Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 18

And that's pretty much what I've done with my life. I went to Brandeis University, majored in theater arts. Then straight out of college I went to NYU to the graduate acting program. Then I immediately started doing theater in New York and got my first film, A Walk in the Clouds, with Keanu Reeves. I played his wife. And then I got a recurring role on NYPD Blue, playing Gail O'Grady's wayward sister, Dana Abandando. She was a fantastic character. Really fun and great and extreme. Then I got my first television series, Ned and Stacey, in which I played Stacey.

Now I play Grace on the television comedy Will and Grace on NBC. Grace is an interior designer who lives in New York City. The premise is that I moved in with my best friend, Will Truman, who is a lawyer. I'm a straight woman and he's a gay man and we have been best friends for years, but this is the first time we've ever lived together. We each just got out of very long relations.h.i.+ps and are now newly single. And we kind of become-we're like this special twosome who would probably be married-we are true soul mates and the only thing that would keep us from spending the rest of our lives together is the fact that Will is gay.

But there's more to the show than just Will and Grace's domestic life. Grace has her own design firm, Grace Adler Design. And she has a-[laughs]-a very, very wealthy woman who has chosen to be her secretary. She is probably the worst secretary around. [Laughs] She just wants to see how the other half lives. The people who actually have to work for a living. She never cashes her checks. She just likes to come and watch. [Laughs] Her name is Karen. And then the fourth and last character is Jack, Will's dearest male friend. He's gay as well. And he's perpetually out of work and looking for new jobs. Every week essentially he's trying something new.

So it's pretty much watching the lives of Will and Grace and Jack and Karen and hopefully you're laughing when you're watching.

It's been a great experience for me. It's really gratifying to be able to come to work on this. At the same time-doing a situation comedy is unlike anything I've ever done before. You only have four days of rehearsal and then, you know, millions and millions of people see it. It's a little like performing a play because there's a live audience, but it's also-it's very different. Because the people who come to this particular play know the characters already and have an investment in these characters and have an expectation of these characters. It has a feeling sometimes of like a frat party. Between scenes, there's a DJ playing and people are dancing-complete strangers are dancing and- it's a very, very raucous group. It's kind of weird, actually, it takes some getting used to-but once you adjust, it's really thrilling because it gets you on a high. Their adrenaline, their energy, just lifts me- even if I'm exhausted.

There's also this kind of playfulness between the actors and the audience that's not like anything that you find in theater, because it's direct. We can see their faces and they can see us. I mean, we'll be taping and someone will scream, "Hey! Grace!" and I'll turn back and I'll scream, "What?" They'll wave, I'll wave. It's fun. And we really want the audience to be engaged. Like, often a joke-you say something you've been rehearsing to death and then the audience loses their minds laughing and you're so gratified because you've been working all week long to get that reaction.

Or say a certain joke doesn't work, or an entire section doesn't work-the audience doesn't laugh or whatever-well, literally the writers will gather and two minutes later they'll come running out to us and they'll say, okay, "Cut that, cut that, cut this." And then they'll show us a half a page of new dialogue they've just written on the spot and say, "Now, add this." And we read it out loud once and they say, "Okay, go! Action!"

And the audience is thrilled that everything is just being thrown at us. I think they empathize with us and love the mistakes as much as they love the victories. Sometimes, when a new line is thrown at one of us, we just literally go blank and look at the audience and say, "I have no idea what the f.u.c.k this is." [Laughs] And the audience loses their mind when you swear. They love it. [Laughs] I mean, it's easy to relate to. It's a human thing to mess up. And when you don't take it so seriously they don't have to worry about you. They can laugh along with you and they can laugh at you because you're giving them permission to. So it's just-it's a very frenetic and very freeing environment to work in. And I think the freedom makes our work better.

Of course, it's also a scary way to work. It was initially, really, almost terrifying for me. I had never done a sitcom in my life. I was this theater girl. I got my master's degree studying Shakespeare, Molire, Brecht, Chekhov. [Laughs] And with dramatic material, say, Chekhov, you would try and figure out what story he's trying to tell, and what your character's role is in moving that story along, and trying to figure out the psychology, what the character wants and needs and all that. But in a sitcom that doesn't matter. The most important thing about a sitcom is making people laugh. So it's a much more external approach. It's all about knowing how to throw your lines right-finding the musicality of the words and landing the rhythm of the line-because that's how you get the audience laughing. You play the music.

