Confessions of a Recovering Hollywood Columnist

I was 21 years old in 2007 and fresh off a plane from Australia when I landed my first job, writing a pop culture column for Fox News called Pop Tarts. I had no idea then that trailing courtroom benches, red carpets, and beach parties would end up being the best training I’d ever get for a career that would eventually take me into war zones, interrogation rooms, and the company of terrorists, traitors, and insurgents. Yet looking back nearly two decades and 50 countries later, that is what it was.But back to 2007. That summer, Paris Hilton had just been released from jail after violating probation in connection with a drunk-driving arrest, and a ticket to her beach party was the hottest currency among young Hollywood. The paparazzi lined the sand in packs. Everyone wore sunglasses too big for their faces and carried themselves like main characters. I remember feeling hollow even then, like I was standing at the edge of something glittering but empty. Still, every cub reporter has to start somewhere, so I pulled my shoulders back and got to work.That kind of work in 2007 looked nothing like it does now. There was no Twitter to scroll for a quote, no algorithm serving up a story already half-written by someone else. If I wanted information, I had to go out and get it — from publicists, agents, club owners, entertainment lawyers, and assistants. Surviving the noughties took a strange mix of freedom and white-knuckled grit. Stringing together a story meant biting through layer after layer of personality, building trust one favor at a time, learning the delicate, maddening art of the tit-for-tat.We carried BlackBerrys to clubs and house parties in the Hills, with cameras so poor that nobody worried too much about being photographed doing something they shouldn’t. There were no influencers as we know them yet, just an odd bunch of reporters who, to this day, remain some of the sharpest, funniest, most creative people I’ve ever worked with.Some days made no sense next to each other. One morning, I’d be at a downtown courthouse, close enough to a Britney Spears conservatorship hearing to watch her hands tremble in her lap, her eyes overwhelmed and somewhere else entirely. By that afternoon, I could be sitting across from Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills, talking about abortion rights, or dancing with the Spice Girls as they prepped for their storied reunion tour.Hollie McKay on the red carpet. Via Hollie McKayOther days carried far less glitter and far more grief. On an otherwise regular Thursday in June 2009, I rushed to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center on the rumor that Michael Jackson had been admitted. I paced the waiting room as his close friend Elizabeth Taylor arrived, ashen-faced, and understood before anyone said it aloud that he was gone. As the news spread, college kids up and down the block had their windows open, blasting his music into the street.Nearly three years later, I was having a drink with a friend at the Beverly Hilton Hotel ahead of Clive Davis’s celebrated annual pre-Grammy bash when whispers filtered that Whitney Houston had been found dead upstairs, sending the news world scrambling to piece together what had happened.Then, just as fast, it was back to standing on the outside looking in at a kind of surreal circus. I spent afternoons at the Chateau Marmont interviewing rock stars over room service, sat close to the stage at the Oscars year after year, partied at Emmy Governors Balls and attended Miley Cyrus’s “Hannah Montana” Sweet Sixteen at Disneyland in October 2008, when they closed off the park for her party guests.Hollie McKay and Taylor Swift. Via Hollie McKayThen there was a softly-spoken Nashville publicist named Paula who carried around a little card to give reporters at red carpets and events with some bullet points about her new client — a bubbly blonde with bouncy curls in western boots who strummed a guitar and kindly remembered you from the last time you spoke. Her name was Taylor Swift, and she handwrote thank-you notes to those who showed up to her small singing showcase performances.I was also there two years later, in 2009, when Kanye West stormed the VMA stage in New York City to interrupt Taylor Swift and declared that Beyoncé deserved to win. I remember the crowd’s confused, then furious, chant of her name rising through Radio City as we worked our BlackBerrys to track down the inside scoop on what was happening as Beyoncé was in tears and MTV expelled Kanye West from the venue.Every so often, the job let me nudge the record itself. Ahead of the fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” film, I learned from chatting with screenwriter Stuart Beattie that Johnny Depp was never his first choice for Captain Jack Sparrow. He’d written the part with a young, not-yet-famous-in-America Hugh Jackman in mind, which is where the name “Jack Sparrow” actually came from. Hugh Jackman playing a pirate in ‘Pan,’ 2015. Via Warner Bros.Disney, he said, wasn’t interested at the time and spent a decade passing on the idea before finally coming back to it. Months after the piece ran, I got an email out of nowhere from a “Jeopardy!” producer asking me to confirm it for a clue they were writing. It wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, yet it stuck with me — proof that even a throwaway pop culture line can end up wedged somewhere in the record.Other stories were smaller and sweeter. In the summer of 2011, while interviewing Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis for the raunchy rom-com “Friends with Benefits,” I mentioned offhand that a U.S. Marine had just posted a YouTube video inviting Mila to his Ball.“You have to go — do it for your country,” Justin told her, and the two of us spent the rest of the interview, with the camera rolling, talking her into it. I spent the following weeks bothering her publicist until Mila made good on the promise, and her appearance inspired a wave of other celebrities to attend Marine Corps Balls across the country that year. It wasn’t hard news. Still, it served as small proof that even a pop culture column could do something for people who had earned it.Hollie McKay at the Golden Globe Awards. Via Hollie McKayFor all the glamour, there was a slimy side too — one you learned to spot fast. A sweaty stranger at a club called Green Door once cornered me and sneered, “What do you do?” without so much as a hello. I shrugged him off with my Aussie retort, “Not much,” only for a friend to rush up afterward, eyes wide, asking why Harvey Weinstein had been talking to me. I did not think much of it at the time. That was simply the texture of the business.There were quieter, heavier moments too. Sitting at Stevie Nicks’s piano in her Pacific Palisades home — yes, some celebrities invited you into their homes for interviews — she told me the one thing she would change about her life was walking into the psychiatrist’s office that put her on Klonopin for eight years. She believed that had cost her a chance at a family of her own. Brittany Murphy and Paris Hilton at a party at the Serpentine Gallery at London in June 2005. Dave Benett/Getty ImagesI sat on a couch at a party on Melrose with Brittany Murphy days before she died in December 2009. She clutched my hand as we spoke, and I remember thinking how sweet and vulnerable she was as she detailed her life and its ups and downs.Long before #MeToo became a cultural reckoning, I dug into Hollywood’s casting-couch culture for a piece that made a few people uncomfortable. Not long after, I went after the industry’s strange, enduring soft spot for Roman Polanski — people who’d worked with him defending him to my face, often without much prompting.During that decade, I learned something that had nothing to do with fame: How to overcome those whose job was often to keep me from finding out the truth. Along the way, I stopped walking in with a list of questions already written. I put the notepad down and listened, letting people talk past the point they meant to stop, until they said the thing they hadn’t planned on saying.I had no idea yet how much I’d come to lean on that instinct when sitting across from people who had done genuinely terrible things. I recognized it as the same skill I’d first sharpened chasing quotes on Sunset Boulevard in my twenties: Patience and refusing to settle for the first answer someone handed me.

Confessions of a Recovering Hollywood Columnist

Confessions of a Recovering Hollywood Columnist

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