I HAD KNOWN I WOULD BE HAPPY AT PEOPLE IF for no other reason than it was a fresh start after eight years at Good Housekeeping. What I hadn’t counted on was how quickly I would feel at home there.
On my first day, I was shown to my new office, which was empty except for a desk, chair, some shelves… and a television set. This was a thrill. Of course, at the Post, there had been a few televisions dotted throughout the newsroom; we generally only glanced at them during major breaking news events, and even then, only briefly. (“Come on, the TV guys are always the last to know anything,” one metro desk editor would sneer if anyone lingered for too long.) In my final years at GH, my computer had been able to stream certain television stations, but it was the dawn of such technology and more often than not I was stuck staring at a frozen, pixilated image that was endlessly buffering.
Now I took a seat at my new desk and stared for a moment at the TV, cable box, and DVD player. Despite feeling a sort of free-floating anxiety, I cautiously turned it on. I half-expected it to be dead—a relic left behind by the office’s previous occupant that maintenance workers had yet to clear away, perhaps. Instead, the TV hummed to life with the glorious vision of the E! channel, and Giuliana Rancic was discussing the latest celebrity breakup.
I began flipping between Giuliana on E! and Kathie Lee and Hoda Kotb hosting the third hour of the Today show when my new boss, Larry, walked by and stuck his head into my office. I quickly scrambled for the remote and tried to shut the TV off, but found myself nervously stabbing random buttons instead.
“How’s it going?” Larry asked.
“Um… fine,” I said, flustered and feeling guilty before confessing. “Sorry… you just busted me watching TV. Sorry.”
“That’s part of your job,” Larry said. “Why do you think you have a TV in here? Don’t apologize.” Then he sauntered off down the hall.
The saying is that if you find a way to get paid to do what you love, then you’ll never work a day in your life. Getting hired as the senior editor for television, I realized, meant I was now literally getting paid to know everything about TV—the one thing that had always come naturally to me. Loving my job would be easy.
The “not apologizing” part would take a little more time.
Being a teenager in the late 1980s and early 1990s meant coming of age during a perfect moment for moody, contemplative, complaint pop. R.E.M. wailed about losing their religion and everybody hurting while Edie Brickell sang virtually incomprehensible lyrics about being choked in shallow water. Just when the whining got to be overwhelming, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana and the rest of the grunge movement arrived on the scene to add some rage and angst to the proceedings. Revolutionary? Sure. Upbeat? Not exactly. Still, it was what every single one of my classmates was listening to, and while I gamely went to Tower Records and bought my 10,000 Maniacs and the Cure cassettes, I felt like an impostor the entire time. The truth was, my musical tastes were a lot more aligned with those of the two people I spent the most time with: my parents.
Running a theatrical advertising agency meant that my mother listened to a lot of original Broadway cast recordings. As a result, I was perhaps the only seven-year-old in New York City who could sing every last song from Guys and Dolls—even though I’d never been to the show. Years later, I would arrive at Oxford and begin studying T. S. Eliot, only to be pleasantly surprised to find that I already felt intimately familiar with many of his poems—because I still remembered every lyric from Cats.
My father, on the other hand, was one of seven kids born and raised in the macho-, hipster-sounding town of Mitchell, South Dakota. Rather than winding up with a career somehow tied to agriculture like many who went before him (my grandfather sold tractor parts, and one of my uncles is the dairy king of South Dakota), my dad left the state for college in Minnesota, then graduate school in Washington, DC, then tried his hand as an actor in New York City. When that didn’t pan out, he landed in advertising. Perhaps to compensate for his more rural beginnings, he took his degrees in English (BA) and Drama (MA) seriously, and wielded the vocabulary to prove it. Imploring me to keep my voice down when visiting a museum, he’d say, “Let’s all try to remain sotto voce,” while I heaved an exasperated sigh. Objecting to a rather saucy front-page headline the Post ran while I worked there, he called to complain: “Getting rather concupiscent with the cover language, don’t you think?” he asked. My favorite was the moment when he noticed a Christmas decoration that featured a Santa Claus tugging on Rudolph’s reins, as Rudolph’s head bucked back and forth. “Oh, look at Santa with the recalcitrant reindeer,” he commented. Born in 1936, my dad felt truly great music was the kind written by Cole Porter and the Gershwins. (Listen to Annie Lennox sing “Every Time We Say Goodbye” and it’s hard to disagree.) This is why I was probably the only thirteen-year-old who knew all the words to “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and whose idea of a fantastic new album was the latest release from Carly Simon or Linda Ronstadt.
