The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-obsessed Teens Ripped off Hollywood and Shocked the World. Nancy Sales Jo
“It is strange,” Justin said. “There’s a lot of people with money who think they’re better than everyone else. It’s the haves and have-nots.”
“They act like they’re, like, the people on The Hills,” said Jill. “They wear, like, three-hundred-dollar jeans.”
I asked them what they thought motivated the Bling Ring kids.
“Kids are very influenced by the media,” said Justin, looking thoughtful. “They’re constantly seeing movies and TV shows telling them a certain lifestyle is better, and if you don’t live that lifestyle you can’t be happy. You’re like a loser. So people want what they don’t have.”
“Everybody wants to be famous,” said Jenny.
“No,” said Jill. “Everybody thinks they are famous. I call it ‘FOF’—Famous on Facebook. It’s like they think they can just put themselves out there and don’t even have to work for it.”
I told them I’d just seen Kourtney Kardashian.
“We see them all the time,” said Jill. “They have really big butts.”
“I saw Britney at the gas station,” Jenny said. “Even though she’s gained some weight I still think she’s really cute.”
When I got back to my hotel in L.A. that night I thought about what it must be like growing up in an America where everybody wanted to be famous. An awards show was on, the American Music Awards. I watched the stars gliding up the red carpet, and thought of Nick Prugo and Rachel Lee watching it, somewhere, transfixed. Then Jennifer Lopez was singing her song “Louboutins” (2009): “I’m throwing on my Louboutins … Watch this Benz/Exit that driveway….” I turned it off.
If the kids at the Calabasas Commons were right, then everybody not only wanted to be famous, but thought it was within their reach. It’s telling that the most popular show on television between 2003 and 2011—in fact, the only show ever to be number one in the Nielsen ratings for eight consecutive seasons—was American Idol, a competition program celebrating the attainment of instant notoriety. “This is America,” said Idol co-host Ryan Seacrest in 2010, “where everyone has the right to life, love, and the pursuit of fame.” As proof of this, Seacrest is also the executive producer of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
The narrative of fame runs deep in American culture, dating back to A Star Is Born (1937) and beyond (arguably to the spread of photography in the 1850s and 1868’s Little Women—Jo wants to be a famous writer—which isn’t quite the same as wanting to be on The Real Housewives of Atlanta). But it’s safe to say there’s never been more of an emphasis on the glory of fame in the history of American popular culture. There are the countless competition shows (The X Factor, America’s Got Talent, The Voice, America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway); awards shows; reality television, on which even “hoarders” and “American pickers” can become famous. There are Justin Bieber and Kate Upton, self-made sensations through the wonders of self-broadcasting. Explaining the success of YouTube in 2007, co-founder Chad Hurley said, “Everyone, in the back of his mind, wants to be a star.” There’s the new 24/7 celebrity news industry exemplified by TMZ and gossip blogs. There’s the way in which even legitimate news venues have become infused with celebrity reporting.
Unsurprisingly, the massive growth of the celebrity industrial complex hasn’t failed to affect kids. To put it mildly, kids today are obsessed with fame. There’s already a fair amount of research about this—it seems we’re obsessed with how obsessed kids are with becoming famous. A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds said their most or second-most important life goal—after becoming rich—was becoming famous. In a 2005 survey of American high school students, 31 percent said they “expect” to be famous one day. For his book Fame Junkies (2007), author Jake Halpern and a team of academics conducted a survey of 650 teenagers in the Rochester, New York area. Among their findings: Given the choice of becoming stronger, smarter, famous, or more beautiful, boys chose fame almost as often as they chose intelligence, and girls chose it more often. Forty-three percent of girls said they would like to grow up to become a “personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star”—three times more than as chose “a United States Senator” and four times more than chose “chief of a major company like General Motors.” When asked whom they would most like to have dinner with, more kids chose Jennifer Lopez than Jesus. More girls with symptoms of low self-esteem said they would like to have dinner with Paris Hilton.
Interestingly, kids who read tabloids and watch celebrity news shows like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood are more likely to feel that they, too, will one day become famous. Girls and boys who describe themselves as lonely are more likely to endorse the statement: “My favorite celebrity just helps me feel good and forget about all of my troubles.”
The fame bug is more prevalent in industrialized nations than in the developing world. A 2011 survey by the ChildFund Alliance, a network of 12 child development organizations operating in 58 countries, found that a majority of children in developing countries aspire to be doctors and teachers—when asked about their top priorities, they talked about improving their nations’ schools and “[providing] more food”—while their counterparts in developed nations want to grow up to have the kind of jobs that will make them rich and famous—professional athlete, actor, singer, fashion designer.
Or for the less hardworking, there is burglar.
It occurred to me, while looking over the careers of the Bling Ring victims, that not only were they rich and famous, but nearly all of them had been in movies or on popular TV shows about people who were rich and famous or wanted to be rich and famous. They provided the burglars with an enticing image of fame within fame, imaginary wealth rewarded by actual wealth. There was a double mirroring with all their targets, as deliciously full of things that were bad for you as a double-stuffed Oreo.
There was Paris Hilton, whose “heiress” background was the premise for her reality show The Simple Life (2003–2007), in which she and her friend Nicole Richie invaded the lives of working-class people and made fools of themselves and their hosts. There was Lindsay Lohan, famous since the age of eleven, who had appeared in a movie, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004), about a girl who is consumed with wanting to become a famous actress. And there was Rachel Bilson, who had starred on The O.C., about rich kids in Newport Beach, California. (Josh Schwartz, who created the show, now had another hit with Gossip Girl, about rich kids in New York.)
The Bling Ring had also burglarized the home of Brian Austin Green, who had starred in the 1990s teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210, about rich kids in Beverly Hills. Their real target in hitting Green was his girlfriend (now wife), actress Megan Fox, who had co-starred with Lohan in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, playing a rich mean girl. Then there was Audrina Patridge of The Hills, a reality show about rich girls trying to find themselves in L.A. Spencer Pratt, another regular on the show, was apparently also a target, but the Bling Ring was busted before it had a chance to rob him.
Rachel Lee and Diana Tamayo allegedly fled from the home of High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale in July 2009 after encountering her housekeeper at the front door (Tisdale was in Hawaii). The High School Musical phenomenon hit when the Bling Ring kids were entering high school. The first installment in the three-part Disney franchise appeared in 2006. Although it was geared more toward tweens, no one could escape the hype, which made stars of newcomers Tisdale, Zac Efron, and Vanessa Hudgens (all three were Bling Ring targets, although none was ever successfully burglarized). The squeaky-clean movies, shot in squeaky-clean Salt Lake City, are about high school kids vying for roles in a high school musical, but their true message is about the thrill of fame. Tisdale’s character, Sharpay Evans, a spoiled rich girl seemingly modeled after Paris Hilton (she’s a platinum diva who carries