Grasping for a Star

Blame Cinderella. Ever since that little minx snared Prince Charming, the slightly weird yet very rich foot fetishist, women’s fantasies haven’t been the same. It’s Lana Turner’s fault too, for spreading that baloney about being discovered in a drugstore on Sunset.

Millions of women have been influenced by the fairy tales rooted in our collective imagination. And thousands travel to Los Angeles, hoping to find fame, fortune or the bragging rights to having slept with a movie star, an L.A. Clipper or at least a Depeche Mode roadie. Some of them, like Bonny Lee Bakley, are grifters who wind up dead. Others, like Brynn Hartman, the would-be actress married to Phil Hartman, turn to drugs, murder and suicide. The list of casualties goes back to early in the last century, when an unlucky teenager caught Fatty Arbuckle’s eye and didn’t survive a night of hard partying with the silent movie comedian.

Isn’t there a Disney version, in which everyone lives happily ever after? Yes. But many who have observed commoners attempting to enchant a People magazine prince tend to be a cynical lot. Ask them who these women are who believe L.A. is full of beautiful, sleeping bachelors waiting for their quickening kiss. Or what drives these optimistic pretenders. The answers of those close to the celebrity mating dance spin sagas of ambition, moxie, deception and disappointment that are more nightmare than romance.

The problem is, every success story lights bonfires of hope. Nicole Brown was a waitress at a Beverly Hills hangout when she met O.J. Simpson. (The world knows that relationship didn’t become a model marriage, but when their love was new, she was just a girl from Orange County and he was a sports legend.) Jessica Sklar launched a flirtation with Jerry Seinfeld at a gym shortly after returning from her honeymoon. The comedian married her after she divorced husband one.

Of course, most celebrity wives didn’t set out to snag someone famous, but the serendipitous encounters that led to some much-admired unions nevertheless add to the lore. Jeff Bridges met his wife, Susan, 26 years ago, when he was working on location in Montana and she was a maid at a dude ranch nearby. Dylan McDermott spotted a beautiful woman at a Venice cafe, was instantly smitten and followed her to the store where she worked. He and Shiva Rose have been married for six years, and he still describes finding her in a way that makes clear he thinks he’s the one who got lucky.

Samuel Black, a Westside psychiatrist, says such examples make it difficult to label as delusional those women who envision a future with a celebrity. “We hear about the ones who make it to the top of the mountain. It does happen. Someone who actually goes out and tries to make their daydream manifest is the same person who buys a lottery ticket. They figure, someone’s got to win, so why not me? Now that Tom Cruise is single, someone’s going to be his girlfriend.

“Women who pursue that kind of goal aren’t satisfied with themselves. They could gain confidence by getting more education, and working their way up in a profession, but that takes time. By attaching themselves to a celebrity, who seems to have money, beauty, sexual power and the admiration of millions, they see a way to elevate their low self-esteem immediately,” Black says.

Step one in the star seeker’s manual is to come to L.A. Once here, the most dedicated pursue their prey with precision.

“All someone has to do is pick up a magazine like InStyle to find out the places where celebrities go,” says publicist Stan Rosenfield, whose clients include Robert De Niro and George Clooney. “As the saying goes, if you want to win the World Series, you must first play in the World Series. If you want to meet a celebrity, let’s rule out having lunch in Fontana.”

His office fields calls every day from fans who ask for the name of a client’s hotel or extend an invitation to a charity event that may or may not be legitimate. “A woman called to ask where George Clooney got his hair cut,” Rosenfield says. “She said she wanted her husband to have the same style, but I told her I couldn’t give her that information. She went to a lot of trouble to find me, so a call like that makes my antenna go up. She could be someone who would hang out, waiting for George to show up.”

Although engineering “chance” meetings is a popular strategy, women determined to get involved with a celebrity are different from stalkers, whose hold on reality is very tenuous. California law defines a stalker as someone who harasses and inspires fear in a victim and who expresses a credible threat.

