Part 7: Meeting Taylor drunk on Oscar night
Taylor Swift took possession of our house in Fall 2015. At the same time, my second book Sporting Guide (historical fiction set in the world of vice and sex work in 1890s Los Angeles) was published. In January of that year, right before my dad died, maybe the day before, my publisher reminded me that I needed to turn in the final draft with Acknowledgements included. I had been hesitating. I knew I wanted to dedicate the book to my dad but was superstitious that if I did, he would die. I remember typing the words “for my father” and sobbing hysterically. The next morning I held his hand as he died in the hospital.
While I was promoting the book, I heard through a few mutual friends that Taylor wanted to get in touch with me and talk about the house. My friends knew how close I was with my dad, the grief I was in, and were rightfully protective of my mental state, so they didn’t connect us. I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone, let alone a complete stranger, about my childhood home and family stories. She was dating Calvin Harris at the time and I heard he had given her a special tree to plant in place of some of the roses I had removed. But that might have been hearsay. I want to be respectful of her privacy, with what I share here, too.
It wasn’t until Oscar night, 2016 that our paths finally crossed…
Graydon Carter created the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party (taking over the role from Hollywood superagent Swifty Lazar who used to host them) and turned it into a super coveted invite during his time as editor in chief (1992-2017) of the magazine, before he went on to found one of the first successful culture subscription newsletters, AirMail.
When Taylor and I met in 2016 at one of Graydon’s last post-Oscar parties, it was still pre “woke Hollywood” days, two years before #TimesUp and #MeToo. Legacy media still mattered and TikTok was called Musical.ly.
It’s amazing how fast those couple of years (2016-2018) swung the pendulum in Hollywood, at least when it came to talking points. Post Graydon’s departure, when Radhika Jones took over as EIC of Vanity Fair and threw an Oscar week #TimesUp “Women in Hollywood” party, I came face to face with a man who had sexually harassed me years before. He was invited to the party as a longtime advertiser of the magazine and a fixture of society parties in NY, London and Paris. Fancy fashion advertisers often want to be in Hollywood, so they start vanity production companies to feed their ego and play the game. I’d walked away from a high paying commercial directing gig several years earlier that his brand was commissioning me for after he: 1. insisted on having dinner with me as conditional to securing the job; 2. showed up drunk and high for said 5 pm dinner meeting; 3. propositioned me during the meeting that I should be his mistress and he would pay for my apartment; 4. said he would be on set for the duration of the shoot so we could “spend time together.” I knew and respected his wife which made the whole situation suck even more. I didn’t have any recourse to do anything about it so I declined the job offer instead of dealing with his pervy behavior on set. This was much to the chagrin of my commercial agent at the time who was missing out on a hefty commission from the six-figure directing fee they’d negotiated for me. There he was, years later, whispering in my ear some gross remark about “oh so this party is supposed to get rid of men like me? How hilarious” and asking my friend if she was “still a dyke” while we stood around toasting how far women in Hollywood ostensibly had come. This was supposedly also “the year of the woman,” at least according to the numerous male Hollywood agents who I sat in meetings with during this period while I held back eye rolling and choking on my own vomit. Hollywood agents don’t do well with sarcasm, I’ve found.
As for what Taylor was dealing with back then, she was embroiled in her headline making lawsuit against a radio DJ who grabbed her ass at a promo event. She won a symbolic $1 in damages. Just setting the scene for you all as to all the elements at play in these “times are a changing” years in showbiz.
Back to 2016… It was the Vanity Fair party at the time of the night where people are drunk and starting to leave for after parties, an In-and-Out burger in hand. I didn’t have it in me to pull a late night and accompany my date to afters. Having always been a stoner (but after getting threatened by security once at a VF Oscar party years before for smoking weed with Bill Maher and Sarah Silverman years before it was legal I didn’t do it there again) I instead drank a few tequilas and was feeling done in. A neighbor and I decided to share a car back to our respective places together. We got our In-and-Out order in hand and were waiting for our driver in a holding area when Taylor approached.
Thank god I was drunk and with a friend because at that point in time, if anyone wanted to talk to me about my dad when I was sober, I was apt to burst into tears. Taylor politely introduced herself and said she’d been wanting to reach out. We exchanged emails and pleasantries and went our respective ways. Honestly I was too drunk to remember exact details. But a couple weeks later an email from her arrived.
She said how happy she was to have the house, that she was obsessed with my family legacy and had given her whole family Goldwyn memorabilia for Christmas. She asked for any stories I could pass along about the house and perhaps, when she was done renovating, for some family photos to hang.
My dad’s death and the sale of the house that had been in my family for three generations was too fresh back then, for me to reply with the perspective I have now. I eventually wrote her a letter about how much the gardens meant to me. That the fig and persimmon trees were my father’s favorite and how they always fruited in September. About the wall of sweet peas that my mother planted. About the vegetable garden we had growing up, the citrus orchard and the plum and apricot trees. That these old trees and the veggie garden were first planted during WWII and that they raised chickens down there and used their manure as fertilizer.
I told her about the avocado tree and how it needed a mate within a certain radius and that it hadn’t flowered in almost 30 years because I thought its mate died. I told her that right after my dad passed away, it started to fruit for the first time and that I was bummed because we sold the house before the avocados were ripe. I asked her how they tasted. I told her about the roses and Hearst Castle or maybe I forgot to include that part because I was still wrapped up in my own sadness. Maybe I should have passed along more concrete details of movie stars and dinner parties and memories of the fabulous people who passed through the corridors but the stories of the roses and the garden were what I felt she needed to know. That there was magic in the soil. And mystery and refuge and the voices of my grandparents whispering on the wind.
I’ve since heard that she got the house designated a historical landmark and worked to restore the grounds and property to the glory of its heyday. I hope she threw an epic party with sherry and champagne and movie stars and fabulous people to celebrate and that no one ever breathes a word of it.
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