The closest I came to breaking away from the Lite FM preferences of my parents was when I discovered an adorable British pop duo who called themselves Wham! Unfortunately, I “discovered” them about two years after they’d broken up. No matter: by the time I’d thoroughly exhausted every single song on all three of their albums, George Michael was ready to launch his solo career with his new album, Faith.
The album was, of course, massive. Every song, every video—from “I Want Your Sex” to “Father Figure”—became a huge hit. Unless, that is, you were walking the halls of the exclusive, obnoxious, private high school I attended. There, my fellow freshmen would openly declare that George Michael was a “loser” (and I’m ashamed to admit names far worse than that were used) and deemed his ballads—like the exquisite “One More Try”—to be “so totally lame.”
Meanwhile, I was the girl screaming myself hoarse at the Faith tour when George played the Meadowlands arena in New Jersey. My date for the evening was the head writer at my mother’s advertising agency, a fantastic, openly gay man whom I secretly wanted to marry someday. That is, right after I married George. Clearly, I was developing a type.
I never told anyone at school that I’d gone to the concert; I wouldn’t have dared reveal that I adored George to any of my classmates. Besides, it’s not like listening to George on my Walkman, rather than, say, Echo & the Bunnymen, was a huge burden to conceal. Secretly loving George Michael was hardly worthy of discussion. Until, during one magical vacation, it was.
Every year during either Thanksgiving or February break, my parents tried to escape the frigid New York winters and take a vacation with me that involved sand and sun. Most years, the trip was to the US Virgin Islands, where we regularly stayed at a place called Caneel Bay—which at the time was a fairly simple family resort without so much as a swimming pool, but which is now considerably more high-end with not only a pool but also a five-star spa. In 1990, my mother and I were enjoying what passed as one of the major activities at Caneel: floating on yellow foam mats in the middle of the gin-clear water. Then my father came paddling over, and promptly declared that the biggest pop star in the universe was now staying just two doors down.
“I think that guy you like so much is staying here, Katie,” he said. “You know the one with the stubble—George Michaels?”
I had two reasons for bursting into laughter: First, there was absolutely no way that George Michael was staying at a tiny child-friendly resort in the not-exactly-ultra-chic US Virgin Islands. (St. Barths or Mustique it is not.) Second, the last person in the world who would be able to accurately recognize George Michael was my father. My dad could be relied upon to regularly misidentify civilians as celebrities. Living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, less than a mile away from the famed former residence of John Lennon, meant that my father was certain nearly any short Asian woman who passed us on the street was, in fact, Yoko Ono. (It was almost always the woman who sold us fruit at the corner bodega.) Similarly, multiple brunettes over six feet tall were identified by my dad as Sigourney Weaver. He never, ever got it right. “Look—isn’t that Bill Murray?” Dad exclaimed one afternoon, as I turned to look at the tall veterinarian with a receding hairline who actually lived one floor below us in our apartment building.
I knew better than to think for even a nanosecond that my father was right about George staying on the same beach as us.
“Dad,” I said, exhaling dramatically. “There is no way George Michael is here. This place is all families. I don’t know who you just saw—some guy with a five o’clock shadow, probably—but there’s no way it was George Michael.” My mom paddled over and I told her of Dad’s latest “celebrity sighting.” She hooted and confirmed there was no chance George Michael could be staying there. My dad just shrugged.
That night at dinner, I left my parents’ table to join a group of jaded, world-weary teens who alternated between welcoming me as one of them and talking over my head to prove their superiority. Most of them were also from New York, went to obnoxious and exclusive high schools similar to mine, and were several years older than I was. But since we would never see each other again outside of this island and this resort, there was no real reason for them to exclude me. I was generally welcome to join them as they played ping-pong and tried to sneak beer, but I constantly felt as though I were walking a razor-thin ledge, trying desperately to keep from dropping into the chasm of the uncool. That night, as we flopped over several lounge chairs discussing the latest thing we found stupid, one of the teens, a girl named Amy with long, flawless blond hair I envied, rolled over and propped herself up on her elbows.
“Ewwww, guys, did I tell you what I heard?” she said with a half-yawn. “George Michael is staying here. So lame.”
A boy named Max, whose acne-riddled skin apparently did nothing to temper his swaggering sense of self-confidence, let out a derisive snort. “Yeah, my mom said she heard he and his pal were staying at some other resort but people were like, constantly harassing them or whatever, so they came here instead,” he explained. “He’s gross. Who would even care where he was staying?”