Det. Rick Pfaff of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s Stalking Unit, which handles 12 to 15 celebrity cases a year, says, “Most stalkers are pretty crazy and obsessed. A lot of them are bipolar. A degree of mental instability distinguishes a stalker from someone who just tries to get close to a celebrity. The stalker usually won’t make direct approaches.” In the last year, his unit has worked on cases involving Brooke Shields and Pamela Anderson.

The stalker climbs a wall to break into a heartthrob’s bedroom, then may happily straighten his underwear drawer, fantasizing that she’s performing her wifely duties. Unlike the stalker, a star seeker is out for actual face time, at the least like the woman overheard boasting to her friends in the ladies’ room at the Whisky Bar, “George Clooney’s here tonight, and I’m going home with him.” (She didn’t.)

In such an intimate setting, she might get close enough to say hello or even have a conversation. “A girl had better be gorgeous, skinny and young if she wants to get further than that,” says Dianne Bennett, owner of the Beverly Hills matchmaking service Beautiful Women, Successful Men. For a fee, Bennett provides introductions for wealthy men to models, actresses and dancers who are looking for serious relationships. Her roster includes women who came to L.A. with dreams of marrying a celebrity and, with time, have grown more practical.

At first, many were like Tracy Richman, who was a 14-year-old Hollywood High student when she began attracting attention from actors and rock stars. “I wished for big things,” she says. “I wanted to be famous. I wanted to date the most powerful, richest, most famous men on the planet, and I did. I wasn’t pursuing them. They all chased me.”

She’d go to the Roxy or Helena’s, the hot spots in her day, and quickly became part of a loosely organized partier’s underground. “You get into a certain circle and it’s like being in the most popular clique in high school,” says Richman, who is now 40 and preparing a paternity lawsuit against a married producer. “Aspen, New York. Wherever you go, you see the same people.”

Parties at the Playboy mansion are fertile hunting grounds, if a woman is attractive enough to get invited. The mansion has enjoyed unusual longevity. As quick as you can say “over,” other venues change, and the word gets out that the crowd has moved from Moomba to Deep to Las Palmas, the Whisky Bar and Lucques. The prettiest, most socially skilled women stay current, and they insinuate themselves into the scene, meet celebrities and sometimes get more than a handshake. For groupies, a notch on a belt is enough. Women who hope for more than a night with an athlete or an actor find their interpretation of an encounter often differs from the man’s.

“The girls think it will lead to happily ever after,” Bennett says. “Hollywood sells itself very well in the ‘burbs. The girls come here like lambs to the slaughter, without much information. And the men lie. They promise them very little. ‘I really like you. Lie down.’ ”

A Sense of Entitlement

Bennett reserves her strongest criticism for the women whose beauty has given them a sense of entitlement. “These girls are really lazy,” she says. “Because they’re pretty, they think they don’t need a work ethic or a sense of responsibility. They want to find a situation where they can just shop and have sex now and then.”

Some figure out that certain jobs can provide access. Richman worked briefly at the Grand Havana Room, a private cigar club in Beverly Hills. “A lot of girls realize that when you’re a hostess at a restaurant where those men go, you’re on display,” she says. “It’s an ideal situation. You have a job. You’re not hooking. Posing for Playboy can also be part of the plan.”

Former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss calls the magazine Dial a Bride. She says, “The rock stars and actors flip through it like it’s a catalog. They see a picture of a woman they want to meet. It’s one phone call, and they can marry her. And that’s why the girls want to be in Playboy in the first place.”

The socially ambitious have their own pecking order. Some rank money higher than fame. Darcy La Pier Hughes, who was married to Jean-Claude Van Damme, then became the fourth wife of the late Herbalife founder Mark Hughes, is celebrated as someone who knew how to play the game. Despite signing a prenuptial agreement, the 35-year-old widow, a high school dropout from Oregon who became a Hawaiian Tropic model, walked away with $34 million after less than two years of marriage.

