[ed. See also: Lee Radziwill and Sophia Coppola in Conversation (NY Times)]
Alexis Neiers was 17 in 2008. Her mother, Andrea, was a former Playboy model and her father a director of photography on Friends. Thousand Oaks isn’t super-rich but it’s the sort of place where people care a lot about money. Alexis and her friend Tess, who lived with her, behaved as if shopping (and having things) was the only way not to be a nobody. Alexis never forgot there was gold in them there hills and she spent her late teens trying to establish contacts that would lift her into the Hollywood scene. The family did pole-dancing in the living room and Andrea gave the girls – including Alexis’s younger sister, Gabby – the amphetamine Adderall every morning. (She said they had ADHD.) The girls knew about first class. They knew about VIP areas and fast cars, but they’d never seen a dictionary. Many of the kids in the southern valley think you’re odd if you don’t have a card for medical marijuana.
In the autumn of 2008, and for a full year after that, Alexis began travelling up the freeway at night in the company of some of the kids she knew from Calabasas. Like her, they wanted to be famous, but not in the old style: the stars they liked best were the ones who didn’t really do anything. The goddess for them was Paris Hilton. They didn’t think about talent and they didn’t care about class: they loved the kinds of star who were just like them, only fully arrived. In their world of Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and TMZ, where everybody was a star of their own social universe, as well as being their own paparazzi, the suburban teenagers idolised the people they were close to being themselves. Perhaps it’s a new kind of narcissism, where you only get to feel fully realised, successful and self-loving when you look at your reflection in the pool and see your idol. And having your idol’s shoes and handbag is one of the ways to achieve that.
Fame today is a matryoshka doll: inside each celebrity is a series of smaller, hollow simulacra, and, at the very core, there is a hard little being who feels buried alive. In Alexis’s gang there were four girls and three boys: the main culprit, Nick Prugo, was a gay kid working his way out of the closet. When he was eventually arrested by the police he was wearing a striped top he’d stolen from the house of the actor Orlando Bloom. And that’s what they did: after days of shopping or doing pilates, hanging out on MySpace, texting or oh-my-god-ing on their iPhones, studying Google Maps or celebrity websites to find addresses, they would travel in their big, gas-guzzling cars to the houses of their heroes in the Hollywood Hills, and rob them. At Paris Hilton’s house, they tried on her perfume and her shoes, they took money and handbags. It was almost as if Paris had been waiting for them: there was a key under her doormat, and her dressing-room, the inner sanctum, was filled with cushions bearing her self-adoring image. The burglars stepped gingerly over the little dogs called Marilyn Monroe and Prada.
The relationship between modern celebrities and their greatest fans is rather like the relationship that once existed between cops and robbers in the movies. (And in life, if you believe the Mafia lore.) Classic cops and robbers have the same DNA: they understand each other, because, at some basic level, they are the same people. The Bling Ring (as the Los Angeles Times called them) already possessed many of the items they were stealing, but what they craved was proximity and identification. Anyone can have a Marc Jacobs handbag if they can raise the money, but it isn’t just anyone who can have the one belonging to Paris Hilton. Only Paris has that – unless someone goes over to her house and takes it. Soon, the kids were showing up on Facebook and at clubs wearing their new clobber. It took the victims a while to notice, of course – so many handbags, so little time – but eventually it became clear that the Bling Ring had stolen $3 million worth of stuff.
There’s nothing new in stealing from the rich. What is new is the idea that the purloined items aren’t the main thing that’s been taken. Alexis wanted to be Paris, or a version of Paris which meant being more like herself-as-celebrity. She’d noticed – how could she not – that the celebrities she admired weren’t a million miles away from her and that was the thrill – being close to her ‘true’ status. Not by achieving it or even by getting to know her heroes personally, but by stealing their shoes and wearing them as if she had the right. The group described their nights in the hills as ‘shopping’.
by Andrew O'Hagan, LBR | Read more:
Image Credit: Merrick Morton via:
