Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (30 page)

Mr. Mavety was sweating over his decision to greenlight my publication.

“One could lose a million dollars publishing a teen magazine,” he told me flatly. “But I don’t intend to do that. Make the next one work.”

Worried that I might’ve been deviating too far from a sales formula to which I was not yet privy, I decided I needed to stress the biggest acts of the day, even if I couldn’t get them to talk to me. A third cover, plastered with unseen-in-the-U.S. photos of the Backstreet Boys I’d hunted down in Singapore thanks to a Madonna-obsessed colleague who ran that country’s pop bible,
Max
, was a big hit.

Was I sexual?
Yeahhh.

Speaking of sexuality, it was always a trick interviewing boy bands since almost every one of them had at least one gay member. As an out gay man, I felt queasy asking gender-specific questions, wondering if I were causing angst and shame. Talking to the massively popular (just not in the U.S., where the mag was, y’know, published) Irish group Boyzone, I zeroed in on cute Stephen Gately and asked him to rank his bandmates from best-looking to worst. It would’ve been a funny, blow-off question if he hadn’t been closeted, a factoid not readily available in their official book or on their Web site.

“Em, I dunno,” he replied, fidgeting. “That’s not a question for me to answer. I mean, I’m sure you could ask the other guys. Usually some people say me.” I then asked what fans should think now that he was the last unattached member of the band since the others all had girlfriends and lead singer Ronan had even gotten married. “When I meet the right girl, I’ll know. I’m only 22. There’s still a lot that I want to do, a lot that I want to achieve.” A year later, he came out as gay, a remarkably bold move for a boy born into poverty whose livelihood was earned off the heart palpitations of little lovestruck girls.

He went on to have a short, successful career in music and on the stage, tragically dying of a congenital heart defect 10 years later.

It was around this time that I first encountered a young lady named Britney Spears. I was sent a ridiculous press release from her first of many PR firms that started with, “Britney Spears enjoys being a girl.” She was being hyped since she was a tourmate of *NSYNC, who were tearin’ up the charts in the wake of a huge error the Backstreet Boys had made—BSB turned down a
Disney Channel In Concert
special, opening the door for the boy bands’ shared manager, Lou Pearlman, to substitute *NSYNC for the gig. The cuter, bendier *NSYNC snatched a huge percentage of BSB’s fans, inciting a Hatfield vs. McCoys-style war—girls were not supposed to like both. Britney was aligned with *NSYNC and sleeping with its lead singer, Justin Timberlake, and doing a lot of other things she wasn’t supposed to, but she was marketed as a wholesome Louisiana girl oblivious to her sexiness.

After meeting her at a luncheon at which Britney buzzed from one tableful of teen eds to the next, I went to the offices of her record label, Jive, and sat across from Britney at a conference table for our first interview. She wanted to know if I would come see her perform at Macy’s (I lied and said I wouldn’t miss it), confessed she hoped to model her career after Jennifer Love Hewitt’s, and her eyes popped when I asked her if she liked to dance. How could I have known I was talking to a girl who would soon take the python polka to iconic new heights?

She couldn’t have been nicer or bubblier. I transcribed every “like” and “um” and printed the interview verbatim, which her people didn’t like because it made her sound like an idiot.

“It’s just, I don’t know, they’ve been, like, really
hyping it up
and, like, I mean, it makes me feel really good. But then again, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!’”

I, like,
liked
that it was 100% real.

They also weren’t thrilled when I came across images of Britney drinking and making out with her first cousin and printed them (minus the cousin kiss), even though I asserted in the captions that she was just drinking “Soda Pop”. I did, however, print a refutation regarding her rather obvious breast implants—she went in for knee surgery and came out with
Juggs
-ready jugs, but the 16-year-old denied she’d gotten a boob job. An editor at a fashiony teen mag told her colleagues that Britney was physically mashing her new implants around and into place during their cover shoot, but my magazine dutifully went along with the partygirl line—that she was simply growing up.