“I heard he wants, like, total privacy,” Amy the Blonde was continuing. “Tonight they closed down the beach bar so him and his guest could have dinner there. God, why does he have to be the one staying here? I wish it was someone cool like Michael Stipe or Morrissey.”
I was now sitting up straight, my mind spinning. George Michael really was here? On the same beach where I was? There was no debate to be had: I had to go to wherever he was. Immediately. Declaring that I needed to leave to hunt down my favorite star in the universe was not going to be an acceptable exit line with this group, however.
“Um… I just forgot I have to tell my mom something about… um, a project I forgot I have to finish when I get back to school,” I said, desperately.
“Whatever,” Amy the Blonde said, cracking her gum.
I raced back to my parents’ table.
“Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod,” I hissed to my mom and dad as I reached them, before saying a sentence my father has probably heard less than a dozen times in his life.
“Dad, you were right,” I said. “George Michael is here! He’s here right now! He’s down in the beach bar and oh my god! If I don’t get his autograph I am absolutely going to die. I have to see him.”
“You see! I told you!” my father said triumphantly. Perhaps it was his elation at having been correct that led to what he did next, as my mother waited for the check and I went back to the cool kids.
“Um, yeah, bad news… I gotta go back to the room with my parents. It’s my grandmother’s birthday and we promised to call her,” I said. Absolutely no one seemed sorry to see me go, a fact which might have mortified me had I not been consumed with the task at hand: making my way to George. By then, my father was already fully on the case.
Finding George had proved remarkably easy: he and his friend, finished with dinner and now enjoying a few drinks and some quiet conversation, were still seated in the otherwise-vacant beach bar, surrounded by empty tables. My father wasted no time in walking onto the patio—and seating himself at the table directly next to them.
This did not go unnoticed, and within a few minutes, George and his friend picked up their drinks and moved several tables over. My father waited all of two minutes and then followed suit, moving several tables over and once again seating himself right next to George and his pal. Twenty empty tables to choose from, and my father placed himself immediately adjacent to the world’s biggest pop star not once but twice. So once again, George and his guest felt compelled to get up and move—this time to a table against a stone wall and behind a potted palm tree, effectively thwarting my dad’s attempts to continue stalking them. Not that it mattered: by that point, I had arrived on the scene.
“I followed them from table to table,” my dad said proudly. “But for some reason, now they’re hiding behind that tree.”
And there I saw them—or more accurately, saw him: George Michael, the man whose full name—Georgios Panayiotou—I had practiced saying aloud (for when we said our vows) and whose every biographical detail I had memorized (favorite color: blue. Least favorite food: okra). Less than twenty-five yards away from me. He was really sitting there, laughing with a man I assumed was an old childhood pal or something.
My mom was ready with her ever-present piece of paper and felt-tip pen. “Go ahead, honey,” she said, once again urging me to go after an autograph.
I took a moment to steady myself. I was only a little older than I had been during my Robert Downey Jr. outburst, and with all due respect to Iron Man, my love for George far outweighed any fleeting crush I’d had on Robert. If ever there was a chance of melting down once again, this was it. Not to mention, this was hardly a large public gathering. Judging from how often George and his buddy were making eye contact with each other, they were clearly locked in some sort of meaningful conversation. Despite my misgivings, I knew I would never forgive myself if I didn’t manage to at least say hello, and I once again realized the worst case scenario was completely survivable. If he said no, I’d be disappointed, but I’d live. I had nothing to lose. “You’re not going to cry, you’re not going to cry, you’re not going to cry,” I chanted to myself as I walked toward George’s table.
Given my father’s antics, by that point George and his buddy didn’t seem particularly irked to see me approach. Obviously, they were now resigned to the fact that they were going to be disturbed no matter where they fled.
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” I said, my voice shaking but not near tears; I had learned to rein it in a bit. “But do you think I could have your autograph?”
George smiled at me kindly and put down his glass.
“Sure, not a problem,” he said, but didn’t extend his hand. Then he looked me in the eyes and my heart skipped a beat.
“But one question first,” George said, raising one eyebrow. For one fleeting second I let myself hope that the question was, “Would you like to marry me even though it would be illegal in most states?” Then I listened to what he was actually saying.
“That man you were talking to over there,” George asked, nodding his head toward an area behind me. “Who is he?”
