Taylor Swift bought my childhood home, Part 1
Which sounds like something I’m sharing for clickbait but it’s actually true (you can google it.) Taylor is the first person to own and live in the home outside of three generations of my family. This unusual detail of my backstory used to be a source of self-consciousness— not Taylor purchasing the house—but that I grew up in a mansion suited to the lifestyle of an international star of her circumstances. This was made public when she purchased the house after my dad died in 2015.
Funny how details that people can google about you might be details you are careful not to discuss with casual or even intimate friends.
As a kid I worried constantly about being judged for having a big house and a famous last name. Even though growing up in L.A., a lot of my friend’s parents were celebrities, and/or in the biz, I was never entirely comfortable with this part of my identity. While I am grateful for the privilege of how and what I was born into, I learned early on not to flaunt it. I knew that it wasn’t normal to live in a mansion with an elevator, a 35mm film projection room and home theater. Our house was on the “Hollywood Maps to the Stars' Homes,” so buses filled with tourists would regularly drive by the front gates. My dad would warn us not to answer the bell or pick up packages from strangers left outside. Stalkers were another thing I inherited at birth along with the last name. Add being a woman and a career spent writing about sex to the mix of traits that appeal to stalkers and you probably get why I’ve spent so many years being guarded about my personal life.
From 7th-9th grade I attended a private high school in Los Angeles, whose student body included Tori Spelling, then starring on Beverly Hills 90210. She was a senior when I was a freshman. Her father, Aaron Spelling, was in the midst of building a megamansion at the time and there were rumors she had a bowling alley and underground skating rink. This was the early 90s, before the days of Paris Hilton. Extravagance was not considered cool in the circles I traversed. We listened to hip hop and punk rock, wore vintage clothes and downplayed any association to fame.
By 9th grade, my friends and I were labeled “bad girls”—drinking at school dances and cutting class to hang out with boys in Westwood who tagged graffiti and dealt weed.
In the middle of 9th grade, I was escorted in handcuffs by police from my then-boyfriend’s house for possession of marijuana. My best friend and I had run away from home to follow the Grateful Dead — for some reason we were under the impression that it was 1968 and hippies and Haight Ashbury was still a thing. The plan was to make our way to San Francisco, where we would sell the pound of weed and sheets of LSD we had and go from there across the country. This, however, was thwarted after my parents placed a call to a family friend who was a D.A. and arranged to have officers show up at my boyfriend’s house. We were extremely high at the time and not at all cognizant of our behavior in the squad car. At one point I said “is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” I just re-read my diary account of this experience and found this delightful quote from one of the officers to us, two 13 year olds— “we’re going to send you to juvie where you’ll get raped by fat chicks.”
This being America and me being a minor and a white girl from a wealthy family, I got off with a wrist slap plus 150 hours of community service and attending an experimental state sponsored “Youth at Risk” program that was part of Outward Bound, where my fellow youths included a teen car thief, crack dealer and sex worker. I picked up a lot of useful skills from this group including how to hot-wire a car and make a pipe using a toothpaste cap and the inside of a pen. The crack dealer and I became close friends and for years after he would send me roses on my birthday. Just like Biggie Smalls says in “Ten Crack Commandments,” he never got high on his own supply, though. I was also “invited to leave” my private school, code for “leave on your own accord so we don’t expel you.”
It was the middle of the school year and my parents decided that something drastic needed to be done to straighten me out so I got sent to boarding school on the East Coast. Around this time I became acutely aware of others perceptions of who I was vs. how I saw myself. I also became cast in a role in the family dynamic, one I wasn’t auditioning for and couldn’t get fired from even if I tried—the black sheep.
I was sent to a small liberal arts school on the outskirts of Boston, where students burned an American flag on the quad to protest Desert Storm; boys wore skirts to class and a high percentage of the other kids' parents were Harvard intellectuals. It was a revelation and a rude awakening. Coming from the actual 90210 (home addresses were published in the student directory) and having a recognizable last name, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Doesn’t everyone in high school just want to fit in? When my mom came to visit for parents weekend I was so embarrassed by her chic Giorgio Armani pantsuit and Giorgio Beverly Hills perfume and wished she would just wear Laura Ashley corduroy overalls and turtlenecks like the other moms did.
In my late teens, after moving to New York for art school, I was simultaneously working at Sotheby’s auction house in the Fashion department and hanging out with downtown cool kids and designers. The press began covering me in fashion magazines. My family heritage was always used as an identifier—“daughter/ granddaughter/sister of…” Having been raised by a feminist mother who had me reading Colette and Betty Friedan before I was 11, the moniker made me feel like a frivolous female accessory to the successful men in my family. So I did everything in my power to define myself outside the name and the house and the lore I was raised in.
Now I realize how fucking cool the name and the house and the lore is and instead of being ashamed about it, I want to immortalize every last detail.
Stay tuned for the next installment xoxo
I am fully down the rabbit hole. & happy to be so.✨
I’m in.