Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [9]
Heidi and Lauren were besties, and it was easy to understand why they liked each other. Lauren because Heidi would never be a true rival for the crown, and Heidi because Lauren was the It Girl, and those of us who strive to be It like to be as close to It as possible so that we may benefit from its reflected glory. Lauren needed an entourage to promote her queen-bee status and Heidi was comfortable being second banana. Heidi was fun and also fun to watch: a lot less guarded about her image than Lauren, Heidi would complain about her five-hour work week and roll her eyes at co-workers.
Much like most women who remain glued to The Hills, at certain points in my life, I’ve been both Lauren and Heidi (but more often played the “Heidi” to a friend’s “Lauren”). The Lauren-Heidi dynamic is really an ode to the high-school friendship: a black-and-white way of looking at the world. One is rich. The other is not. One is pretty. The other is not quite. One is popular. The other would like to be. My own “Heidi” phase occurred when I was a financial aid student at Columbia. Sure, there were many other nice, earnest, hardworking kids to hang out with. But I wanted to have fun—to go to nightclubs and cool parties, to do the stuff that comes naturally to kids with resources. The typical student scraping by on a work-study program didn’t know how much a table at Au Bar cost, let alone where it was, and I wanted to.
There was no middle class at my college. You were either a trust-fund kid or a scholarship student. I’m not from Crested Butte, Colorado. But I might as well have been. My parents were rich once, when we lived in Manila, but who cares? They weren’t rich when I went to college, and by that time, the memory of our chauffeur-driven lifestyle had faded with the reality of our humble circumstances: running the employee cafeterias at several Sears stores. (To this day, the thought of Sears sends a shudder down my spine.)
My Laurens were rich-girl Natashas as described by Tolstoy: Girls who had everything and were made even more attractive by the abundance of charm and luck in their oh-so-privileged lives. My first Lauren was my roommate: a sloe-eyed bohemian who slept on Laura Ashley sheets and left her Swiss gold necklaces in the sink. I still remember how fluffy her Ralph Lauren towels were.
Caitlyn had an irresistible confidence. Although she is nothing—at all—like Lauren (she’s a classic NPR canvas bag girl and would die before driving a Mercedes), she did have Lauren’s ability to command a room. Because—well, simply because she was Caitlyn. Several different boys were in love with her every week. They would troop into our room, looking for her, leaving behind little books of poetry or other tokens of their devotion. I’d never seen it before, but it’s true: there are the pursued and the pursuers, and some girls are lucky enough to fall in the former category.
This is a tangent, but bear with me: The whole poor-little-rich-kid story we’re spoon-fed in mass media simply doesn’t ring true to me. Sure, some rich people are awful and neglect their kids, but from what I’ve seen, mostly the opposite is true. The rich parents I’ve known have been devoted, engaged, active, and interested in their kids’ lives. They keep a stable family unit. And this is what I mean by these girls being Natashas—they were rich in every sense of the word: rich in material things and in the things that really matter. Caitlyn’s family was close-knit and glamorous. Her parents had been married for forty years. Her sisters worked for magazines or educational think tanks. They were connected to a vibrant network of insiders. Caitlyn never once had to use the college employment office. Upon graduation, she got a job at Vogue through her sister’s friend. Lauren’s parents don’t seem to be too far from Caitlyn’s. The Conrads are still married. And they helped her expand her business empire and brand: the fashion line, the YA books.