And that's definitely how I approach my scripts now. But I actually don't think my talent lies so much in that kind of punch line funny stuff-the bah-dum-dum is what I call it. [Laughs] There are people who are geniuses at that. I'm not one of them. I think what I do well, and maybe this is because of my training, is that I can find the emotional truth in the story. As crazy as that story may be, I commit to that emotional truth-I make it real for myself. And I commit to it so completely, so extremely, that it ends up being funny.

Like last night's episode, there was that one moment where we're all touching each other. The story, the sort of background, is that there's an article in the New York Times celebrating something Grace designed, and there's this distorted picture of me that sort of makes me look like I have enormous, enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s. [Laughs] And Grace doesn't see that it's so distorted. So Jack and Will go through this weird sort of dance with me in order to prove that there's a stark difference between my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the b.r.e.a.s.t.s in the picture. It ends up with Will cupping my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and then comparing them with the picture, then Jack cupping my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and comparing them with the picture. Then we end up all feeling each other. Jack is feeling Will. Will is feeling me. I'm feeling Will. Will's feeling Jack. And it was this incredibly playful, wonderful, weird, weird moment. [Laughs] Totally weird. I loved it.

We tried so many different things to make that moment work. The last thing when-[laughs] when the two guys go over my shoulders to feel my b.r.e.a.s.t.s at the same exact time-that was the b.u.t.ton of the scene-we worked on that for so long. We didn't know if it was funnier for them to come in front, to go back, to come under, to cross. But what it came down to was the characters. What made sense for each of us. What we could commit to. I mean, we eventually had a really pa.s.sionate dialogue about what was the best way to touch my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And it was such a silly thing to talk about. But it was meaningful to all of us. We worked it and we worked it-and when we got it, we knew we had it.

It ended up being a really long moment where we were really, you know, feeling each other's bodies. And I think that's what made it so weird and that's what I loved about it. Because it so easily could have been a fast, playful, simple, cute, little bit. And that would have actually been more what I call "sitcom-y" and may very well have been very gratifying to watch. But I think the fact that it was long somehow grounded those characters and made them quirkier. They weren't cookie-cutter television characters anymore. The fact that the three of them were spending so much time feeling each other's chests, and that it took them so long to realize that it was weird, told us something about those three people.

It's little things like that that I spend most of my time thinking about. It's not stuff like, well, if the word was "that" and not "the," I think such-and-such a line would be funnier. I think what-in my quiet times when I'm home alone, thinking about the show, it's those little, silent moments that thrill me the most and I pine for the most, because it's in those silent moments that you learn the most about the characters.

And I have to say that I'm-I'm just-I know it may sound sort of, I don't know, ungenuine or clichd, but I'm incredibly proud to be a part of this show. I feel it's really smart, really funny. The writing is really extraordinary. But more than that-it's the characters we've all created-the writers and the actors-I'm proud of the characters. Will and Jack are not caricatures. They are just really funny, loving, silly men. Jack is more out there than Will, but they're both these very real characters. We care about them. And the response, the letters are mind-blowing to me. I get a lot of mail from gay men. And they just-it's wonderful. I get letters from everywhere.

I got a letter from this fourteen-year-old boy in Arizona. He wrote me and told me that he's gay, and that he had recently come out to his mother and that his mother is actually okay with it, but his best friend is not speaking to him. And that he wishes he had a Grace in his life. Can you imagine getting a letter like that? And he said that his mother is getting through this transition in her family by watching Will and Grace with him every week. He said this is the one time of the week that's mother/son time. And the two of them watch it together and laugh together and every week he said his mother changes slightly. You know, she-she looks at him and she laughs with him.

It's something I'm just now starting to understand, the power of television. I think it's an incredibly personal thing. With theater, it's an event. You get dressed up. You put clothes on. You drive or you take the subway and you pay a lot of money to sit in velvet seats and watch a live performance. In a community. And then you go off and you discuss it. And with a movie it's similar. But television-it's in your home, you don't have to go anywhere, you don't have to dress appropriately for it. It is there in your home. And you can sit on your couch in sweatpants and turn on the TV and those characters are always there. They never fail you.

I love watching television. There is a consistency about each character that, as a viewer, we come to expect and we come to love and we come to look forward to. It's like with Seinfeld, Kramer, the character of Kramer. You expected every single time Kramer opened the door and walked in that room that he would make an entrance. And I think it's that consistency that is comforting. Because it becomes a part of our lives. It's an intimate relations.h.i.+p.

