The Bling Ring (16 page)

In the 1950s, with the publication of
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951), Holden Caulfield unseated Huckleberry Finn as the quintessential American boy: Huck was an adventurous innocent, vulgar and rough but fundamentally good; Holden was louche, morally flexible, a charming depressive—and a rich kid. But he was essentially cynical on the matter of his privilege. In fact, what seemed to be at the root of his discontent was his sense of coming from an elite class full of “phonies” and “crooks.”
Rebel Without a Cause
(1955) continued on the theme, with its well-off suburban teens acting out against their parents' hypocrisy and materialism. “Don't I buy you everything you want? A bicycle? . . . A car?” Jim Backus, as James Dean's father, demands plaintively of his rebellious son, who tries to make his family understand: “You're tearing me apart!”

As the country grew more affluent during the post-war boom, the youth of the 1960s channeled their rebelliousness into a rejection of materialism in favor of making “love, not war.” Civil rights, women's rights, and protesting the war in Vietnam were their passions—not shopping. Revisionist historians have liked to minimize the impact of 1960s activism, but Nixon himself admitted after leaving office that student protests had influenced his decision to withdraw troops from Indochina. “Young people were at the cutting edge of cultural and social change,” writes Steven Mintz. “Their protests and actions transformed not only their sense of self, but the very character of American culture.” In the 1970s, punk rock hardened the 1960s' message, pushing antiestablishmentarianism toward the edge of a nihilism brought on by what was seen as a lack of any real systemic change. The national hysteria over hippies and punks alike fell right in line with Puritan minister Ezekiel Rogers' admonition of 1657: “I find great Trouble and Grief about the Rising Generation. Young People are stirred here [in the colonies]; but they strengthen one another in Evil, by Example, by Counsel.”

And then something different happened. In the 1980s and '90s, more so than at any other time in American history, youth culture wasn't challenging the status quo. Young people didn't want to change the system—they wanted to game the system. They wanted money. The pursuit of the almighty dollar had always been the purview of soulless grown-ups and parents, but now kids—certainly not all kids, but youth culture overall—were promoting the idea that “getting paid” was cool.

The goal wasn't the traditional sort of American success popularized by Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick stories of the 19th century, where a boy would go from rags to riches through hard work and ingenuity. The goal was success that came from the ruthless pursuit of money for its own sake—in fact, often the more ruthless the pursuit, the cooler it was thought to be. I first noticed this trend being expressed in
Risky Business
(1983), in which Tom Cruise plays a cynical rich kid who gets into Princeton after entertaining the school's college admissions officer with the prostitutes Cruise is pimping out of his parents' home while they're away on vacation. This was a big switch from Dustin Hoffman's disaffected college graduate in
The Graduate
(1967) who's repulsed by his society's materialism (in a famous moment a friend of the family encourages him to consider a future in “plastics”) and the moral dysfunction of his parents' generation. At a reading in 1997, I met the late Budd Schulberg, author of the classic novel
What Makes Sammy Run?
(1941), about an unprincipled Hollywood hustler named Sammy Glick. Schulberg told me that while his book was once understood to be a dark portrait of a despicable young man and the hollowness of success achieved through dishonest means, young people now approached him saying, “Sammy's my idol! Sammy's my Bible!”

Just as it had once been considered the thing to do to “drop out,” in the 1980s, the thing to do was to join the club. “Wall Street seemed very much like the place to be at the time,” wrote Michael Lewis in
Liar's Poker
, of going for a job at Salomon Brothers upon graduating from college in 1984. “I was frightened to miss the express bus on which everyone I knew seemed to have a reserve seat, for fear that there would be no other.”

But it wasn't just privileged white boys from Princeton who wanted a seat on the money train. It was kids from the ghetto as well. “I want money like Cosby who wouldn't,” Jay-Z rapped in “Dead Presidents, Part 1” (1996). Hip-hop music, which started out socially conscious and politically radical,
¹²
became about gangsterism, robbing, drug dealing, and making money by any means necessary (“Gimme the Loot,” said the Notorious B.I.G. in 1994). There was necessarily something subversive about young black men from the projects exalting in their wealth—in a country with a history of slavery, segregation, and persistent racism, it was triumphant (“Money, power, respect” said the LOX in 1998). When Puff Daddy appeared on the cover of
Fortune
in 1998, it was a crossover moment of significant proportions. But that was just it—it was about joining the establishment, not fighting it.