Britney’s first album debuted at #1, so it was a long time before we got her again. In fact, I wasn’t given access to the pop princess again until 2003, when she had a lot riding on her
In the Zone
album doing well. It had taken forever, but it was quite a nice invite I received—all the teenybopper editors were allowed to meet with her at the Chateau Marmont, a hotel at which you might one day not be shocked to hear her body had recently been found, for one-on-one interviews. I seized the moment, having a trophy made (she’d won a slew of reader’s favorite awards) and buying her a cute necklace from Girlshop. We’d been told no photos at all would be allowed, but because our photo would be of increasingly passé Britney posing with an award, I got it cleared.

First, we were plunked onto sofas that had cost more than I spent on an entire issue of my magazine, and forced to listen to a bunch of pre-release songs from
In the Zone
. To this day I would swear we heard a couple that have never surfaced, but I was really into “Breathe On Me”, even if Britney always seemed about as literally sexual to me as one of those dolls kids point to after they’ve been touched inappropriately.

Then, one by one, we were put into a hotel room with the star while our peers cooled their heels on the terrace. It was maddening because we could all watch each other’s animated conversations with Britney, but were left to wonder what the others were asking her. Would we be repeating questions? Did somebody else think of just the right question to ask in order to get the juiciest reply? Would she be a zombie by the end of it?

My interview with her was great; before her breakdown, she was always good at shoveling out the kinds of answers teen magazines want. When I gave her the gift, she gasped girlishly, then looked at me with Bambi eyes, “Thaaank yooou,” she murmured, hugging me stiffly. She also happily posed for a snap of me handing her the award, which became my only Britney pic-with.

As much as I detest Britney as an artist (I don’t know if I could even locate a gay man in his thirties or twenties who doesn’t think she is some kind of amazing force of nature), she knew how to be professionally sweet and engaging, even if the toll it was taking on her would not be evident for a while. So even as an anti-fan, I was psyched to have the access and get the photo.

Working for a celebrity magazine is all about validation. They fawn when you say “yes,” then they say “no” until you hate them, then the next “yes” makes
you
fawn over
them
.

It’s warped, but the best teen editors are the ones who actually care if Britney Spears hugs them.

One surefire way to know if a star were in danger of being over was when someone who’d always been out of reach for our magazine in the past suddenly became available. Britney bounced back (and then some), but it didn’t look good when Joey McIntyre willingly stripped to the waist in front of us at his solo shoot, or when Ben Savage showed up and blabbed all about his private life (his show
Boy Meets World
was cancelled shortly thereafter). We found out a black girl group member was pregnant after she’d talked to us. When I heard, I put it into our gossip section, which a staffer helpfully pointed out was a bad decision. I yanked it before publication. Good thing, because she was “no longer pregnant” by the time the magazine hit the newsstands.

Even though my being so early on trends and stars could hurt the magazine’s sales, I still made it my business to be first. I was first with “First!”

Even if I could be a few issues too soon on burgeoning popstars, by supporting them when they needed it, that ensured they’d be eternally grateful to me. Or at least grateful for a little longer after they became famous, before forgetting who I was.

Lou Pearlman, the boy-band impresario behind *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys never forgot who I was. He loved my magazine as much as any other teenage girl, and called me up often to keep me apprised of his new acts. I thought this was money in the bank, even though he seemed strangely impotent when it came to getting his most successful acts’ publicists to return my calls. In trusting his reputation for minting popstars, I covered in the magazine a lot of his bands that never really took off.

Lou was once quoted as saying, “As long as God keeps making little girls, there will be boy bands.” But that doesn’t mean they’ll all be able to pay their rent. The quote should’ve been, “As long as God keeps making little girls, I’ll keep making little boys perform for them.” And he did.