Sometimes-[laughs]-sometimes I think it's maybe a little too intimate. I mean, I have people on the street come up to me every day. It's really amazing. People come up and say, "Hi, Grace." And I'll say, "Hi, my name's Debra." And they just won't-they won't say it. They'll just keep saying the name "Grace." They're like, "Oh, my G.o.d, it's Grace! This is Grace! This is Grace!" And I will continually introduce myself as Debra. But they don't want that. They don't want Debra. They want Grace.

Many of them talk to me or touch me or hug me as if I'm their friend. As if I know them. Like about three days after my birthday, this man came up to me. He nudged me on the arm and said, "Happy Belated Birthday, Debra." And I said, "Well thank you. I'm sorry, do I know you?" I wasn't sure because he'd used my real name. And he took a step back and looked at me with such hostility. He started counting on his fingers: the grocery store, the gas station, Blockbuster, Starbucks, the dry cleaners-these were the times he had come up to me and said, "Hey, I love your show," and I'd said, "Thanks." Now, I talk to a lot of people. But these interactions to him were-I mean, we now had a friends.h.i.+p. I said to him, "I'm so sorry." And he put his hand on my shoulder and said, "It's okay, Debra. It's okay." He walked away, but he was annoyed that I had let him down.

It's a confusing thing. You know, you try to stay in touch with who you are, with your ident.i.ty, and you try to make sure that you're not living the life of Grace. And twenty, thirty people come up on a given day and say, "Hi, Grace." It's weird. What are you supposed to do? I mean, because-I forget. In my experience, I am performing for three hundred people. I forget that sixteen million people are watching. And then even when you remember that, how do you really digest that? How do you really understand that? Those numbers are very intangible. You can't think about them. You have to basically ignore it.

I mean, all I really want to know is, do I have a job that I love? The answer to that question right now is yes. And I'm really, really lucky-I'm very lucky and I'm very happy. Will I get to do this for the next few months? Yes. Beyond that? What do I need to do to allow this show to continue? Well, I'm only one person. You know, there's so many elements that need to be in line for a show to succeed. And nothing I do can make a show work or make a show fail.

So the way I look at it, it's my job to work very hard and to be as funny as I can be and to make Grace as three-dimensional a person as I can and be respectful of the people I work with. But, I mean, you know, there are numbers. Right now, the numbers are good. But that could change. And, ultimately, it doesn't matter if the show is moving. If no one's watching, it'll get yanked. Really, really, really, really great shows with mediocre numbers can be yanked. You can't force people to invest emotionally in your show. You can't force viewers to watch your show. You just have to try and make them laugh.

I think that a lot of people who are angry

and bitter go into casting. Or maybe they

become angry and bitter from casting.

CASTING DIRECTOR.

Lisa Pirriolli.

I fell into this job. I was waitressing, and a friend of mine who was producing a very low-budget movie asked me to be her production a.s.sistant, and I said okay. When I started working, they had not cast most of the roles, and I had a background in theater, so I found a bunch of actors to be in the movie. That was at least fifteen years ago, and I've been in casting in many different forms since then, primarily working for other people. For the last two years, though, I've been owning my own company, which is a trip.

I have two a.s.sistants and a very small office. My a.s.sistants are great. One still lives at home with her parents, she's in her mid-twenties. For my money, she doesn't seem like she has a lot of life experience. She has been an a.s.sistant to casting directors for years. She's great in the office, and great at organization, but I find her humorous because there is nothing else. I mean she actually grew up wanting to be a casting director. And when you grow up wanting to do this, your reality is slightly stilted. So that's her. And then there's this guy who is a waiter part-time, at night, because I don't pay him enough. He's gorgeous, and gay, and he fills a niche in the office for any kind of film that may come in that is slightly-I don't know how to say it-he has a great personality. People always like him and, like me, he just fell into this business.

It's interesting being a woman boss to a man, because there's this testosterone thing where guys just don't want to take orders from women. So you have to manipulate the situation. I don't mean I manipulate him in an evil sort of way, but I understand that it's hard for him to take orders from me. So I defer to him and basically let him think that what I want him to do is his own idea.

