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By Root 652 0

belongs in the category of nice stars (Matt Damon) rather than of difficult stars (Ralph Fiennes). Stars in the nice category act as if they’re just like you (i.e., me) so that you will like them and write flattering things about them, a strategy that is almost universally successful despite every writer’s belief that he’s far too jaded to fantasize that the Vanity Fair cover is incidental to Brad Pitt’s desire to give him a tour of his house. Kitty is sorry for the twelve flaming hoops I’ve had to jump through and the several miles of piping hot coals I’ve sprinted across for the privilege of spending forty minutes in her company. She’s sorry for having just spent the first six of those minutes talking to somebody else. Her welter of apologies reminds me of why I prefer difficult stars, the ones who barricade themselves inside their stardom and spit through the cracks. There is something out of control about a star who cannot be nice, and the erosion of a subject’s self-control is the sine qua non of celebrity reporting.

The waiter takes our order. And since the ten minutes of badinage I proceed to exchange with Kitty are simply not worth relating, I’ll mention instead (in the footnote-ish fashion that injects a whiff of cracked leather bindings into pop-cultural observation) that when you’re a young movie star with blondish hair and a highly recognizable face from that recent movie whose grosses can only be explained by the conjecture that every person in America saw it at least twice, people treat you in a manner that is somewhat different—in fact is entirely different—from the way they treat, say, a balding, stoop-shouldered, slightly eczematous guy approaching middle age. On the surface it’s the same—“May I take your order?” etc.—but throbbing just beneath that surface is the waiter’s hysterical recognition of my subject’s fame. And with a simultaneity that can only be explained using principles of quantum mechanics, specifically, the properties of so-called entangled particles, that same pulse of recognition reaches every part of the restaurant at once, even tables so distant from ours that there is simply no way they can see us. 1 Everywhere, people are swiveling, craning, straining and contorting, levitating inadvertently from chairs as they grapple with the urge to lunge at Kitty and pluck off tufts of her hair and clothing.

I ask Kitty how it feels to always be the center of attention.

“Weird,” she says. “It’s so all of a sudden. You feel like there’s no way you deserve it.”

See? Nice.

“Oh, come now,” I say, and lob her a compliment on her performance as the homeless junkie turned FBI gunslinger/acrobat in Oh, Baby, Oh—the sort of shameless bit of fawning that makes me wonder whether I might prefer death by lethal injection to my present vocation as a celebrity reporter. Wasn’t she proud?

“I was proud,” she says. “But in a way, I didn’t even know what I was doing yet. With my new movie, I feel more—”

“Hold that thought!” I cry, though the waiter has not yet reached our table, and the tray he bears aloft is probably not even ours. Because I don’t want to hear about Kitty’s new movie; I couldn’t care less and neither could you, I know; her prattle about the challenging role and the trusting relationship she had with her director and what an honor it was to work opposite such a seasoned star as Tom Cruise is the bitter pill we both must swallow in exchange for the privilege of spending some collective time in Kitty’s company. But let’s put it off as long as possible!

Luckily, it is our tray (food arrives faster if you’re dining with a star): a Cobb salad for Kitty; a cheeseburger, fries and Caesar salad for me.

A bit of theory as we settle down to lunch: the waiter’s treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien