I instinctively knew it was good to be a celebrity. But I wanted to smell it up close, at its white-hot center. I wanted to escort a celebrity around a gift lounge.
Distinctive Assets, the biggest of the gift-bag companies, hired me to lead celebrities around its gift lounge after the Grammy rehearsals Sunday night at Staples Center. The other part of my job was carrying a big bag for the stars to load with $12,398 in gifts. It was like being a parent on Halloween, only it was going to be a little harder to sneak into the bag later and eat an Escada purse.
Vendors — Escada plus 18 others — paid Distinctive Assets $20,000 apiece, in addition to the cost of the gifts, for the chance to set up a booth and give their sales pitches directly to Grammy performers and presenters, and to try to get them to pose for pictures holding the products.
For a mere $6,000 they could have had their products shoved into the $54,249.54 gift bag that the stars will find in their hotel rooms. Among its items is a coupon for Lasik surgery. Luckily for Buddy Holly, gift bags did not exist while he was alive.
While I was waiting for my first client, Kelly Clarkson, to finish rehearsals, a noncelebrity who had just wandered into the tent was escorted out, but not before being handed a huge bottle of cranberry vodka from 267 Infusions.
When I asked 267 Infusions owner Stacie Parker Shonfeld why she gave free stuff to a woman she didn't recognize, she said: "We'll give it to all random people. We want everyone to enjoy it as much as we do." I'm guessing that Shonfeld came up with this marketing strategy when she was three-quarters into a bottle of cranberry vodka.
Clarkson, it turned out, was a true genius at getting gifts. Because — in a discovery I made that should be studied in every econ class — it turns out that even when you're being given stuff for free, sales pitches are still incredibly annoying. But Clarkson acted interested in every item. Most were met with an enthusiastic "Right on!"
Such as, "Oh, Verizon Wireless, right on! I've seen y'all's commercial."
When the Verizon salesman asked her if she currently used Verizon, the singer admitted that she had no idea which service provider she used.
"My business manager knows," Clarkson admitted. "She gets the best deals."
An hour into this, I was impressed to find that Clarkson's "Right on!" did not flag. She seemed genuinely appreciative of the $1,000 in gift certificates from Tupperware.
"When I was poor and needed it, no one was giving me $1,000," she said. Though, undoubtedly, being poor and having $1,000 worth of Tupperware would have its own frustrations. Such as having nothing to fill $1,000 worth of Tupperware with except Top Ramen.
After Clarkson left, I escorted my second client, the country band Sugarland. Like Clarkson, lead singer Jennifer Nettles didn't need free stuff. I know for a fact that Nettles is so rich it ain't funny, because she says it in one of her songs. Still, Nettles may have exceeded Clarkson in her enthusiasm. Upon approaching a cubic zirconia table, Nettles exclaimed, without any provocation whatsoever, "Ziamonds? Awesome!"
As I carried five shockingly heavy bags to her car, accompanied by two unpaid Distinctive Assets volunteers who carried the remainder of the swag, I wondered how Nettles and her bandmate, Kristian Bush, were going to get this stuff home. JFK didn't airlift this much stuff into Berlin.
Having already been through five gift lounges at other events since their first album came out a little more than a year ago, the Sugarland members had learned to have their spouses arrive with empty suitcases. These are the kind of hard lessons you're taught by the road.
The weirdest part of the night was that even though I was party to one of the most obscene gestures the invisible hand of capitalism had ever made, there was something sweet about seeing celebrities all excited and grateful. Unlike money or fame, the tactility of free stuff returned them to their pre-famous selves, able to appreciate how ridiculously fortunate they'd become.
Weirder yet, I think they might actually deserve all this stuff. In a world that's increasingly stripped of advertising (TiVo, satellite radio, TV shows on DVD, decreased newspaper readership, NASCAR's inability to invent a method to put a corporate sticker on top of another corporate sticker), what a celebrity wears or uses is becoming our main method of learning about new products we'd like.
Having talent is now just part of the job of being a celebrity. You also have to be a tastemaker. In fact, just being a tastemaker is sometimes enough. Especially if your talent is mostly being willing to sell a video of yourself starring in night-vision pornography.
If we find all this alarming, then we'd better start clicking on those pop-up ads.