Overall, I don't think I'm a very good boss. I am always worried that I am making the wrong decisions and I'm always trying to second-guess my employees. And I'm pretty uneven-sometimes I can be a real control freak while other times I kick back, but I'm always panicking inside. In other words, I don't know that I know how to be a boss yet. I'm learning as I go.

I work a lot. Now that I own my own business, I'm here all the time. Eighteen hours a day, weekends, nothing is out of the question. And when I say I am working all the time, I really mean all the time. I only occasionally go to the bathroom. I never have a lunch break. It's not one of those jobs where people spend a lot of time around the water cooler. It's a very serious business.

A typical day is you go in and you set up auditions for whatever project you are on. You go in in a calm manner, ready to begin your day, and the minute you walk in the door you get ten phone calls- five actors have canceled, there are four new jobs, somebody has lost all their funding for a movie. Every day it's like that. You go in calmly, but it's pretty much shot to h.e.l.l within an hour.

So then I'm on the telephone a lot. And then I'm with the actors. On an average day, I can meet up to sixty actors. If it's for a commercial audition, they're put on videotape-they do their lines or whatever and we record them and show them to the client later. If it's for a movie, I'm auditioning them with the director. Or there's a thing called pre-screening, where I meet actors I don't already know and have them audition for me alone to see if they are right for a particular role.

Sometimes I wish I pre-screened everyone. Actors can be unpredictable, to put it mildly. I had an audition once where an actor pulled a long knife out during the reading and everyone ducked behind a chair, because n.o.body knew who this guy was. He thought he was just being real, you know, just being an actor, right? But it was really scary. I could fill a book with stories like that. Just recently, we were auditioning girls for a movie and one came in a see-through dress with no underwear on, and proceeded to basically unzip the guy who was reading with her and perform s.e.x acts, without technically performing them. It was very uncomfortable to just sit there and watch this, but it's hard to stop somebody and say, "This is inappropriate behavior."

It can get weirder, too. I remember once at the beginning of my career, somebody wanted me to meet this actor to talk about casting his movie. I was just starting and this actor called and said he wanted me to take a look at his script. I didn't have an office, and I don't know what I was thinking, but I said, "Just come on over to the house." So this guy shows up and he's very cute, and he had maybe five hundred sheets of yellow paper rubber-banded together. It was a ma.n.u.script, but like, a huge ma.n.u.script. And he walked in and put it on the table and said, "I'm sorry it's not typed."

So we're talking, and he tells me that this script is really personal, because it is about something that happened to him when he was eighteen years old. And then he told me that he had been camping with his girlfriend and that they had been taken into a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p one night and had been operated on by Martians, and then released back to Earth. She refused to talk about it, and refused to talk to him again. He'd been lugging this story around for a long time, and finally decided to write a script about it. So I was alone with this person, who I didn't know, in my house, who was telling me that he had been on the planet Mars. I was trying to be sympathetic to him, but I called one of my friends and made him come down and sit with me while this guy was there. He had to sit with me until I finally said, "Byebye." In the end, I realized, he didn't want me to cast the movie, or anything like that. I mean, there wasn't any movie. He just wanted to talk, or something. I don't know.

I think at this point it's a cliche, but if you tell any casting director that you want to be an actor, they'll say, "Isn't there anything else you'd like to do?" Because it's a horrible life. Life as an actor is terrible. You have to be totally self-centered, because it's all about you, and it's all about getting the job, and it's all about rejection. And then if you do get the job, it's all about doing it correctly and getting the next one, and the next one, just trying to get famous. And if you do get famous, it's all about being famous. And then it's about when your star is going to fall. It's a completely self-involved profession. Still, everybody wants to be in movies. I was in the middle of Europe once and this guy said, "Couldn't I be in the movies?" I mean, he could barely speak English but he could get out, "Couldn't I be in the movies?"

But you know, that's also the great part of my job, my favorite part-I love actors. I think that makes me good at what I do. I mean, I think I possess a quality that not everyone has: the ability to feel for others. I think it helps in the casting process, both to feel for the actor as a human being who is auditioning for you and for the character you want them to play. I think it's just an ability to understand life experience and to watch well. I watch people all day long. You learn a lot from that. I watch how they enter a room and I can tell what they're thinking, just by watching. And I like that. It's interesting to me. I love to be entertained. And when the job is going really well, I am thoroughly entertained all the time.

