YOU don’t know their names, but you know who they are, because you’ll see them in Us Weekly or In Touch or Page Six. They’re the unnamed celebrity assistants, remaining a royal distance of three steps behind while toting jumbo Starbucks cups for their famous charges.
They’re often seen partying alongside their famous bosses, too, at the Roosevelt Hotel, or Bungalow 8, shopping with them, deplaning in Europe with them – giving rise to the recent, woefully warped perception that the most in-demand glamour job a striver could hope for would be that of a celebrity assistant.
“Everybody wants these jobs,” says Lynn Cothren, assistant for 20 years to the late Coretta Scott King. “Most of us didn’t go to college. But being a celebrity assistant is now more of a profession than ever.”
This Saturday, the New York Celebrity Assistants – a members-only organization whose closed ranks rival the Freemasons – will celebrate their 10th anniversary. It’s ostensibly a networking group: Assistants, who tend work in isolation out of converted bedrooms in a celebrity’s home, can exchange information, job listings, and post frantic, last-minute queries (How do I get a dog into Egypt by tonight?) on the group’s message boards.
But it’s also a support group. Because seriously, who besides another celebrity assistant will understand what it’s like to have to type up term papers for your boss’ kid? Or find a nursing home for your boss’ mother, and later get a call to hustle over there and find said mother’s missing teeth?
Bonnie Low-Kramen (Olympia Dukakis, 20 years) has done all three – proudly and competently, she might add. “There haven’t been ugly moments where I’ve felt, ‘I don’t want to do this,'” she says. “It’s all in the realm of making things happen.”
Also in that realm: screening all of Dukakis’ calls, including those from her own children, and planning one son’s wedding. “She said, ‘We want the wedding in the backyard, we need a tent and a caterer, and I don’t have enough time to do it, so will you do it?'” recalls Low-Kramen. Once, when Dukakis was stuck in traffic on her way to a performance, she called Low-Kramen and demanded a police escort.
Two weeks ago, Dukakis was not happy that the blizzard in New York meant she was bumped from a Monday morning flight out of Toronto to one a few hours later.
“She was justifiably upset by that,” says Low-Kamen, defensively. “The fact that she called me on a Sunday, and a lot of people were out playing in the snow … that didn’t matter,” she says. “Olympia said to me, ‘Well, Bonnie, if they can’t make it happen, then you make it happen.”
She did. Low-Kamen is the ultimate celebrity assistant, and has even written a (self-published) book, “Be the Ultimate Assistant.” Her name appears on the front cover once; Dukakis’, twice. She works out of a small office in the downtown apartment Dukakis shares with her husband, character actor Louis Zorich (“Did you ever see the show “Mad About You”? The one with Paul Reiser? He was the dad on that. So they’re both celebrities.”). Her desk faces a wall of Dukaka-bilia, including three large portraits of the actress, whose Oscar – with hardened glue seeping from the nameplate – resides here too.
“It’s more accurate to say I work with Olympia than for her,” says Low-Kamen, who is married (her husband is in medical sales) with a 17-year-old son. “I’m trying to eliminate the word ‘boss.’ If you really want to push it, the word ‘boss’ can have a racial connotation too.
But mainly, she says, they are also friends, not just employer-employee, though Low-Kramen views nearly every event through the prism of her “celebrity employer.”
Last month, for example, NYCA members met with the American Red Cross – because, Low-Kramen says, “We were talking about the tsunami, and lately Katrina, and what happens? Say a celebrity is caught down there? What happens when a celebrity dies? Luther Vandross’ assistant spoke that night. He spoke of being a part of the before, during, and after of Luther’s stroke. Living through his death. Because it’s the assistant on whose shoulders a lot of it rests. Of course the family participates, but a celebrity’s life is so big …”
Many assistants believe that they have a more intimate relationship with their famous bosses than anyone else – family included. “Sometimes, you are closer to them than their families, because you are with them all the time,” says a 31-year-old who has worked for four major New York-based stars.
