Oprah At the Grownups' Table
Sep. 24th, 2007 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraHopped on my bike and cranked out 12 miles yesterday.
Also labeled the chile light covers "chile light covers" in the hopes this would dissuade casual Little Store browsers from trying to eat them.
Also watched the first two hours of Ken Burns' The War, which I liked very much.
It was just a gorgeous day as almost every day in these parts has been recently. The dense fog that usually characterizes this area has been pretty much a no show for months. Global warming? The next ice age? Dunno.
What I do know is that I'm very out of shape.
###
The point of all celebrity journalism – I suppose what we were doing was journalism – is to convince consumers that the world is one big fabulous party to which they'll never be invited.
Never! Not in a million years.
Well. Maybe. If they buy the right designer mascara.
My official title at the Planet Hollywood function was Celebrity Handler. That meant I was supposed to approach the various celebrities and entice them back to the People Online tent where they would be photographed standing next to a computer and then debriefed by a typist for the edification of the masses who presumably had nothing better to do on a Friday night than languish in front of their monitors.
There were a lot of celebrities there. I can no longer remember who most of them were. It took me a little while to catch on that despite this huge party infrastructure, nobody was having a particularly good time. It was all being staged for the benefit of ABC, which was doing an hour long special. Elton John played exactly three songs; Chuck Berry ditto. Finally Bruce Willis climbed on the stage. I do remember thinking Bruce Willis had to be the most obnoxious human on the planet not currently in electoral office.
I also remember thinking that Hollywood had apparently never heard of affirmative action. They had Wesley Snipes, Danny Glover and assorted Black People all sitting at the same table around which a parade of silicon and blonde hair falls looped endlessly.
Oprah, by the way, sat with the white folk.
At 10:00pm precisely, the party ended. Exactly as though somebody had pulled the plug: Pouf! The klieg lights went off.
I had some modest success. Geena Davis. A very drunk and pathetic Kelsey Grammar whose own handler was a hard-as-nails blonde whose silicon outcrops were so hard and peaked, they could have been carved into presidential profiles. Some Party of Five cast members.
Drew Carey was the one guy who insisted on doing his own typing.
"Sure," he said when Hala asked. "I go online all the time. You know, surveillance missions. To talk to fans, see what works, what doesn't."
Drew Carey was Hala's dream come true.
###
Until just a few years ago the Planet Hollywood site People Online put up to celebrate the opening was still extant though buried deep beneath AOL/People's cheery interface. All gone now. Now all that remains is the spam I cross-posted to a hundred Usenet newsgroups:
WWW> PEOPLE Parties At...Planet Hollywood
*** From Net-Happenings Moderator ***
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 1995 19:53:56 -0500
From: pdil@pathfinder.com
http://www.pathfinder.com/people/planethollywood/planethome.html
Everybody loves a party! Everybody loves Hollywood! And everybody
loves our planet! So why not combine the three? That's what PEOPLE
Magazine has done with our Virtual Party site featuring (among other goodies) a tour of cyber-Planet Hollywood, movie star trivia games, electronic postcards, an online scavenger hunt, and exclusive reportage of the celebrity-studded opening of LA's first Planet.
Despite my optimistic shilling, the site was a huge failure. A huge, expensive failure.
This didn't endear Hala to the Time Inc corporate masters, and one wonders whether senior executive Don Logan didn't have Planet Hollywood in mind when six weeks later he famously compared Pathfinder to a black hole in space – a black hole that hemorrhaged money.
Hala's commercial instincts were rarely off. But often her timing was, certainly in this instance. Three years into the future she would have been able to pitch this to the Planet Hollywood guys as a co-branded deal, shifting much if not all of the cost to their pockets. (Although come to think of it, three years into the future Planet Hollywood itself was going bankrupt. So maybe not.)
But the pipes weren't there yet. Also the Internet was still the media of choice for the cognoscenti, people whose interest in pop culture was purely ironic.
Hala lasted another year or so.
But the handwriting was on the wall.
###
The last time I saw Hala was in 2001.
My mother had just died.
My mother had left an awfully eccentric last request, which was to scatter her ashes at the precise intersection of 72nd street and Riverside Drive in NYC. This, of course, was completely illegal, violating not only the local litter ordinances but also a public health statute stipulating the disposal of human remains, so I deviated from her master plan a bit, ending up at the Hudson River near the houseboat yacht harbor into which I surreptitiously emptied plastic cupful after plastic cupful of my mother.
"She'll finally get to see Europe," thought I to myself.