The worst part of this job, by far, is the people who have power in the business-not the actors-the producers and so forth. They're liars, cheaters, you name it. Most of them are far too concerned about fame and money. And they have very short tempers. They are often really angry people. I myself have become much more bitter about human nature because I've seen so much depressing s.h.i.+t. I see people who have a project that they want to get off the ground and there is absolutely nothing that will get in their way. It's awful what they will do. And you see a lot of nontalented people getting ahead and that's not what the world should be like. I think there is something wonderful about working hard and reaping the benefits of that work, but I think that a lot of people in movies and commercials get ahead only because their parents know people, or because they're rich. And once they get ahead, they usually just coast.

As for my peers, so to speak, well, I think that a lot of times people go into casting for revenge. I think that a lot of people who are angry and bitter go into casting. Or maybe they become angry and bitter from casting. It becomes a control issue, because they think that they can control other people's careers. So you see a lot of casting people who aren't happy, and they seem to take it out on actors who aren't famous. I've always said that a lot of casting people were really unpopular in high school and this is their way of getting back at all the people who didn't ask them out.

But I actually like this job a lot. I want to keep doing it as many years as it will have me. As long as I can hold on to it with my teeth. [Laughs] I think it's that kind of business-it's like being a musician or something-as long as you can hold on. Because it's a youth-oriented business, you know? It's all about what is hot and what's in. And the people are getting younger and younger, particularly in commercials. I mean, I have to answer to twenty-five-year-olds all the time now. I think that maybe my time has come. But I also think that people see me as being a little younger than I am. I think that they think that I know what is hot, and that I'm good at finding it.

So I like doing this, but I'm not sure if I had my life to live over that I'd do it again. There are a hundred other things that I could see myself doing instead, like owning a bookstore in some weird little town somewhere. Or maybe some nine-to-five job where I could just turn it off at the end of the day and go home to my husband. I guess I just don't find this job meaningful. I mean, it's meaningful to people who want to get jobs as actors, and people who are making movies, but that's about it. I suppose you could argue that if I help make a commercial that helps to sell Bounty, that's one more person who has a job making Bounty, but that's really stretching it. [Laughs] I guess I'm a little jaded.

I've also become much more self-involved and generally, I think, just worse from doing this-worse as a person, as a friend, just worse. As I become more successful, as we like to say in the office, it's all about me. And I don't like that, which is why I wish I had more of a life to go to when I leave the office. I think that would balance things out. But I don't. I have no social life. Because who do I meet? I meet actors. And it is inappropriate, I think, to date actors in this profession. Especially in light of what I just said about the control issue. And I work all the time so it's hard for me to go to functions, and when I do go to functions they are business-related, so I don't really meet anyone. It's all work. Work, work, work. But still, you know, there are perks. I get to see a lot of interesting movies and plays, I get into the hot clubs and restaurants, I travel-and the only hazard is shaking people's hands all day long. That and waking up in the middle of the night terrified and sweating. [Laughs] And the fact that I'm going to end up a spinster.

I was just a girl from Bergisch-Gladbach!

SUPERMODEL.

Heidi Klum.

I always hate to say "supermodel." I guess I turned out to be that way now, but it's just a funny thing-you don't want to say that of yourself.

"Supermodel" means you're a household name as a fas.h.i.+on model. I think I'm going more toward being a personality. I do a lot of television. I've done Jay Leno and Keenan Ivory Wayans and David Letterman and Larry Sanders, and I did six episodes of Spin City. I do E!, Extra Hollywood. So I feel like people get a little bit closer to me than just a model doing advertising, because now there is something more behind me than just a face.

Being on the cover of the 1998 Sports Ill.u.s.trated swimsuit issue was my big break. I had done Victoria's Secret a lot before, which is another amazing thing to do, but the Sports Ill.u.s.trated cover for me was the one. When it hit the newsstands I got to do it all-every radio station, lots of press interviews, all the big shows. My day rate went way up. Suddenly I got to work with some of the world's greatest fas.h.i.+on photographers. I shot with Steven Meisel. I did several covers. People all of the sudden are like, "Ooh, who is that girl?"

Of course, it was not like I just came to this. I won a modeling contest in Germany-that's how I got started. One day I was flipping through a fas.h.i.+on magazine with my girlfriend, and we noticed a coupon for a modeling compet.i.tion they were having on this show hosted by Thomas Gottscheit, who is sort of the David Letterman of Germany. So I sent the coupon in with some snapshots from my family's photo alb.u.m. I didn't hear anything for a while, and I almost forgot about it. Then everything happened really fast. They called me and my parents, and they're like, "We want you to come to Munich for a casting." So we went, and then I won the compet.i.tion.

