A Year in the Life of a Hollywood Personal Assistant

In which she drinks at Dana Tana's and passes checks at the Scientology Center and battles wildfires in Laguna Beach. Bonus chapter to FORTY BUCKS AND A DREAM: STORIES FROM LOS ANGELES

“[Los Angeles] has always been marked by a certain languorousness, an idleness in the population—armies of people with nothing to do, going nowhere in particular.” - Judith Freeman, The Long Embrace

“Sometimes I think the only real forces here are circumstance and grace.” - D.J. Waldie, Holy Land

“Darling!” she said, and she held out her arms.

“My God,” I said. “Don’t you think this has gone far enough?” - John Fante, Ask the Dust

FORTY BUCKS AND A DREAM: Stories from Los Angeles is available right now (paperback drops tomorrow). Thank you for buying! Tell your friends; let me what you think. Until then, please enjoy my time working as a personal assistant more than I did.

Yuppie Like Me, or, A Year in the Life of a Hollywood Personal Assistant

While there may be more excruciating film industry jobs than that of personal assistant, I’ve never had one. You might think, but it’s a glorious opportunity for someone young and eager. And recall the photos you saw in Us Weekly, of a Kardashian with her assistant, and they were wearing identical tops and had identical blowouts and were both drinking matcha lattes and they really looked like the best of friends.

Let me disabuse you of this romance: the duty of the personal assistant is to listen to the complaints of the employer, who is understood to be more important, ergo more stressed, than any citizen on the planet. When said employer is super-cranky, the PA is paid to be on the receiving end of steaming piles of humiliation. This, between fetching whatever needs fetching, say, a $2000 white leather jacket with fringe and shoulder pads and a belt AND the sort of fake Native American medallions typically found on souvenir dreamcatchers. And a bra for the Porsche, and a gift for the sullen teenage daughter, you pick it out, up to four, no, five hundred dollars. And since you’re going that way, stop at In-N-Out, but not the drive-through, go inside, because your boss says he can taste the difference, but has also expressly instructed you to not leave the jacket in your car, it might get stolen, and by the way, do you know your car smells?

I did not sign on to be a personal assistant. In 1992, I was reading and writing criticism on about ten screenplays a week for International Creative Management, a task that took roughly thirty hours and netted $450. Was this entertaining? Not really. Somewhere around 70 percent of scripts are formulaic pieces of crap, 20 percent are laughably awful, 9.9 percent are worth recommending, and .1 percent extraordinary, and in three years of reading, I came across two that actually made me cry: Jack the Bear by Steve Zaillian (screenwriter also of Schindler’s List and Gangs of New York) and The Interpretation of Dreams, which so moved me I phoned the writer at home (that his number in New York City was on the script is an indication of just how out of the industry loop he was) to tell him so. I think he thought I was a weirdo.

But I also read books for ICM, because I enjoyed the interruption, and because they paid up to $1/page. One was a sloppily typed 600-page romp called Yuppie Like Me, about a club-footed punk rocker in Manhattan who decides to go undercover as a yuppie, to impress women but also to try to outrun the stench of failure that’s clung to him since high school. It was written by Legs McNeil, who in real life started a ‘zine in the early ‘70s called Punk, and is credited with naming the genre. The Yuppie manuscript was cruel and incisive and hilarious; I wept with laughter through nearly the whole thing and gave it a glowing recommendation. Later, I would pal around with McNeil in the East Village, an afternoon that involved us stepping over a pile of throw-up someone left outside his apartment door.