Our anonymous assistant was enthralled with her career choice: “You get to be around celebrities, meet people the rest of the population barely gets to see” – and, in fact, quit working for one employer because “she was not so A-list.”
She says she now works as a corporate assistant because she couldn’t take being on call 24/7, but also because “I was so involved with their lives. You have to step back.” She says she has a “friendship that continues to this day” with a beloved former employer, although she has not seen him since she left six months ago.
“You are not family. This is a job,” says Dr. Maddy Gerish, a “human systems consultant” and psychologist who addresses NYCA members at meetings every couple of years.
Gerish says that while most celebrity assistants claim to be uninterested or unimpressed with fame, the opposite tends to be true, and that many defer to “their celebrity” reflexively, all the while convincing themselves they have a friendship of equals. They are also often woefully underpaid; while some can make upwards of $60,000 a year, and urban legend has it there are those making six-figures, Low-Kramen points out in her book that some celebrities feel that proximity to them is enough of a perk.
“Assistants think they are going to be more a part of the celebrity’s life than they are,” Gerish says, “and then they’re like, ‘Why aren’t I invited to Thanksgiving? Or the parties? Why do I have to fly coach?'”
Rick Borutta understands. The 34-year-old Upper West Sider worked as an assistant to the assistant to Tommy Tune (“he wanted me to make sure that the blow-up raft in his bag didn’t have a hole in it, and this was the night before – maybe there was a better time to put this on my list?”) and Elaine Stritch.
He worked for the septugenarian Stritch for 4 years, with the proviso that he could also do production work on her one-woman show, “Elaine Stritch at Liberty.” He can be seen in her 2004 documentary being berated like a recalcitrant 4-year-old over minor tasks (at one point she literally raises her fist in the air and shakes it indignantly). “Riiiiiiick!” she bellows later, in the lobby of the posh Savoy. “I forgot to take my insulin!”
“It is not helpful to defer to celebrities when their behavior is inappropriate,” Gerish cautions. “I see destructive behavior – I saw one celebrity assistant drinking heavily. She really wanted to believe [she was being treated well]. We are star-crazy! It is so embedded in our psyche that there is a reluctance to say to the celebrity employer, ‘No. I can’t do this.'”
The ideal celebrity assistant, Gerish says, is someone who is quite happy to operate in the shadows, gets a vicarious thrill from their bosses’ success, but does not derive their identity or self-esteem from it. “But I’ve often seen assistants become a little star-struck themselves,” she says. “It becomes a huge problem.”
When 54-year-old Susan McTigue began working for Ellen Burstyn 20 years ago, she had barely heard of the actress. It didn’t matter: “I was totally intimidated,” says McTigue. “I could barely talk to her.”
Now, she says, they are friends: “Ellen is an extraordinary person,” McTigue says. “She has a very rich, full life, and I’m involved in all aspects of it. We’ve never come up with a title for me, so I say, ‘I curate you. You’re the work of art.'”
“It’s not so much that I like dealing with celebrities – it’s that I woke up one morning and that’s what my life was,” says 53-year-old Robin Rose, who nonetheless seems to really like dealing with celebrities. She worked for actor Peter Boyle for 6 months (“He was really hot when he was on ‘Everybody Loves Raymond'”) and became close with the late Jerry Orbach: “I was there [when he died].”
She now works for Reese Schoenfeld, founder of the Food Network, getting in at 10 a.m. every morning to print out his emails, because “he doesn’t like to touch the computer.”
He’s her boss, but – you guessed it! – they’re friends, joined at the hip, she his right arm. But really, Rose insists, she’s unimpressed – as is her husband, a regular civilian who runs a sports bar in Tribeca.
“My husband’s not too impressed with celebrities,” Rose says. “But then again, John Kennedy Jr. had his birthdays at my husband’s bar. I mean you walk around Tribeca and there are celebrities all over the place … but he doesn’t get too starstruck or anything. I don’t think I do either.”