I have no idea why my mother picked that particular intersection. We'd lived on West 74th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, and as far as I knew all her nervous breakdowns had been staged in Central Park, not Riverside Park.
Afterwards I went out and met Hala and Lianne Farbstein (NHRN) for lunch.
I hadn't kept up at all with Hala after she was ousted from Time Warner. I knew she'd landed a job as a corporate VP with one of those boutique Internet ad agencies that were in vogue before the Internet bubble burst. There was much unpleasantness when she left a short time later.
A short time after that, Jeremy Koch called to ask me if I had talked to Hala. Her house had just burned down.
"Her house burned down?"
"Yes, and I think I heard her dogs died in the fire. Didn't you know?"
No, I had not known. Though I had been in that house many times, a lovely house in the Hudson River Valley, an historic house that at one time had belonged to a writer – I couldn't remember which one. Hala and her husband had restored it, enlarged it; she had done a great deal of the work herself, right down to the carpentry. Hala had cooked for me there. Hala was a brilliant cook.
She had loved those dogs.
She loved all animals.
Trust Lianne Farbstein whose rolodex was kind of a museum of anybody she'd ever met who just might be of use some time in the future to have Hala's contact information.
Hala was late. That meant I had to suffer through lunch with Lianne alone. Lianne was in full Uriah Heep mode, which meant that she was complimenting me a lot on how great I looked – I did not look great! my mother had just died – and telling me how marvelous it was to reconnect. Lianne was the person who'd gotten me laid off from People, so I took all this with a shaker full of salt.
And then Hala was there.
She was looking at getting into the imported Chinese antique business, she told me. She had a relative who held some kind of diplomatic position in Shanghai and he could get her access to all sorts of deals and cheap container ships.
"But couldn't you go back to the print magazine?" I cried. "They loved you at the print magazine!"
Hala arched one eyebrow and considered me. "I called Jeremy. Once. We had lunch. And he told me I had been out of the business too long. It would be impossible to go back into any kind of senior position, and impossible to hire me into a junior one. So-o…"
We had business in the same direction so after lunch we walked together a ways.
"I don't know whether I ever told you what a great boss you were," I began haltingly. "It was the first job I ever had where someone believed in me –"
Hala made a face. "It wasn't all that hard. You were very good at what you did."
There'd never been any room in Hala's world for fake sentimentality. That hadn't changed.
We hugged goodbye.
I haven't seen or heard from her since.
Also labeled the chile light covers "chile light covers" in the hopes this would dissuade casual Little Store browsers from trying to eat them.
Also watched the first two hours of Ken Burns' The War, which I liked very much.
It was just a gorgeous day as almost every day in these parts has been recently. The dense fog that usually characterizes this area has been pretty much a no show for months. Global warming? The next ice age? Dunno.
What I do know is that I'm very out of shape.
The point of all celebrity journalism – I suppose what we were doing was journalism – is to convince consumers that the world is one big fabulous party to which they'll never be invited.
Never! Not in a million years.
Well. Maybe. If they buy the right designer mascara.
My official title at the Planet Hollywood function was Celebrity Handler. That meant I was supposed to approach the various celebrities and entice them back to the People Online tent where they would be photographed standing next to a computer and then debriefed by a typist for the edification of the masses who presumably had nothing better to do on a Friday night than languish in front of their monitors.
There were a lot of celebrities there. I can no longer remember who most of them were. It took me a little while to catch on that despite this huge party infrastructure, nobody was having a particularly good time. It was all being staged for the benefit of ABC, which was doing an hour long special. Elton John played exactly three songs; Chuck Berry ditto. Finally Bruce Willis climbed on the stage. I do remember thinking Bruce Willis had to be the most obnoxious human on the planet not currently in electoral office.
I also remember thinking that Hollywood had apparently never heard of affirmative action. They had Wesley Snipes, Danny Glover and assorted Black People all sitting at the same table around which a parade of silicon and blonde hair falls looped endlessly.
Oprah, by the way, sat with the white folk.
At 10:00pm precisely, the party ended. Exactly as though somebody had pulled the plug: Pouf! The klieg lights went off.
I had some modest success. Geena Davis. A very drunk and pathetic Kelsey Grammar whose own handler was a hard-as-nails blonde whose silicon outcrops were so hard and peaked, they could have been carved into presidential profiles. Some Party of Five cast members.
Drew Carey was the one guy who insisted on doing his own typing.
"Sure," he said when Hala asked. "I go online all the time. You know, surveillance missions. To talk to fans, see what works, what doesn't."
Drew Carey was Hala's dream come true.