It was pretty amazing. I'd never thought about being a model. I was still going to high school. I had just filled out this coupon for the heck of it. And all of a sudden I won this big contract with a modeling agency for three hundred thousand dollars. I didn't even know how much three hundred thousand dollars was.

This was 1993. I started going to shoots in Munich and then to Hamburg. My father would drive. I'd have a map and we would go around finding these places together. Often getting lost, too. [Laughs] I did lots of test pictures. I really wanted to work. I'd do ten shoots a day if I could. It just seemed wrong whenever I wasn't busy. I mean, I had won this contest out of something like thirty thousand girls. And the public watching the show on TV had voted me the winner. So I felt a little like someone who gets elected to something. I just felt like I always had to push.

Eventually I wound up in Miami, which was like Party City. I couldn't believe what went on there. I was only nineteen. I'd never seen so many good-looking people in my whole life. And so many models! You'd go to castings where you put your name on a list and you're number two hundred and fifty. So you walk down the street, have a cafe latte, and you come back an hour later and it's still not your time. After four weeks of it I said, "I'm out of here." I called my agency in New York who I won the contract with and told them, "I'm sitting here with four hundred people in this casting! I won this big contract! I want to work! What are you guys going to do with me?"

So I came up to New York and the agency people looked me over. I think they didn't know at first what to do with me. I still had a baby face. My hair was down to my b.u.t.t. My nails were long. I had baggy pants. I had no style. You know, I was just a girl from BergischGladbach! So they got my hair cut, told me my nails had to go, told me I had to wear tighter clothes and not cover up so much.

And the smile. The worst for me was the smile. I was just so stiff and so bad at it. But this one photographer told me, "Go home and train in front of the mirror. Look at yourself and relax. See the camera as your friend. Don't see it as your enemy." So I went home and I learned in front of the mirror how to smile. Now it's very funny because that's what I'm known for-my smile.

All this input really helped-right away things began to happen. I did a big campaign for Bonne Bell. Then I did a couple of covers for Self and New Woman. It started to roll, you know? And I was a little lucky, too, because when I started there was that whole waif look, where the girls were all so skinny and sick-looking. I was a little out of place. But then, thank G.o.d, b.o.o.bs came back and curves came back. The healthy and natural look. And that was my look, so in a sense I was just there at the right time. I started working at a hundred miles an hour, going from one job to another, traveling from Mexico to Milan to Paris, going all over. And then I did the Sports Ill.u.s.trated thing and that was like a jumping board, you know. Like swimmers you jump on the board and you go, "Schwam!" That totally did it for me.

Now, I never sit around. Because there's always something. Always. And I know it's a cliche, but it's true-modeling is a lot more than standing in front of a camera. It's a business. If I have a shoot at nine, my day starts at seven. I make the bed, and then I take care of paperwork. I get lots of faxes coming in day and night. Because America is not the only market I'm dealing with. I have other markets where I have to review interviews that I've done. I have to look at photos that get resold in Africa and Mexico and Spain. In Germany, in France. I have to decide which picture they should use. Is this okay? Is it not okay? What do you think?

And you're not going to the same office or studio each day, so you're arranging for shoots, getting airplane tickets together, hotels, clothes, discussing things with your agent. Who's the photographer? Who's the makeup artist? Who's the client? You need a good team of people with you. I mean, you're the face, you're the one who's out there, but it's definitely not like you're doing it on your own. And I have a lot of fun because I really like all these different people I work with. A lot of them are the same ones from job to job so we've become like little family groups.

Then there's the public. [Laughs] People reacting to you as a famous person definitely takes some getting used to. It can be very weird. [Laughs] I mean, I actually like meeting people, as long as they're not scary or trying to take advantage of me. But some of them are just getting your autograph to sell it. You can tell because they have a special pen. It has to be blue instead of black or something, because otherwise, it looks like a stamp. That sort of thing I don't like. And you have to be cautious, because there's a lot of crazy people out there. For example, I was on the David Letterman show and afterward some people in a car started chasing us through the streets of New York. We drove around and around and couldn't lose them. I couldn't go to my house. What was I going to do? I don't want these people to know where I live, otherwise I will have them sitting in front of my house the next day or coming through my window.