I looked back over at my father, who was sitting with my mother and giving me a thumbs-up while grinning wildly from halfway across the restaurant.
“Uh, him?” I asked nervously, gesturing toward my dad but hoping they meant someone, anyone else. The bartender, maybe?
“Yes, him,” George said. “What I mean is, do we know him or something? Is he someone who has maybe met us before? Are we supposed to know who he is?”
“Uh… no,” I said uncertainly. “I mean, I really don’t think so. That’s just my dad. He’s just… my dad.”
“Oh,” George said. “Well, all right then.” He took the paper and signed it with his name but no message, not that it would make me cherish it any less. I thanked him profusely, wished him and his guest a good evening, and scurried back to my parents.
“What did they say to you?” my mom asked.
“He wanted to know if they’re supposed to know you, Dad,” I said, emphasizing his name like it was the most ridiculous word I’d ever had to utter.
“Hmmm…” my father pondered. “They probably thought I was Tom Courtenay.”
I’m aware that absolutely no one reading this will have the first idea who Tom Courtenay is. He’s a British film and stage actor who was part of the New Wave era of British films in the sixties—i.e., when George Michael was still a child—and most notably had a supporting role in Dr. Zhivago. He looks nominally like my father in the sense that they both have brown hair, strong noses, and human bodies. I’m going to go out on a limb and say with some certainty that George Michael and his good friend had no idea who Tom Courtenay was, and probably still do not. Nevertheless, while my father’s invoking an obscure British thespian won’t tell you much about how he looks, just know that it explains a lot about why I’m now the sort of person who uses words like “innumerate” and “gravitas” in a sentence. You say “pretentious”; Dad and I say “erudite.”
In the week that followed, my mother essentially invented the photo bomb, floating on her raft absurdly close to a black-Speedo-clad George while my father claimed to take pictures of her, all while actually focusing instead on George. The resulting photos show a justifiably wary George front-and-center with my mother’s butt floating just out of view.
When I returned to school the following week, everyone began trading their vacation stories. I was ready to launch into the incredible tale of my encounter with George, but I stopped short. I knew if I talked about it, I’d have to roll my eyes and let sarcasm coat every word. I’d have to offer details about how “lame” he was and how “gross” he looked. I didn’t want to do that. I couldn’t do that. I stayed silent.
Luckily, over the years, I got better at embracing my preference for bubblegum-flavored culture. Living in England was a start: nothing like the land that gave us Monty Python to give you freedom to celebrate the deeply silly. The advent of irony also helped: whether I’m being sincere or not when I discuss my love for the animated series Jem and the Holograms really doesn’t seem to matter to my hipster friends who bought me the DVD boxed set for my birthday.
There are still moments, however, when I once again fear my tastes are too pedestrian. In the town where I now live, I belong to a book club attended by some of the most brilliant women I’ve ever met. They are doctors and lawyers and writers and just generally sarcastic, witty, erudite, insightful whip-smart ladies whose company I feel honored to enjoy. At every single one of our gatherings, however, toward the end, there is a moment that goes like this:
Brilliant Lawyer: So what should we read next month?
Brilliant Doctor: I’d really like something meaty. Has anyone read that book that the New York Times just reviewed, about the Serbian orphans battling blindness? The one set against the backdrop of the fall of the Ottoman Empire?
Brilliant Writer: Oh, that sounds good. I heard about that on NPR.
Brilliant Lawyer: And it was originally written in Serbian but I hear the translation is fantastic! And it’s only five hundred pages long so it should go by quickly. I’m pretty sure it just won the Ida McCorklestein Prize for Obscure Literature. Sounds like a good option to me!
Me (muttering to myself): Soooo… I guess no one wants to talk about that new Jennifer Weiner novel about the funny, smart, slightly chubby girl who finds happiness against the odds?
It should be noted that I occasionally succeed at shoving my preference for easily digestible literature down the throats of my fellow book club members, and every single time the book has turned out to be abysmal (here’s a tip: avoid the one about the promiscuous girl who learns nothing and is generally an atrocious human being from start to finish) which makes me silently vow not to proclaim my mainstream preferences ever again—until I wind up reading a novel the following month that contains graphic descriptions of worm-infested soldiers suffering from dysentery. Four weeks later, there I sit, swearing to my genius pals that I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. I will admit, of course, that these women have pushed me to greater heights: thanks to them, I read The Goldfinch (all 771 pages of it) and actually enjoyed it. But not as much as I enjoy being able to tell people I’ve read The Goldfinch.
