How to Sleep with a Movie Star Read Free

wearing the right shades of lipstick, buying skirts with the right hemlines, and learning things like how one-night stands could raise their self-esteem.
    In other words, all the important things.
    This isn’t
exactly
what I visualized doing when I graduated from college. I’d been the kind of English-lit dork who preferred a night with Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe to a day lounging by the pool with the latest issue of
Vogue
. And despite the crash course in the merits of Michael Kors, Chloe, and Manolo Blahnik that I’d received during my first week at
Mod,
I was, to the chagrin of many of my coworkers, still mostly a Gap girl. With the notable exceptions of the two pairs of Seven jeans I’d fallen in love with and the six Amy Tangerine designer tees I’d developed an obsession for in the last year, most of my clothes were from the sale racks of the Gap, Banana Republic, Macy’s juniors department, or the ever-popular cheap chic of Forever 21 or H&M. The fifteen dollars max I usually spent on a T-shirt was a far cry from the $180 some of my coworkers spent on a white tee that could just as easily have come from Fruit of the Loom.
    Thankfully, the atmosphere wasn’t anything like that of the high fashion magazines where a few of my classmates from college worked. They had all been promptly assimilated and now had matching haircuts, matching Fendi and Louis Vuitton bags for every season, and wardrobes that consisted only of the most expensive and trendy designer clothes. Margaret just asked that we look presentable, polished, and stylish, which I usually didn’t have a problem with, even on my admittedly meager salary.
    After all, I had to look the part if I was going to interact with the fabulously wealthy A-list set. I’d made the mistake my first year at
People
of dressing professionally but without much of a stylish edge, and I’d quickly learned my lesson. Spending a bit more on designer items—even if I could afford just a scarf to pair with less impressive non-designer threads—would go a long way. When you were an actress decked out in tens-of-thousands-of-dollars of diamonds, strutting down the red carpet, there was just something about a reporter wearing a Gucci scarf that made you just a bit more likely to stop and chat. Sad, right? But those were the rules of the game.
    And the articles. Sheesh, the articles. Don’t get me wrong—I love what I do. I love getting inside people’s heads (even if those heads often belong to vacuous celebrities) and finding out what they’re thinking, what they’re worrying about, what makes them tick. So the job as senior celebrity editor of
Mod
fits me with a perfection that might surprise you, considering I originally had my sights set on the lofty literary world of
The New Yorker.
    But it’s the other articles, the in-between assignments that a Prada-clad Margaret dumps on my desk at the last minute, that drive me crazy. I mean, there are only so many ways you can address your readers’ “Most Intimate Sex Questions” (clue: they’re not so intimate anymore when 2.6 million women are reading about them); the truth behind “How to Drop Those Last Five Pounds” (um, exercise and eat less—duh); and the ever-popular “How to Know If He Likes You” (well, men who like a woman usually want to sleep with that woman—wait, should I be taking notes here?).
    Even the celeb interviews have their moments, when I wish I could just bury my head in Jane Austen and slink back to my college English class with my tail between my legs.
    I became an editor because I love to write. And I took this job at
Mod
because I really like one-on-one interviews and profiles. As a little girl, I loved reading my grandmother’s celebrity magazines:
People, The Enquirer, Star
. The lives of the beautiful people in the pictures seemed so glamorous, so exciting. Perhaps that was what had drawn me to celebrity journalism to begin with, although after several years of working in the field, I