The city is big and varied enough that it’s always possible that someone out there is leading the life portrayed on-screen. There could very well be teenagers akin to the ones on Gossip Girl, living on their own in the Waldorf Astoria, wearing berets en route to drug deals, sending back plates of spaghetti Bolognese at the Bowery. You may not know them personally. But they’re out there, leading pretty much your same life—just with a few more rhinestones glued to the edges. I’ve seen glimpses of them, or the people I think might be them, at literary benefits that I have rarely paid for when I was acting as escort to other authors, keeping folded copies of their tour schedules in my bag.
These events notwithstanding, book publicity is an unglamorous job. In my time working in publishing, I never once dressed up for a book party. Wearing a nice dress at a book function generally indicates that you are fresh from (a) a job interview, (b) a funeral, or (c) a fake funeral to cover up the interview you just came from. For the handful of fancy events the publishing industry hosts each year, I would bring a change of clothing with me to the office and hop into a dress in the handicapped bathroom stall. But even these occasions were increasingly rare. Cocktails had been replaced by beer, restaurants by dive bars, gift bags by the code for the bathroom door. The big book-launch party itself had become unrealistic, even in reality.
Thus when the Gossip Girl producers encouraged me to bring what I might wear to “a typical fictional publishing cocktail party,” I was disappointed. Yes, I was playing me, but did I have to dress like it? Also, I had never attended a typical fictional publishing cocktail party before. I don’t own any hypothetical dresses.
* * *
Gossip Girl is taped many months before it airs, so the pressure is on not only to wear something chic, but to wear something that will remain chic in the future. With no time to shop, I threw a few hardly stained dresses into a plastic garment bag and made my way out into the rain. It was pouring by the time I arrived uptown. I met a production assistant outside the apartment building, hangers cutting off my thumb circulation, and exchanged my small umbrella for her large one. She escorted me to a silver trailer and knocked on the door, whereupon two stylists yanked me inside as if I were a spy about to blow my cover.
Maybe the inside of the Gossip Girl wardrobe trailer is normal. Maybe it’s not objectively impressive if you work in television. But I had never seen anything like it. It had sliding ladders and tiers of clothing racks. The names of the characters were taped to various wooden drawers and they said things like BLAIR: TIGHTS, STRAPLESS BRAS. I wondered if we were the same size and if I could be the kind of person who steals a bra as a souvenir. I did come here to act. Could I play a thief?
The head stylist was chatty and amiable. She led me to the back of the trailer and pulled a heavy curtain behind us.
“Let’s see what we have here,” she said, medically.
As she examined my dated dresses, a Chihuahua pushed under the curtain and began sniffing my feet.
“That’s Humphrey,” said the stylist.
Humphrey stared at me. All the humans he encountered smelled like fine leather goods and aioli and macarons. I must be a stray.
“Is he named after Dan Humphrey?”
This, I assumed, was a self-evident question.
The costume designer studied my face, questioning her own judgment in treating me like a person up until this point.
“After Humphrey Bogart.”
“Oh.” I looked at the dog. “I guess you had him before you started working here.”
“I’ve had him for three months,” she said, “but everyone thinks he’s named after Dan for some reason.”
She pulled the last dress from my bag and called for her assistant.
“This will work,” she said. “But tell you what … why don’t you borrow a pair of these?”
We were flanked by walls of overpriced designer fabrics and tailoring that glimmered at every turn. I peered over her shoulder, anticipating a tray of designer earrings or, say, some very expensive shoes.
She handed me a pair of Spanx.
* * *
I should say that everyone from the director to the actors to the prop stylist was extremely welcoming and kind. Both because it’s true and because I should say it. For as small a world as New York is, Gossip Girl is even smaller. There are so many people involved with the show, it’s rife with awkward intersections that really should not happen in a sane universe. Acquaintances of mine are friends with the cast. The music supervisor used to live in the same building as one of the actors. A friend used to write for the show. Once, I had seen a couple of the stars make out with each other on the swanky sofa of a swanky apartment while I scooted to the edge of the selfsame sofa. It’s not that my points of connection are particularly elite. It’s that Gossip Girl has been filming in New York for exactly the right amount of time to make it a cottage industry. It’s the Law & Order of my generation, destined
