“Just hear me out,” my friend Tina was telling me at lunch. “Go to the audition and if it’s not for you, don’t do it.” Tina was an executive at MTV whose low-key manner belied her high-octane job. Being around her always made me feel like we were in a secret club, filled with intrigue and excitement. (A typical staccato phone message: Yello, Tina calling. Here’s the thing. I have a meeting at three, but how about we go shoe shopping at four. Check the schedule. Circle back.)
As we split a piece of chocolate cake, Tina said that MTV was starting an all-music channel called M2 (later to change to MTV2). They were searching for a female on-air personality who had a decent knowledge of music. The list of New York–based lady rock journalists is a concise one, so my name inevitably came up. “I know you don’t like doing television, but this could be fun,” she said.
Sometimes, if I wrote a story for Rolling Stone that made some sort of splash, I would be called upon to do an interview for one of the celebrity news shows. I usually wriggled out of it, because I found the whole process excruciating. First, a crew would show up at the office and film you faking some activity so that filler footage could run while an announcer said, “Jancee Dunn is a reporter at Rolling Stone.” Usually the producer would instruct you to type at your computer, or chat on the phone to a nonexistent “source,” or, the worst, stride purposefully down a hallway with a “stop the presses” expression on your face. This usually involves multiple takes because the producer will tell you that you’re smirking, or look slightly demented, or that you’re staring at the camera when you should act as if you’re lost in thought, mentally writing your next story’s lead paragraph as you walk along.
Then, for forty-five minutes, you dutifully answer a producer’s detailed questions. That night, the extensive footage is narrowed down to one dopey, truncated micro-quote (“Sarah Michelle Gellar is a great girl, and—”) before your answer is awkwardly cut off. Then they cue up the garish music and they’re off to the Cannes Film Festival, where the stars light up the red carpet!
“I’m horrible on TV,” I told Tina. “Trust me.”
“Just give it a try,” she said. “It’s only part-time, so you can keep your job at Rolling Stone. I’m going to have a producer call you to set it up.”
Two days later, the producer phoned to give me instructions for the audition, which was to take place, terrifyingly, on the street outside the MTV studio in Times Square. “Don’t wear white, because depending on the lighting, it might glow,” he said. “No patterns or stripes, because they can look animated, almost, on camera. You know how it can look like it’s moving? And you’ll probably have to read off of cue cards, but there won’t be a lot written on them, so don’t worry.”
I worried. “How do I act? How do you want me to behave?”
“Just be yourself,” he said. “Tell jokes, and if you have any information about the musicians you’re talking about, throw it in there, because you want to seem informed. We’ll send you a rough script, but feel free to say whatever you want.”
The script introduced different videos with a couple of pertinent facts, such as new projects, tour dates, or background information about the video shoot. The channel only played music videos, and the variety was staggering. The playlist resembled some insane late-night cable access show: a Buzzcocks video would run after Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now,” followed by footage from an early-seventies James Brown performance. LeAnn Rimes, N.W.A., KISS, the Cocteau Twins, Nirvana, the Sugar Hill Gang—all were tossed in together.
For days, I hastily memorized trivia on the artists I was to mention and then practiced a way of casually throwing it out there as if I had just thought about it. Oh, here’s something, Gene Simmons was once an elementary school teacher. On the day of the shoot, I met the producer on the street behind the studio.
“I’m going to hold up a cue card,” he said, “but try not to look at it. Just talk to the camera as though you’re telling something to a friend.”
My lips were trembling. My smile was a ghastly, grinning skull. As I rattled out my fun facts, the cameraman swooped the camera around me to create a spinning effect. I assumed they wanted my delivery to be short and sharp, but I found myself rambling as I corrected myself, or mused aloud, or wandered off on tangents. This was supposed to be a hip new channel, and I sounded distressingly like Bob Newhart. Flop sweat beaded my forehead. They urged me to be animated, but my arms hung heavily at my sides. At one point, for variety, I clasped my hands together before they returned to their droopy job.
One script introduced a video from the Cranberries, so I put in a fact about the lead singer, Dolores O’Riordan. “She recently won a libel suit against a newspaper claiming she was cavorting onstage wearing no panties,” I said. “Dolores claimed she was, in fact, wearing panties, and she won.”
“That was great,” said the producer brightly, afterward. “We’ll let you know.”
“Right,” I said, quickly gathering my things.
A week later, a second producer called. “My name is Lou,” he said. “I’m the supervising producer.” He paused. “I saw your audition tape.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “Painful.”
“I don’t know how you did it,” he said. “Apparently somebody likes you.”
I got the gig. Taping took a half day, two days a week. My Rolling Stone editors tolerated my absence from the office, provided I got my work done. On my first day as a veejay I reported for duty at an East Village thrift shop. MTV2 didn’t want a studio setting, so we shot at various locales downtown. We were allowed to wear our own clothes if we wanted, so I showed up with a carefully chosen green shirt with a subtle pattern on it. A slim, dark-haired guy ran over holding a cigarette in one hand and a clipboard in the other. “Hi, I’m Lou,” he said, grabbing my hand absently. “It’s nine hundred degrees in here.” While the camera crew set up, we quickly got to know each other. In five minutes I extracted that he grew up in Hoboken, was an aficionado of bad made-for-TV movies that usually ended up on the Lifetime network, was a sugar fiend, and didn’t have much of a problem speaking his mind.
He stared at my top. “What’s with the shirt?” He pointed to what I thought was an artful splotch on my left breast. “One of your tits looks darker than the other. It looks like you’re leaking milk.” Before I could say anything, he pulled me over to a corner where a production assistant was setting up a craft services table with snacks, grabbed a bag of sour gummy peaches, and started to eat. “Get these away from me,” he said. He continued to pop them in his mouth. Was I supposed to actually take them?
“Listen,” he said, “we film dozens of segments that will run over the course of a few days, so you’ll have to change clothes and hair.” He introduced me to the wardrobe girl and a hair and makeup artist. “It’s your new entourage,” he said drily.
I changed in my “dressing room,” a tiny bathroom in the back of the thrift shop. The wardrobe girl buttoned my blouse for me and tied a scarf around my waist as a belt. Then she stood back, squinting critically, then darted forward again, fussing, adjusting. After she nodded, I was passed to makeup. I was fighting to stay cool but my inner hillbilly kept bobbing up: Garsh, there’s free food on a table that you can jist go ’n’ eat! And a lady who puts on your makeup! And I got me a lil’ ol’ intern gal who runs to git me a Diet Coke!
Lou bustled up and told me to be ready in five minutes. “Oh, and the channel is on a satellite dish, so you need to say the transponder number.”
“I’m too nervous,” I said. “I won’t remember. Plus, I don’t know what a transponder is.”
He handed me a piece of paper. “Well, read it off of this when you’re on camera. We’re very informal here.”
The makeup artist slapped on some more powder and then we were ready. As I got into position and a sound guy attached a microphone to my shirt, another new veejay who had just finished her shift lingered in the doorway of the thrift shop.
“Lou,” I whispered. “Why is she watching me?”
He raised an eyebrow. “She’s not doing anything. I’ve got news for you, you’re going to have to get used to people watching you.”
I leaned in. “Yes, but this is my first day.”
He rolled his eyes and sighed loudly. “I’ll try to get her into wardrobe or something.” After he lured her away, he returned. “Try to relax,” he said. “You look like you’re about to have an embolism. It’s just me and the crew, and believe me, we don’t have any viewers. We’re really working on our own Private Idaho here.” I could feel some hives form on my neck. He peered at me. “What are those?”
“Hives,” I whispered. “It happens when I get frightened.”
He shook his head. “Can we get some makeup?” he yelled. The makeup artist stubbed out her cigarette and hurried over.
“Can you spackle her hives, please?” he said. She dabbed gingerly at the welts with a makeup sponge, keeping her face mercifully impassive. Then Lou turned to me. “Listen, if you mess up, try to correct yourself and just keep going. Okay?”
“Sure.”
Then he counted down. “In five! Four!” Then he held up three fingers, two, one, and silently pointed my way. My lungs constricted as I stared back at the ring of faces—some bored, some interested—that surrounded me.
“Hello, viewers,” I ventured. “You’re watching the very first hour of MTV2. It’s a new network with videos, videos, videos, twenty-four hours a day. I don’t quite know what I’m going to be doing, but I do know they have me on board.”
Lou nodded. Good.
I tried not to glance at the cue card that the production assistant was holding. “Coming up we have something new from Liz Phair and a classic from Bob Barley.” I stopped, flustered, then I looked at Lou. “Can we do it again?” I asked, assuming he would stop the tape.
He shook his head.
“Please? I said ‘Bob Barley.’ I’m begging you.”
“Keep going,” he said firmly.
“Seriously, that was terrible—”
“No!” he said. “I will decide when we do it again! Keep going!”
Chastised, I continued. After a couple of takes, Lou pulled me aside.
“What made you decide to begin with ‘Hello, viewers’?” he said, lighting up his twentieth cigarette of the day. “Who talks like that? Even Diane Sawyer doesn’t say ‘Hello, viewers.’”
“So do you want me to say something else?”
He shook his head while he exhaled a plume of smoke. “No.”
Back we went for more segments. During one in which I talked about a clip from a tight-pantsed Billy Squier, who was clearly hanging to the right, I started to break down in a nerves-induced giggle fit. This tended to happen to me during somber events, like funerals. As I chokingly tried to Keep Going and deliver my lines, tears poured out of my eyes and I could barely croak out a word. Still, the camera continued, relentlessly, to film me.
At the next shoot, Lou informed me that the word from on high was that the network brass actually enjoyed my trainwreck delivery. (“Focus,” said one letter from a viewer that Lou made me read aloud on the air. “Say your words. Pause and breathe. Take your time.”) Because the channel had an organic feel—as if you had stumbled onto a cable access show programmed by a musical polymath—the slightly unhinged quality that I brought to the proceedings must have hewed to the Keeping It Real philosophy.
As I got more comfortable on camera, I began to love the job. The young crew worked hard but knew how to have fun. Every week we would set up somewhere different, and it was like a traveling party: a Broadway costume store, the basement of a sewing machine factory on the Lower East Side, a mouse-infested artificial flower factory, a dusty tenement on Twelfth Avenue, and once, memorably, a brownie factory. Taping at a bar could occasionally be hazardous. When the Deftones showed up at a sticky-floored downtown dive, lead singer Chino Moreno promptly turned a shade of garbage-bag green. “I just puked outside,” he announced. “We were here drinking last night and the smell made me sick.”
“I have Certs,” I volunteered, reaching for my purse.
We filmed on the street, where homeless people would flap up to me and gibber away as I was trying to introduce a Black Flag video. The whole procedure had an appealingly lawless feel, particularly in the early days, when it seemed like our only viewers were in the Big House. We were constantly amazed at how many prisoners enjoyed full cable. Sometimes I would read their carefully composed letters on the air.
“Here is yet another letter from our friends in the Arizona State Prison in Yuma, Arizona,” I would say brightly, holding a piece of tattered stationery aloft. “‘We love MTV2 and watch it for hours,’” I read. “‘Could you please play ‘Man in the Box’ by Alice in Chains, and also ‘Freebird.’ And please keep doing the mess-ups, they make us laugh, and we can use some laughs in here.” I guess they thought my gaffes were scripted.
“No problem, fellas,” I would say cheerily. “A video from Alice in Chains is coming up. And thanks so much for the sketch of the crying clown, I see some real artistic talent. Keep watching!”
Not only did viewers request videos, but crew members could, too. “Do you want to program an hour of videos?” Lou asked me one day. “The more obscure, the better.”
“Really?” I asked. “You would let me do that?”
“We all can,” he said. “Don’t flatter yourself. I programmed four hours for my birthday. I put in every Kate Bush video there was.”
So I programmed what I considered the most embarrassing videos ever made, among them “Hello” by Lionel Richie (plot: a gorgeous blind girl falls for art teacher Ritchie and fashions an elaborate clay bust of his head, each Jheri-curl on his clay mullet painstakingly detailed).
As the months rolled on and I adjusted to life on camera, my skin hardened to the consistency of a rhino’s as my appearance was subjected to new levels of scrutiny—not from the executives at MTV, who, bless them, never said a single word about my looks, but from everybody else. If I would tape a show on the street, a crowd of bystanders would form who commented loudly on my appearance as though I were a hologram. “She’s on TV?” one construction worker wondered as I talked to the camera. “With that ass?”
“Well,” observed his companion, a guy whose paunch spilled over his cutoff shorts, “it looks like they’re only filming her from the waist up.”
I broke off in the middle of my spiel. “I can hear you, you know,” I said to the guys, who both jumped as though I were a statue come to life. “I’m two yards away.”
If I changed my hairstyle, mail would promptly arrive from my incarcerated pals, who commented more frequently than my girlfriends every time I lost weight or got new highlights. “I notice Miss Dunn that you cut your hair so that it is about one inch below your shoulders,” read one dispatch from a Kansas penitentiary, written in stilted, warden-approved language. “I think that is a good length for you Miss Dunn but I liked you better with the darker hair but I do like the length as it makes your face look thinner.”
I never realized until I appeared on camera that evidence of everything I did showed on my face or body. If I ate pizza the night before we taped, the wardrobe girl would announce, “Wow, you had carbs last night, huh?” as she was zipping up my pants (yes, she put on my pants). If I had been to a show and had a few drinks, our new makeup expert, an unflappable Brit who we called Sheree the Makeup Artist, would have to pull out the industrial-strength eye bag reducer.
As MTV2 grew, my encounters with walk-on guests would occasionally derail into embarrassment. I would often be so jittery before interviews that my skin would explode with monstrous stress zits. While magazine interviews were usually a one-on-one affair, TV was different. Usually it consisted of the artist, the crew, and the artist’s sizable entourage of publicists, managers, and stylists, all of them gathered around the camera in a horseshoe, eyes trained, hawklike, on their star.
With magazine interviews, I could also control the outcome by excising all awkward moments from the text—my fumbling attempts to befriend, my inappropriately loud guffaws after a star’s mild joke (“Hahahahaha! Whoo, that is some funny stuff!”). On camera, there was usually no time to make any sort of connection, fumbling or otherwise. The artist arrived, plopped into a chair already styled and readied by their squad back at the hotel, and we began.
During an interview with Outkast, I had just asked Andre and Big Boi my first question when the producer broke in. “Stop tape,” she announced. “The zit on her cheek has skin flakes around it and the camera is picking it up. Does anyone have Scotch tape?” A production assistant was dispatched to find a roll as we all waited silently. Sometimes artists do not want to chat between takes, presumably to conserve their energy. I looked at Andre and gave him one of those tight, grimacelike, slightly downturned smiles reserved for coworkers you pass in the hallway at work, when you want to assume a pleasant, hail-fellow expression without actually chatting them up. Andre did not return the favor. Instead, he broke eye contact with me and tactfully gazed at the floor.
“Hold still,” Sheree instructed as she ripped off the offending skin flakes while Andre, Big Boi, and their entourage sat quietly. My cheeks burned as I searched for something clever to say about skin flakes. Nothing turned up.
Worse was my encounter with Bono and Larry Mullen from U2, which they requested take place at an Irish bar in Midtown so that they could drink Guinness and play pool. The previous evening I had worked myself into a panic at the prospect of meeting one of my musical holies. I grew up with them, played their albums until they warped, pored over the liner notes as I lay on the floor of my bedroom. I even loved Bono’s military-boots phase. God help me, I even loved that mullet.
The night before the interview, a three-dimensional pimple rose majestically out of my forehead like the Washington Monument. Alarmed, I speed-dialed Heather.
“I feel nauseous,” I said.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You have an interview coming up. Is it for Rolling Stone or MTV?”
“MTV, and I’ve got one of those hornlike pimples on my forehead.” I flopped down on my bed.
“Oh, please,” she said. “Why are you worrying? No one is even going to notice it except you. And it’s just a celebrity. You’ve done a billion of these. Where are your Calms pills? Take a Calms. You’ll be fine. Who is it this time?”
I paused. “Bono,” I said.
She was silent. “Oh,” she said finally.
I sat up. “Wait, why are you being so quiet?”
“Bono,” she breathed. “Listen, did you try putting toothpaste on that zit? I heard that makes it go down. The paste, not the gel.” She was quiet again. “If I met Bono, I don’t even know if I’d be able to talk. He is probably the one person that would completely freak me out.”