But still, you know, it's very nice that people like you. Having fans tells you that you're doing something right. I really appreciate that. And I'm the kind of person who will stay and sign autographs as long as there are people who want them. Some people tell me such stories-they've been driving five hours to get there, they were waiting in line for an hour and a half. And I can't be like, "Okay, my time is up now, I gotta go, see you later." So I'll stay. And if people are nervous, I'm like, "Please, I'm just like any other person," and they calm down.

I think I've dealt with it all pretty well. My husband is very supportive. Luckily he's not flipping out. Because it really changed our life. We can't do simple things anymore like we used to do. We went to the movies last night and there's two people coming up to me wanting my autograph. Or I go running in the street and people stop me. So, you know, there's always a positive and a negative side. You have to be more careful with your mail, or receiving deliveries, you know, all the normal things you did before.

Personally, I just try to make everything as fun as possible. I like comedy. I like being funny. If I have a TV appearance, and they have a script, you know, something boring, I'll just forget about it and make funny faces. I guess it goes back to my childhood. I was always a bit of a ham. I like making people laugh. I like seeing them happy.

For example, we went on one shoot all the way to Mongolia. That's about as far as you can go and still be on this planet. I felt like an alien. I was in Prada head to toe-in Mongolia-where these people drink fermented horse milk. There were all these kids watching us. We couldn't speak with them, so we played Frisbee. They'd never seen one. There we are at the other end of the world playing Frisbee. It was great. I'm sure that years from now when they're grown up they're going to be saying, "Yeah, there was this girl who came here who was really funny, this really weird tall girl. And she invented Frisbee." That's what they're going to say.

And that's how I am on a shoot. If the crew is tired, you can be sure that they are not going to be tired when I walk in, because they all have to wake up. We crank the music up. We dance. We goof around. I mean, it's not brain surgery, what we're doing. Yeah, we're making beautiful pictures and if I have to be serious I can be serious, but c'mon! [Laughs] That's my style. I think if I had a totally different job I'd have the same att.i.tude.

The most amazing picture that I ever

got was Elizabeth Taylor on a stretcher.

PAPARAZZO.

Alan Zanger.

I take pictures of celebrities. I'm called a paparazzo-the derogatory name doesn't bother me. Nothing bothers me! [Laughs]

Ninety percent of my work in the U.S. is for Star magazine. I also sell my pictures in other countries, because every country has tabloids. I just take my film to a one-hour photo lab. I used to send the pictures overnight via FedEx but with new technology, I'm able to scan 'em into my computer and send 'em out all over the world using the Internet. Takes two hours from start to finish and the editor has them on their desk.

I was a terrible kid. Always in trouble. [Laughs] Even back in junior high school. I was born in the South Bronx, in a lousy neighborhood. I was in one of the worst gangs in the city-The Crusaders. On St. Lawrence Avenue. When the Vietnam War broke out, I wound up joining the Seabees. After that, I stayed in California and took advantage of the GI Bill. I enrolled at Pasadena City College. I didn't know what cla.s.ses to take, so I took a cla.s.s in photography. It was so confusing at first. I even cried because I couldn't roll the film on the little reel. But then I started really getting interested and really doing it seriously. And people started liking my pictures. I think I had the knack for taking pictures that told the story. The school newspaper asked me if I wanted to be photo editor.

Before I left PCC, I was photo editor of every publication the school put out and I had a job with the Pasadena Star News. From there, I was good enough to land a job at UPI covering presidents, major news stories, and sporting events, and I did that for ten years. In 1989, I got laid off when UPI went into financial troubles. They got rid of all their staff photographers first. I was one of 'em.

I was really devastated because I thought that was my job for life. I'd just fell into it, and I loved it. It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed seeing my pictures in all the newspapers and magazines all the time. It was prestigious. Being a news photographer, you have more of an interest in getting your pictures published than making a good living at it. And now this is the opposite, doing this paparazzi work. I don't care where the pictures go. I don't even care if anybody knows my name. Just send me the check.

That's not to say I don't enjoy it. Because I do. But it's a different kind of enjoyment than working for UPI. It's the thrill of the hunt, so they say. You know, a hunter will go out for the deer with his rifle and sit in a tree all day and wait for the right time for the deer to come by. And he just loves it, you know? Well, I'm like that.