Now, over two decades after I was a George-denier, I had landed at People, a magazine that unabashedly celebrates pop culture. The Fonz used to be on our cover. The Bachelor currently is. In one of the first story meetings I attended, someone began talking about a celebrity with a breast cancer story to share. Soon the conversation had pivoted into a discussion of other stars who had chronicled their breast cancer fights with the magazine—Sheryl Crow, Christina Applegate.
“Remember when we did that first big mastectomy story? With that blonde actress who was on that show?” one editor said while others tried to remember which star she meant.
“Ann Jillian,” I said, almost reflexively.
“Right! Her!” the editor said. “It was a big deal back then. She was still on that waitress show, whatever it was called…”
“It’s a Living,” I said, finishing the sentence.
Another editor looked at me.
“Are you even old enough to have watched that show?” she asked.
“I even remember the name of the restaurant where they all worked. Above the Top. Because it was a rooftop restaurant at the top of a skyscraper,” I replied. “I can probably name half the cast, too. Crystal Bernard, the actress from Wings, got her start on that show. So did Susan Sullivan, before she became Maggie on Falcon Crest.”
The words had spilled out of my mouth before my brain could register how bizarrely obsessed they might have made me sound.
“Okay, you’re scaring me a little bit,” the editor replied. I looked down, embarrassed that I had revealed what a TV geek I truly was. Then the editor spoke again.
“That’s completely awesome,” she added.
The real eye-opener came a few days later, when I attended my first pitch meeting, in which the editors for each section suggested stories they thought would be good for upcoming issues.
Julie Dam, a Harvard-educated, incredibly bright editor who had previously worked for Time magazine’s London bureau and had published a novel already, oversaw the music coverage for the magazine. She excitedly suggested a comeback feature to Larry.
“George Michael is touring for the first time in fifteen years,” she explained. In the years since I’d left him behind that palm tree in the Virgin Islands, George had experienced a rather spectacular fall from grace. In 1998, he’d been busted propositioning an undercover police officer in a public bathroom in Beverly Hills. I had worked at the Post at the time and helped suggest the headline we eventually ran for the story: Zip Me Up before You Go Go. (That’s a reference to George’s big hit when he was a member of Wham! but if I have to explain that to you, then the only reason you’ve read this far is because you are in some way related to me.) Following that, George had a string of drug-related arrests, and largely retreated from public view, with his albums failing to gain much traction on the charts or on the radio. But in 2006, George announced his first major world tour after years of semi-seclusion, and in 2008 that tour was still going strong. George was performing all his greatest hits from Wham! and his solo career, and Gen Xers like me were going to the concerts in droves.
“I think it would be great to do a catching-up feature with him,” Julie suggested.
Before I knew it, I was gasping out loud.
“Oh my god, I love him,” I gasped. It was as if I’d been waiting to say it for twenty years, and now I couldn’t stop.
“I got his autograph when I was on vacation as a teenager and it’s one of my prized possessions and he was amazing when I saw him in concert in 1990 and Faith is my favorite album of all time,” I said in one long sentence.
Julie smiled at me and continued her pitch; that’s when I noticed that several other people in the room were murmuring in agreement with her: George was great. Julie’s pitch was rock-solid.
I later learned that Larry Hackett’s musical taste is far more closely aligned with the too-cool-for-school classmates I once had. I’m pretty sure he’s seen Echo & the Bunnymen in concert. That afternoon, however, he turned to Julie, nodded his head and said, “That’s a great idea. Go for it.”
At last, I was home. I had found my people—at People.
After the meeting, Julie stuck her head into my office.
“Hey, I’m going to go see George in concert,” she said. “Want to come, too?”
As if she even had to ask. We attended his show at Madison Square Garden the following week, and the concert was incredible—and I still remembered every word to every song. I still have the ticket stub.
George’s performance was amazing, and he looked nearly as good as he had in that little black Speedo. Almost as wonderful as seeing George on stage, though, was witnessing the packed arena. Thousands of women in their thirties—women who, like me, had been in their teens during George’s heyday—filled the seats. I was not alone in my love for him; far from it. There were many more people like me, even if apparently none of them had gone to my high school.
Best of all, I had found a place where I got to work with such fans every day. I think somehow, as I had struggled in a job I no longer loved, I always believed I would make it to somewhere better. All along, on some level, I was telling myself: I’ve gotta have faith.