The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-obsessed Teens Ripped off Hollywood and Shocked the World. Nancy Sales Jo
then there was Miley Cyrus, another target on the Bling Ring’s list. Her wildly popular tween comedy, Hannah Montana, ran on the Disney Channel from 2006 to 2011. It was, famously, about a high school girl who lives a double life as a famous pop star. Miley the regular teen has dark hair, while Hannah the celebrity dons a platinum wig and flashier clothes. “You get the limo out front,” Cyrus sang in the show’s theme song. “Yeah, when you’re famous it can be kinda fun.” Hannah Montana attracted more 6-to-14-year-old viewers than any other show on cable, and 164 million viewers worldwide.
A study of the effect of celebrity culture on the values held by kids found that the TV shows most popular with 9-to-11-year-olds have “fame” as their number one value, above “self-acceptance” and “community feeling.” “Fame” ranked number 15 in 1997. “Community feeling” was number one in 1967. I searched YouTube for a typical episode of The Andy Griffith Show from that year, and found one that showed Aunt Bee fretting over the responsibilities of jury duty (and mind you, this show was a big hit). Meanwhile, a typical episode of Hannah Montana from 2009 has Hannah fretting over her overbooked schedule—how will she juggle a concert and a radio show? Or for older kids, there was a 2008 episode of Entourage in which Vince the movie star (played by Adrian Grenier) worries over whether he should take a part in a movie, and what it will do for his image.
But it may be too easy to blame pop culture and the media for promoting the “value” of fame. Movies and TV shows and popular music are often more of a reflection than an engine of cultural trends. I think when we talk about the obsession with fame, we’re also talking about an obsession with wealth. Rich and famous, famous and rich—they seem connected as aspirations. Interviewing teenagers over the years, I’ve often heard them talk about wanting to be famous, but almost always in the context of being rich and the “lifestyle” fame ushers in. “Lifestyle” is a word that comes up a lot. “We put them up in the nicest hotels,” said X Factor judge Demi Lovato of the contestants on the show, “because we want them to get a taste of the lifestyle that fame can bring them.” (Sadly for Lovato and also former X Factor judge Britney Spears, “the lifestyle” of fame has also included time in rehab, where they both landed in 2010 and 2007, respectively.) When the kids in the Starbucks at the Commons in Calabasas started talking about fame, they immediately started talking about money. It’s striking that while there seems to be much consternation about kids wanting to be famous, there seems to be little concern about them wanting to be rich.
America has always offered a dream of wealth; in “the land of opportunity,” anyone who is willing to work hard can make a good life for himself and his family. But the idea of what constitutes a good life hasn’t always included private planes and 50,000-square-foot homes and $100,000 watches and $20,000 handbags. We are living in a new Gilded Age, with a “totally new stratosphere” of financial success.*
As we’ve become aware in the national conversation about the one percent, income inequality has increased dramatically since the late 1970s. Then, the top 1 percent of Americans earned only about 10 percent of the national income; now they earn a third. In terms of total wealth, they control about 40 percent. Meanwhile the 99 percent has been going into debt trying to keep up with the newly extravagant lifestyle the one percent inhabits.
“While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall,” wrote Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair in 2011. “All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top.” At the same time, Stiglitz wrote, “People outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real.”
When rich people started having more money—a lot more money—they started coming up with bigger and fancier ways of spending it. The explosion in demand for high-end consumer goods has been called “the luxury revolution,” although it’s anything but revolutionary. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) was a scathing look at the materialistic (and ultimately criminal) culture created by Wall Street players like his main character, Sherman McCoy. But while yuppies might have been portrayed as loathsome in movies like Wall Street, they had stuff, and their stuff was coveted. A bemused Michael Douglas said in a 2012 interview that young men routinely come up to him and say, “Gordon Gekko! You’re my hero! You’re the reason I went to Wall Street!”—as if Wall Street were an inspirational film rather than a cautionary tale about a financial crook.
Greed was suddenly good, so was shopping. In the wake of 9/11, then President George W. Bush elevated it to a patriotic act. (“Some don’t want to go shopping,” after the terrorist attack, Bush said. “That should not and that will not stand in America.”) Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City became our lovable over-spender, trolling for Manolos she couldn’t afford in between too many cosmopolitans. The show, which ran from 1998 to 2004, and could be credited with mainstreaming a familiarity with designer brands, became very popular among tween and teenage girls, who took to showing off their hauls from shopping expeditions in online “haul vlogs.” Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? (1999–2013) another popular show asked. Well, who didn’t? “Everyone wants to be rich,” said David Siegel, the private timeshare mogul profiled in the documentary The Queen of Versailles (2012). “If they can’t be rich, the next best thing is to feel rich.”
By the 1980s, there weren’t songs on the radio anymore about loving your fellow human beings. “Come on, people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now,” sang the Youngbloods in 1967. “People all over the world, join hands, start a love train,” crooned the O’Jays in 1973. Now there were songs about loving yourself—and stuff. There was Madonna singing about being “a material girl,” “living in the material world.” There was Puff Daddy, in the 1990s, rapping, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.” In 2008, the R&B group Little Jackie proclaimed, “The world should revolve around me.” Jay-Z goes by the nickname “Hova”—as in Jehovah—and calls himself “the eighth wonder of the world.” The shift in values could be seen on television, too. There weren’t shows about poor families anymore, like Good Times (1974–1979) or The Waltons (1972–1981)—there were shows about rich people, Dynasty (1981–1989) and Dallas (1978–1991) and, of course, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
Lifestyles had a long run, from 1984 to 1995, and its impact was enormous. Now regular people could see what it was like to be rich from the inside—and they wanted it. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” (1996) by rappers Kool G Rap and DJ Polo, trumpeted the delights of having a “yacht that makes the Love Boat look like a life raft.” Quite a change from the Intruders’ 1974 anthem, “Be Thankful for What You Got.”
When I got a chance to talk to Nick Prugo and asked him why he thought Rachel Lee was so obsessed with their famous victims that she would steal their clothes, he said, “I think she just wanted to be part of the lifestyle. Like, the lifestyle that everybody kind of wants.”
* See Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin 2012).
When you drive up to the address of Indian Hills, the first thing you see is another school, Agoura High; the two schools share a campus. Agoura is a bustling, idyllic sort of American high school, very proud of its Chargers football team. It sits in a large tan brick building with a parking lot full of luxury cars, shiny BMWs, Audis, and SUVs.
Indian Hills, which has less than 100 students, resides at the back, in several prefab buildings, like the ones used as offices at construction sites. It has as its logo the uncomfortable image of an Indianhead, and, hidden at the back