The first story I ever did was a story about Bruce Springsteen being separated from his wife. Supposedly, he was staying stashed at some small house up in the Hollywood Hills. I had the address of where he might be but I didn't know anything else about him. I didn't even really know what he looked like. But I was told that he drives a Turbo Porsche. So I went up into the Hollywood Hills, I found a house across the street, and just hid on the steps of it, behind some bushes.

The first day I didn't see anything. The second day I didn't see anything. The third day I didn't see anything. But the fourth day the Turbo Porsche was parked out in the driveway across the street. So I waited, then midafternoon out he comes. I stood up and I started takin' his picture. And he said, "Hey, don't you believe in asking for permission?" I said, "Yeah, do you mind if I take your picture?" And he says, "No, f.u.c.k you." And he gets in his Porsche and takes off. That's where I learned you can't ask for permission. Although I got a great picture of him flipping me off. [Laughs]

And that's the way it's been ever since. You know, from that first stakeout, I was just into it. Ever since, I'll grab my cameras and go sit somewhere, wherever I'm told, anywhere in the world, and just wait and wait and wait for the right moment to take the right picture. I'll go to their home, a restaurant, find 'em on vacation somewhere, at a hotel, at a resort-wherever we find they might be, that's where I might be.

I never get bored. I just love to do it. When I'm on stakeout, I don't let anything distract me. I don't listen to the radio, I don't do puzzles, I don't read the newspaper, I don't sleep. I can't go to the toilet-I can't leave. So my car is set up for everything that I need. When I'm working, I go to the bathroom in there, eat in there, everything. You have to have the facilities in your car, and you have to have the demeanor to be able to do that. I guarantee you that if you need to take a p.i.s.s and you can't do it in your car, you're going to lose the shot. If you leave for one second, your prey could be gone. So if you're not watching that front gate, or whatever it is you're watching, twenty-four hours a day, you're wasting your time.

Most recently, the best pictures that I got were Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston on holiday in Acapulco. I was sent there by the Star. I have no idea how they found out they were there. Working for these magazines is like being James Bond and the CIA. They know everything about everybody that they need to. Anyway, at first I was on an adjoining beach, and then I rented a boat. From the boat I was using a five hundred-millimeter lens with a doubler, which made it a thousand-millimeter lens. And the pictures were taken from quite far away, but they were so amazing, you know? They were just amazing. She was wearing a Brazilian bikini. The editor said that was the best celebrity a.s.s they've ever seen.

The most amazing picture that I ever got was Elizabeth Taylor on a stretcher. I think it was 1990 or 1991. She was in a little hospital called Hospital of the Marina in Marina Del Rey. The world thought she was gonna die because no one really knew what she was in for.

Everybody, all the tabloids had people surrounding the hospital, wandering around, trying to dig for information. For a week solid this goes on. And it went into the Easter weekend and still there was really no word that she was still in that place, so everybody kind of left. They all thought they'd snuck her out or something. But I stayed, and on the following Monday after the Easter holiday, early in the morning, I saw some people that kind of looked like security leaving. And all of the sudden a little tiny sports car comes zooming through one of the back exits of the hospital and I recognized the car to be that of her then-boyfriend, Larry Fortensky. So I knew something was going on, right?

So I went and I jammed a lock on one of the hospital doors so they couldn't lock me out of the hospital. Then they saw me, so all these people start chasing me-these security guys, some guy on a motorcycle. Well, I ditched underneath a derelict car and then I made my way back to the door that I had jammed open, ran upstairs, burst into a doctor's office, and just really didn't give them a chance to respond or throw me out or anything. I went to the window and waited. Well, too much time went by and they wanted me to get the heck out of there because I was kind of disturbing the doctors-you know, them not knowing me or having permission to be there.

So I go out again and I'm looking for another angle to shoot from and I go to the parking level and they're still looking for me. So I went back in the building and I made my way onto the roof. The roof was kind of flat with no barrier at the edge. I had to lay down on my stomach and crawl a little bit at a time. Then all of a sudden I saw the bushes move. They were taking her out the back door because they thought I was in the front somewhere. They had backed the ambulance up to the door. So when I saw the bushes move and these guys preparing to do something, I stood up, prefocused my camera, and just hit the b.u.t.ton-you know, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing-like as fast as I could. I really didn't know what I was getting because I couldn't really see. But what I got was them picking her up into the ambulance, headfirst, looking up like she was looking right toward me, right above her. And I got a full frame with the IV and everything hooked up to her arm.