Until just a few years ago the Planet Hollywood site People Online put up to celebrate the opening was still extant though buried deep beneath AOL/People's cheery interface. All gone now. Now all that remains is the spam I cross-posted to a hundred Usenet newsgroups:
WWW> PEOPLE Parties At...Planet Hollywood
*** From Net-Happenings Moderator ***
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 1995 19:53:56 -0500
From: pdil@pathfinder.com
http://www.pathfinder.com/people/planethollywood/planethome.html
Everybody loves a party! Everybody loves Hollywood! And everybody
loves our planet! So why not combine the three? That's what PEOPLE
Magazine has done with our Virtual Party site featuring (among other goodies) a tour of cyber-Planet Hollywood, movie star trivia games, electronic postcards, an online scavenger hunt, and exclusive reportage of the celebrity-studded opening of LA's first Planet.
Despite my optimistic shilling, the site was a huge failure. A huge, expensive failure.
This didn't endear Hala to the Time Inc corporate masters, and one wonders whether senior executive Don Logan didn't have Planet Hollywood in mind when six weeks later he famously compared Pathfinder to a black hole in space – a black hole that hemorrhaged money.
Hala's commercial instincts were rarely off. But often her timing was, certainly in this instance. Three years into the future she would have been able to pitch this to the Planet Hollywood guys as a co-branded deal, shifting much if not all of the cost to their pockets. (Although come to think of it, three years into the future Planet Hollywood itself was going bankrupt. So maybe not.)
But the pipes weren't there yet. Also the Internet was still the media of choice for the cognoscenti, people whose interest in pop culture was purely ironic.
Hala lasted another year or so.
But the handwriting was on the wall.
The last time I saw Hala was in 2001.
My mother had just died.
My mother had left an awfully eccentric last request, which was to scatter her ashes at the precise intersection of 72nd street and Riverside Drive in NYC. This, of course, was completely illegal, violating not only the local litter ordinances but also a public health statute stipulating the disposal of human remains, so I deviated from her master plan a bit, ending up at the Hudson River near the houseboat yacht harbor into which I surreptitiously emptied plastic cupful after plastic cupful of my mother.
"She'll finally get to see Europe," thought I to myself.
I have no idea why my mother picked that particular intersection. We'd lived on West 74th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, and as far as I knew all her nervous breakdowns had been staged in Central Park, not Riverside Park.
Afterwards I went out and met Hala and Lianne Farbstein (NHRN) for lunch.
I hadn't kept up at all with Hala after she was ousted from Time Warner. I knew she'd landed a job as a corporate VP with one of those boutique Internet ad agencies that were in vogue before the Internet bubble burst. There was much unpleasantness when she left a short time later.
A short time after that, Jeremy Koch called to ask me if I had talked to Hala. Her house had just burned down.
"Her house burned down?"
"Yes, and I think I heard her dogs died in the fire. Didn't you know?"
No, I had not known. Though I had been in that house many times, a lovely house in the Hudson River Valley, an historic house that at one time had belonged to a writer – I couldn't remember which one. Hala and her husband had restored it, enlarged it; she had done a great deal of the work herself, right down to the carpentry. Hala had cooked for me there. Hala was a brilliant cook.
She had loved those dogs.
She loved all animals.
Trust Lianne Farbstein whose rolodex was kind of a museum of anybody she'd ever met who just might be of use some time in the future to have Hala's contact information.
Hala was late. That meant I had to suffer through lunch with Lianne alone. Lianne was in full Uriah Heep mode, which meant that she was complimenting me a lot on how great I looked – I did not look great! my mother had just died – and telling me how marvelous it was to reconnect. Lianne was the person who'd gotten me laid off from People, so I took all this with a shaker full of salt.
And then Hala was there.
She was looking at getting into the imported Chinese antique business, she told me. She had a relative who held some kind of diplomatic position in Shanghai and he could get her access to all sorts of deals and cheap container ships.
"But couldn't you go back to the print magazine?" I cried. "They loved you at the print magazine!"
Hala arched one eyebrow and considered me. "I called Jeremy. Once. We had lunch. And he told me I had been out of the business too long. It would be impossible to go back into any kind of senior position, and impossible to hire me into a junior one. So-o…"
We had business in the same direction so after lunch we walked together a ways.
"I don't know whether I ever told you what a great boss you were," I began haltingly. "It was the first job I ever had where someone believed in me –"
Hala made a face. "It wasn't all that hard. You were very good at what you did."
There'd never been any room in Hala's world for fake sentimentality. That hadn't changed.
We hugged goodbye.
I haven't seen or heard from her since.
