical
, we’d been the only teen-entertainment mag on set—the publicists had to twist my arm to allow a writer to be flown in, even though it was all-expenses-pad, because the book sounded really grown-up for my 8- to 13-year-old readers. “It’s a phenomenon!” she insisted. Most publicists believe their clients deserve carpet-bombing coverage in every publication as if we’re a public service, so that didn’t move me. “Look up all the actors on Yahoo!…they’re trending and nobody even knows who they are!” I’m nothing if not fair. I looked them up, they were all trending, and I authorized my beloved West Coast freelancer Cheryl to make the trip.

It was a cold, rainy set and Cheryl couldn’t have cared less about being on it (she later became a massive
Twilight
fan—what better way to make your fellow fanatics jealous than mentioning you were on the original film’s actual set?), but she always knew how to get good stuff. By then, our main goal was to get fun video—my magazine wasn’t the #1 teen mag, but we had far and away the #1 social media of any teen mag, including a profitable, monetized YouTube account. Things went from bad to worse to worst when Cheryl finally got to talk to stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart. Pattinson seemed embarrassed to speak on camera to a teen mag. Perhaps because he was a grown-ass man. But Stewart was the real pill. When it was time to wish our publication a happy birthday, she sneered it out, failing to conceal (isn’t she an actress?) her contempt for being made to do something she felt was foolish. Too bad there’s no rehab for
bitch.