Forty Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!
Jules Jones reports
Movie stars always look small the first time you see them, and Kitty Jackson is no exception, exceptional though she may be in every other way.
Actually, small isn’t the word; she’s minute— a human bonsai in a white sleeveless dress, seated at a back table of a Madison Avenue restaurant, talking on a cell phone. She smiles at me as I take my seat and rolls her eyes at the phone. Her hair is that blond you see everywhere, “highlighted,” my ex- fiancée calls it, though on Kitty Jackson this tousled commingling of blond and brown appears both more natural and more costly than it did on Janet Green. Her face (Kitty’s) is one you can imagine looking merely pretty among the other faces in, say, a high school classroom: upturned nose, full mouth, big green eyes. Yet on Kitty Jackson, for reasons I can’t pinpoint exactly— the same reasons, I suppose, that her highlighted hair looks superior to ordinary (Janet Green’s) highlighted hair— this unexceptional face registers as extraordinary.
She’s still on the phone, and five minutes have passed.
Finally she signs off, folds her phone into a disk the size of an after- dinner mint and stows it in a small white patent leather purse. Then she starts to apologize. It is instantly clear that Kitty belongs in the category of nice stars (Matt Damon) rather than of difficult stars (Ralph Fiennes). Stars in the nice category act as if they’re just like you (i.e., me) so that you will like them and write flattering things about them, a strategy that is almost universally successful despite every writer’s belief that he’s far too jaded to fantasize that the Vanity Fair cover is incidental to Brad Pitt’s desire to give him a tour of his house. Kitty is sorry for the twelve flaming hoops I’ve had to jump through and the several miles of piping hot coals I’ve sprinted across for the privilege of spending forty minutes in her company. She’s sorry for having just spent the first six of those minutes talking to somebody else. Her welter of apologies reminds me of why I prefer difficult stars, the ones who barricade themselves inside their stardom and spit through the cracks. There is something out of control about a star who cannot be nice, and the erosion of a subject’s self- control is the sine qua non of celebrity reporting.
The waiter takes our order. And since the ten minutes of badinage I proceed to exchange with Kitty are simply not worth describing, I’ll mention instead (in the footnote- ish fashion that injects a whiff of cracked leather bindings into pop- cultural observation) that when you’re a young movie star with blondish hair and a highly recognizable face from that recent movie whose grosses can only be explained by the conjecture that every person in America saw it at least twice, people treat you in a manner that is somewhat different— in fact is entirely different— from the way they treat, say, a balding, stoop- shouldered, slightly eczematous guy approaching middle age. On the surface it’s the same—”May I take your order?” etc.—but throbbing just beneath that surface is the waiter’s hysterical recognition of my subject’s fame. And with a simultaneity that can only be explained using principles of quantum mechanics, specifically, the properties of socalled entangled particles, that same pulse of recognition reaches every part of the restaurant at once, even tables so distant from ours that there is simply no way they can see us1. Everywhere, people are swiveling, craning, straining and contorting, levitating inadvertently from chairs as they grapple with the urge to lunge at Kitty and pluck off tufts of her hair and clothing.
I ask Kitty how it feels to always be the center of attention.
“Weird,” she says. “It’s so all of a sudden. You feel like there’s no way you deserve it.”