The consensus is that it was predictable that Bonny Lee Bakley, who was aggressive but neither young nor beautiful, could get close only to an older, out-of-work actor who drives a Dodge and lives in the Valley. Bakley’s desire to marry a famous man was so intense that she abandoned her three children to chase her dream, friends have said.

She had pursued singers Jerry Lee Lewis and Frankie Valli before coming to L.A. Once here, she apparently expected not to be hindered by her checkered past--including a conviction for possessing multiple IDs she allegedly used to run a lonely hearts scam. In tapes of her phone conversations obtained by CNN, she said marrying a celebrity would be her way of getting back at the kids who’d made fun of her in school. “I’ll fix them. I’ll be a movie star, and it was too hard, because I was always falling for somebody. So I figured, why not fall for a movie star instead of becoming one, you know?”

The most determined and desirable women benefit from good timing, which often has a powerful effect on relationships, even among the famous. Fleiss says, “Some of these girls who hit the jackpot find someone at a vulnerable time in his life. It could be that the people who handle a celebrity are telling him it would be a good time to get married. I’ve seen even screwed-up, gold-digging women stabilize a guy and help him.”

When timing isn’t on their side, some women take desperate, time-tested measures, says Fleiss, who is under house arrest for a drug violation of her probation and works for an entertainment Web site, Laugh.com. “Sometimes I’ll hear that a woman’s trying to get pregnant so a guy will marry her, or to get money, and I’ll tip off the guy, because I think that’s cruel. It’s the children who always pay. The girls start doing the baby thing when they run out of other options.”

Before Monica Lewinsky flashed her thong at Bill Clinton, you’d have thought a famous, powerful man would know better than to get involved with a woman who practically had t-r-o-u-b-l-e tattooed on her forehead.

Century City attorney Ron Litz represents actor Don Johnson. “The reality is a celebrity can be vulnerable even if nothing happened, so some of them learn to be cautious,” he says. “The real problem is if a celebrity just says no to everybody who approaches him in a public place, then they get a reputation for being rude. If you know your fans are important and you try to be gracious, you do run the risk of a woman saying, ‘He hit on me.’ ”

Too Young to Know Better

Litz advised a baseball player to get a paternity test before he agreed to pay child support. It turned out the baby wasn’t his. “Some of these young men aren’t very sophisticated and can behave foolishly,” Litz admits. “The younger ones think they’re invincible.”

In a way, women who attach themselves to celebrities feel bulletproof as well. They don’t suspect that the object of their affections might turn out to be moody, sexually dysfunctional or boring. Glamour creates a state of blissful denial, then it’s accepted as a trade-off.

“It’s a common myth that having fame is wonderful,” says Leo Braudy, a USC professor of English who wrote “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History” (Vintage, 1997). “People feel validated by the spotlight and think fame brings a kind of freedom. Anyone who’s had that kind of spotlight knows it also imprisons you.”

Many of the women who move in with fame find that loneliness and insecurity share their cell. “It’s so fleeting,” Fleiss says. “There’s a lot of anxiety, because there’s always someone more famous than you, who’s making more money. It takes a certain type of woman to handle the reality of being with someone who’s always worried about staying on top. It’s the type who has no agenda of her own except to be a Hollywood wife.”

Somewhere in the Midwest, an enterprising, public-spirited feminist should offer a course for star-struck prom queens. She’d screen cautionary tales from “E! True Hollywood Story,” the show-biz equivalent of the gory car crash films that convicted drunk drivers are forced to watch. She’d drill them in cliches: It’s lonely at the top; all men cheat; beauty fades; there’s no free lunch.

Some of the girls hellbent on hooking up with a celebrity might alter their career plans. But there’d be a stubborn one in every class who would still follow her dream, convinced that she could wander into the bar at the Four Seasons one evening, just when Kevin Costner would be at loose ends, and he’d glance her way and just know that he’d found The One.