In 1998, I did a story for
New York
my editor headlined “Make Moves, Blow Up, Get Paid,” after a quote from one of the sources, about New York kids who were eschewing college in favor of going out in the world so they could make money immediately. Their dreams were tied to getting famous—through acting, modeling, rapping, fashion designing, screenwriting—but their ultimate goal was getting rich. And they idolized Puff Daddy for his brand of branding. “Puffy is a genius,” Paris Hilton told the
New York Times
in 2005, discussing her inspiration as a businesswoman. “He does everything. Music. Clothing. I totally look up to him and Donald Trump because he's built this whole empire—hotels, casinos, resorts, a television show.”

Bobby Kennedy was gone; and Donald Trump was a new hero. One of the kids I interviewed for another story in the 1990s told me of his admiration for Michael Milken, the “Junk Bond King,” who went to prison in 1990 for securities and tax violations. “He basically got off, considering what he really did,” the kid said approvingly, referring to how Milken had escaped convictions of racketeering or insider trading. “He's a gangster.” The “prep school gangsters” I followed around in those days ran in neighborhood gangs with names that expressed their devotion to self-interest through criminality: Out For Self (OFS), Who's King Now (WKN). “Somehow we became like movie stars,” one gang member told me. “We're like gods to kids.” They were a legend in their own minds, for sure, but they were also the products of their parents, who included wealthy bankers, a media mogul, a famous actor, and a member of the Mafia.

By the 1980s, kids were looking around at a country where lawbreaking and lawlessness were no longer conditions of poverty and life in the inner city alone. Now these were omnipresent aspects of American business, politics, and the media at the highest levels. “There were no rules governing the pursuit of profit and glory,” Michael Lewis wrote of the culture of Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. “The place was governed by the simple understanding that the unbridled pursuit of perceived self-interest was healthy. Eat or be eaten.”

“Today,” writes Glenn Greenwald in
With Liberty and Justice for Some
(2011), “in a radical and momentous shift, the American political class and its media increasingly repudiate the principle that the law must be equally applied to all.” It gives one pause to consider what the Founding Fathers would have thought of the pardoning of Nixon after the Watergate scandal; the overturning of the convictions of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and former National Security Advisor John Poindexter after the Iran-Contra scandal; or the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping, politicized prosecutions, torture, and “black sites”—for which no one was ever prosecuted. Every step along the way has been an even bigger departure from the insistence of the framers of the Constitution that in a democracy everyone must be equal before the law. Meanwhile, Greenwald laments, “the media [directs] its hostility almost exclusively toward those who investigated or attempted to hold accountable the most powerful members of our political system.”

And then there was the financial meltdown of 2008 that brought the world economy to its knees. While its causes have barely been investigated or made transparent, it has become sufficiently clear that the crisis was largely the outcome of widespread fraud and lawbreaking. Yet there has been virtually no prosecution of those responsible. “There is no fear of individual punishment,”
Rolling Stone
's Matt Taibbi said in an interview in 2012. “That's the problem.”

So why did Rachel Lee think she could get away with stealing celebrities' clothes? Maybe Vince was right, after all: 'Cause she hadn't been caught. Yet.

5

In the first two weeks of May 2009, the Bling Ring burglarized Rachel Bilson's house five times. They went back again and again, trying on her clothes, picking out clothes, looking through her things. They put on her makeup and examined her jewelry. They went “shopping” and then decided they wanted to go shopping again. “Ms. Bilson was probably the most emblematic of how this group typically worked,” Officer Brett Goodkin told the Grand Jury on June 22, 2010, “where the accomplice,” allegedly Lee, “identified [Bilson] as a target and Mr. Prugo went to work and they committed numerous burglaries all within an approximate two- to three-week period.”

By now, they had gotten it down. Rachel picked Bilson as the next victim on her list, Nick said. “She loved her clothes.” Like so many young actresses today, Bilson, then 27, was admired as much for her fashion sense as for her work. She appeared at entertainment and fashion industry events in an array of dazzling gowns and around L.A. in unfailingly eye-catching ensembles. She was the object of many a “style crush” among young women and girls. She had a vintage, boho style which she told reporters was inspired by Diane Keaton and Kate Moss. In 2008, she worked with DKNY Jeans to create the junior sportswear line Edie Rose.