I took the phone into the bathroom and ransacked my cabinet, searching frantically for my Calms pills. Mama needs her Calms. Was the pharmacy still open? Heather was still talking.
“—I don’t know if it would be better if he wore the sunglasses or not.” She was musing softly, as if to herself. “Would it be better to look into the darkness or have to stare into his eyes? Probably the sunglasses would be less terrifying. Because if you look in his eyes you’d get locked, and then you would forget what you’re talking about.”
“You’re not helping,” I said.
“You’ll be fine,” she said quickly. “Remember: This is a huge event for you, but your interview is one of fourteen things he’s checking off during the day. Plus, he has a reputation for being nice.”
I showed up an hour early for the shoot. Lou hastened over. “I hate everyone today,” he announced by way of greeting. “I walked to this shoot filled with rage. The whole fuckin’ city is filled with twenty-five-year-old women talking talking talking on their cell phones, with their cigarettes and their lower back tattoos and their little fuckin’ dogs. You know what I was doing while I was walking here? I was deliberately bumping into people on the sidewalk who were on their cell phones.”
“Lou,” I broke in. “I’m feeling a littl—”
“—I was just hoping they would say something to me so I could lash out. And you know what, I used to love Starbucks—like, instead of having a bag of candy in the afternoon I would have a mocha Frappuccino, but now I hate it, because every time I go in, there are these throngs of twenty-five-year-old women all saying that they need their Starbucks, and they’re all in there slurping Starbucks like it’s a giant cock.” He sighed loudly. “I just want to go home and make a list of people I hate, but I’m afraid that when I die, people will discover it and say that I was crazy.”
His eyes flicked to my forehead and he abruptly stopped talking. “What is that?” he asked, frowning. “Did you hurt yourself?” He examined me from the side. “I hate to tell you this, but it actually shows up if you’re in profile,” he said in a low voice. “Listen, when you’re talking to Bono, it might be best if you faced the camera.”
“But doesn’t that look strange if he’s answering one of my questions and I’m staring at the camera?”
Lou gave me a meaningful look.
“I look like a unicorn, don’t I?” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s a little distracting.”
The band arrived with no entourage except for their publicist. Bono, at about five feet seven inches, was much shorter than I expected—you’ll notice that he usually wears shoes or boots with a platform on them—but his charisma was like a crackling force field. He introduced himself to and shook hands with every member of the crew before making his way over to me.
Paul David Hewson! Born May 10, 1960, sleeps four hours a night, allergic to red wine, a chess whiz, owns two German shepherds! My mind whirred with arcane fan questions: Why have you never sung “Elvis Presley and America” in concert? Is it because you improvised the lyrics in one take? Would you ever put “Boy Girl,” a track about bisexuality never released in the States, on a compilation? Did you really take off your clothes during an interview in a London restaurant in 1992 because you were bored? You mention in “Angel of Harlem” hearing something on BLS—is that the New York R & B radio station WBLS, by chance? Didn’t you get the idea for “A Day Without Me” from a friend who tried to kill himself? Well, where is he now? Didn’t Larry once get injections of bull’s blood from a holistic doctor, and if so, what, exactly, was up with that? What did your wife, Ali, think of “The Sweetest Thing,” allegedly written after you forgot her birthday during the Joshua Tree recording sessions?
I didn’t have time to ask any of these questions as Bono smoothly commandeered the conversation. When he talks to you, he is utterly focused. In the ten minutes I was able to chat with him while the crew frantically rejiggered the lighting in that murky bar, the floor dropped away and the room spun around as we had a quiet, intense chat that touched on literature and politics and music and poetry. Well, mostly he talked, as I struggled to hold up my end.
As he was summoned to sit in front of the TV cameras, he made a self-deprecating joke that he had the face of a Welsh coal miner. “Oh Bono, that’s not true,” I tittered like a horse’s ass. Lou, from his post behind the TV monitor, shook his head in disgust.
After I asked my questions, I stared straight ahead at the camera as they responded. Don’t turn to the side, I kept telling myself. They must have been wondering why they had to address my ear, but they gamely went along with it, presumably figuring that I had some sort of showbiz tic.
As our interview wound up, Bono kissed my hand. I blushed, while Lou’s eyes rolled so far into the back of his head that he could probably see his spinal cord.