One of the only real favors Lou ever did for me was he granted my magazine the exclusive to announce—on the cover—the winners of his pioneering reality series
Making the Band
. The show had pitted bunches of Orlando-based wannabes against each other for the privilege of being stuck into a boy band together at the end. The band’s name, like the nickname for the city in which they were created, was to be O-Town. Their first song? “Liquid Dreams”…and what little girl doesn’t want to know her favorite guy group is creaming their sweat shorts at night fantasizing about her? In order to get the scoop, my staff would join all of our rival teen mags in Orlando to interview the new band, but only my magazine would be allowed to shoot them in a sealed-off area of the hotel. Then, we’d rush out a cover story. Exclusivity is the lifeblood of the teen market, and it can be a wonderful high—somewhere between Cronuts and meth—when your competition is having reverse liquid dreams at having been beaten to the punch.

I really loved his boy band Take 5 (he did, too, according to an unsavory
Vanity Fair
story that came out following his arrest for running a Ponzi scheme). It boasted a pair of wholesome Midwest brothers, a bayou babe, a little dynamo who had been a
Star Search
winner, and an incredibly good-looking lead singer who’d been a model and who, as the lead singer, was about to be a model of a different sort again. Lou loved to take his boys on the road, make them a hit elsewhere, then bring them to the U.S. with all of that—in reality—meaningless success backing them up. They boys were received well in Asia, so why not here? Take 5 would be around on the same O-Town junket.

As I was about to fly to the junket, where I was supposed to spend time with O-Town, Take 5, Innosense (a girl group managed by Justin Timberlake’s mom, which had originally boasted Britney Spears as a member, and which also contained a member who took Justin Timberlake’s cherry before Britney had a chance), and several other bubbling-under acts, my knee exploded in pain and puffed up. My gay doctor, who was convinced all gay men were sleep-arounds (we are), said, “Swollen knee—could be gonorrhea.” Of course it wasn’t and was probably due in part to the fact that I’d ballooned up thanks to working in porn with penises I couldn’t touch everywhere in sight and then in teen publishing with skinny 18-year-old boys I couldn’t measure up to. I had somehow injured the joint and had water on my knee. He inserted a needle that was longer than the careers of most of Lou’s bands and withdrew the offending juice, but I was left incapable of walking. I was in my twenties, morbidly obese, and seated in a wheelchair on that fateful trip, during which I was surrounded by physically perfect, happy, healthy kids. I felt like Lou, who while only in his forties, read as far older.

Lou was actually very nice to me, but anyone thinking it unkind that I not return the favor now should remember that when it was revealed he had been running a Ponzi scheme, that meant all of his kindnesses—taking us out to dinner with random groups including Kenny Rogers’s wife, Lou’s dentist, various 17-year-old boys with hungry looks in their eyes—were paid for by money he was remorselessly stealing. We were not buddies, he just saw me as a person with control over a magazine, and I just saw him as a person with control over the people I wanted to put into that magazine.

Lou was from Queens. In a way, he was another devotee of the beautiful—Lou of New York—but one whose admiration wasn’t respectful.

The weirdest thing about Lou was that he behaved as if he were a regular straight dude, and as if everyone in Orlando and the industry didn’t assume he was gay. I honestly don’t think he was the type of professionally closeted man who would keep it on the DL out and about, then let his hair down with close friends—my impression was that if he ever had any interactions in which his potential homosexuality was made clear, they were strictly of the variety that two people share naked. For example, Lou knew I was openly gay, but the closest he ever got to touching on the subject was when he sidled up to me at a strip mall where his latest boy band Natural was doing an autograph signing at a Claire’s, and awkwardly invited me to come see the Chippendales show—turns out he was the owner of the brand at the time. I couldn’t picture being like him, one of the only men there and pretending I was viewing it dispassionately, so I declined. Another time, after we’d shot O-Town in L.A. and were all in a car—me, him, one of his PR hired hands, a couple of others—Lou began telling a story about his “girlfriend.” The air vanished from the car as everyone struggled not to react. It was borderline ridiculous, but he was serious—for a clean-shaven fellow, he never went anywhere without a beard.