Ever since the fashion world success of Paris Hilton, P. Diddy, Jennifer Lopez, and other celebrities, having a clothing line—one of the potentially most lucrative franchise opportunities for a personal brand—has become de rigueur for starlets and reality stars alike. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Jessica Simpson, Nicole Richie, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Lauren Conrad, Selena Gomez, Mandy Moore, Kelly Osbourne, Hillary Duff, Whitney Port, and Avril Lavigne, all have had lines, to name a few. In 2010,
Women's Wear Daily
reported that The Jessica Simpson Collection had become the first celebrity clothing line to top a billion dollars in retail sales. Simpson's reality and fashion stardom would seem to suggest her as an object of Bling Ring interest; but they never targeted her. “Rachel would never, like, carry a handbag that wasn't made of real leather,” said Nick, referring to Simpson's more downscale merchandise.

Rachel Bilson, on the other hand, offered Rachel Lee a whole sleek package of things Lee admired: she was beautiful, stylish, famous, rich, designed for Donna Karan—plus they had the same name. “Rachel-Rachel,” Nick said. “Rachel identified with her.” Both Rachels were from the Valley. Bilson was raised in Sherman Oaks. Her mother Janice was a sex therapist, her father Danny Bilson a Hollywood writer, director, and producer. Her great-grandfather ran the trailer department at RKO, and her grandfather was a director on 1960s sitcoms such as
Get Smart
and
Hogan's Heroes.
So if she wasn't quite Hollywood royalty, she was landed gentry.

Nick did the research. He found out the location of Bilson's four-bedroom, 3,662-square-foot home in Los Feliz, an L.A. neighborhood popular with Young Hollywood. Bilson had purchased the white Spanish-style house for $1.88 million in 2006, three years into her role as Summer Roberts, the unashamedly shallow rich girl on
The O.C.
(2003–2007). When the Bling Ring kids were robbing Bilson, they were also robbing Summer—which for them, it seemed, was a form of flattery as much as it was a crime; the character was the embodiment of the sarcastic, slack-mouthed, eye-rolling mode of discourse (“Seriously?”) so prevalent now among teenaged girls on television and, consequently, in real life. Summer's catty dialogue included the phrases “Ew,” and “Random,” “Ew. Random,” and these bon mots:

“I suffer from rage blackouts.”

“I guess I really will end up bitter and alone.”

“I'm gonna study this thing so hard I'm even gonna out-Jew you.”

“Way to go, Wonder Whore.”

And this exchange:

Summer: “My dad [a plastic surgeon] says chins are the new noses.”

Anna [a friend]: “Picasso thought so, too.”

Summer: “Really? What hospital does he work at? Kidding! I'm not that dumb. Just shallow!”

Summer sounded a lot like a reality show star named Paris Hilton. The acerbic attitude of
The O.C.
was catnip to teens seeking validation for their desire to appear cynical and rude—just like a spoiled rich girl. And
The O.C.
had romance, nerd-bitch romance. Bilson's on and off-screen entanglement with Adam Brody, who played the adorkable Seth Cohen, had been a big deal for 15-year-olds when Rachel Lee was 15. Summer was a girl who could handle herself, once telling a presumptuous suitor, “I'm not gonna be your sloppy seconds, assface.” Not exactly Elizabeth Bennet putting Mr. Darcy in his place in
Pride and Prejudice
but critics hailed the show as “clever” anyway.

But in real life—not the fake reality of
The O.C.
's simulated reality TV moments—Bilson was a girl who'd had problems of her own. During a self-described “rebellious, self-destructive period” in her teens, when she was “hanging out with people she shouldn't have” and dating a bad boy, she was in a serious car accident, a head-on collision which left her in a coma for days, and from which she still suffered migraines and memory loss. Another passenger in the car became paralyzed. (Bilson was not driving.) Because of the experience, she told reporters, she “changed” and “[went] in a different direction,” becoming an actress. She dropped out of Grossmont College, in El Cajon, California, after a year and made her screen debut in 2003, appearing in an episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(1997–2003).