We were screwed.

  As I remember, the pilot was supposed to show the kids getting a limo, getting a room at the St. Regis hotel, going shopping, and eating at Cipriani; after all that they would go to a club. What really happened was Jaime and I got the limo, we got the hotel room, and went shopping at Henri Bendel, but when it came to going to the club I was just too exhausted. Luckily, the shooting schedule didn’t include the camera crew following us to the club. Instead they were to film us the next morning at brunch, where we would recap the night before.

  The next day, over mimosas, Jaime and I made up a night at the club in front of the camera. I talked about “Jason” and “Michelle” hooking up, how crazy it was, and can you believe how messed up Bridgette got? Meanwhile, I actually had been in bed by nine thirty with a fever, which I seemed to get every night and which had been getting worse over the past weeks. I thought the crew would know I was lying and how Jaime and I had screwed up, and I thought there was no way MTV would pick up the show.

  Wendy called for another meeting pretty quickly. When we went back to her office, she told us that the head of MTV had green-lit the project and wanted us to begin production right away.

  Right away? Right away? I thought I’d have more time to think things out, maybe even bail if I wanted to. Welcome to the world of reality TV.

  The big news, however, came with a big condition: Jaime and I had to be the stars of the show.

  “Wait, what?”

  Apparently, they liked our on-screen energy.

  My heart dropped to the bottom of my stomach. My red flag shot up, and my every instinct was yelling, Stop! I was very scared. It felt so weird. First of all, I didn’t think I could physically hold up for a season of shows, let alone deal with the whole privacy issue. We were actually a very private family. I’d been sheltered my whole life. There were many occasions when prestigious magazines wanted to come to our homes and include us in the photos, but my mother refused. It wasn’t safe or appropriate, she thought. My parents didn’t believe in exposing our family for the sake of publicity. I shared the same beliefs, or I thought I did.

  I remember clearly thinking, My mom is not going to like this one bit.

  I was right.

  ten

  DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

  “Do not get attached to worldly things and pursuits. Be in the world, but do not let the world be in you.”

  —SAI BABA

  As I mentioned, I believe in reincarnation. If I had a choice I would come back as a tree. Beautiful and majestic oaks, maples, and pines surrounded me when I was growing up in Connecticut. At summer’s end, Greenwich begins its transition to a Van Gogh painting come to life. If you haven’t seen it, please come. Words do not do justice to the beauty of the Connecticut fall.

  But what I like most about trees is not the colorful leaves or the soaring heights but the long, deep roots that anchor them to the earth. Trees are solid, grounded, and strong. They rejuvenate, shed the old, and grow new fresh leaves. They provide oxygen, food, and shelter, among so many other things. Their roots remain in the earth long after they have gone.

  Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree has always been one of my favorite books. Reading it makes me wonder why humans are so selfish and unable to give back to the majestic trees as much as we take from them. If humans gave half as much to nature as our precious trees gave us, our world would be a more magnificent place, don’t you think?

  On Denbigh Farm we have a giant fir tree. My mom’s property is one of the highest points in Greenwich. For one Christmas, she surprised us by dressing the entire tree with colorful twinkly lights. You could see them all the way from North Street in town.

  Maybe that’s why I love trees so much. If I am ever feeling empty, lost, insecure, or disconnected, I gaze at a tree and visualize that I have my own roots connecting me to everything in the world. My mother is a major tree hugger—literally. She will hug a tree and identify what kind of vibrations the tree holds. I have become the same. I hug trees and feel them breathe. There were many times in my life when I wished I had someone to stop and hug me, and feel me breathe… or to tell me to breathe.

  For example, when I joined MTV.

  When I told my dad that the TV show had been green-lit he was ecstatic. “You’re going to create, produce, and star in a national—international—show for MTV? This is awesome!” I’ve always trusted my dad implicitly, and I knew he would never be excited about something that would be bad for me. Besides, my dad knew a good business opportunity when he saw one. “You don’t ever want to live with regrets,” he said.

  It did feel exciting to me, and I’m not blaming my dad, but part of me felt like I was the princess in Sleeping Beauty, being led to the glowing spindle. Any time fear set in and I wanted to turn into my forest to sing with the animals and trees, I was called back with the cursed lullaby of that spinning wheel. It was glowing, warm, inviting. Come, child, come and touch the wheel and all will be well, said the witch behind the wheel. The show was the spindle and there weren’t many people telling me to run. Everyone around me seemed caught in the same spell.

  After talking to my dad, I went over to Jaime’s apartment on the Upper West Side. “Listen,” her mom said, “this is a really great opportunity. It could lead to so many things in your careers.” I liked acting enough and I guess I was pretty good at it—I even found a commercial agent to represent me. I wasn’t exactly over the moon at the prospect of doing commercials for laxatives or feminine products, however, and I hadn’t completely thought out any other long-term acting plans. I knew I wanted to do film. I thought I would be good as a comedic actor. The truth was, though, acting was difficult for me in some ways because it felt inauthentic, and I didn’t like having to be deceptive to succeed.

  I was also frightened to death of going to college. I barely got out of the idiots’ math class—how could I survive a college curriculum? My parents and I looked at Eugene Lang, a liberal arts college and part of the New School, in Greenwich Village. I wanted to study writing and producing, but I was so worried that my brain function was deteriorating. I thought I was getting dumber. My vision was a problem. My ability to retain information and repeat anything I had learned was a problem. My ability to focus was a problem. I knew that going to college would only magnify all of my learning issues. Although I didn’t know that Lyme disease was causing all of these problems, I did know for certain that those problems weren’t getting any better. In fact, they were getting worse.

  Some of my ambivalence about career direction also came from being my father’s daughter. I had this huge presence in my life standing on the pedestal I had built for him, a person who had achieved so much acclaim and success. How was I supposed to stand on that high platform next to him? I’d already heard the whispers, or had I imagined them? “Is she as smart, as talented, as creative as he is?” I was reluctant to work for my dad because I didn’t want to hear people say, “She’s only here because she’s his daughter.” “I bet she doesn’t have to make any money.” “No matter how good she thinks she is, she’ll never get close to her father’s level of success.”

  In being Tommy Hilfiger’s daughter I reacted to opportunities in one of two ways: I’d either run up the white flag and say, “Fuck it, what’s the use?” or I’d work my tail off to prove myself worthy. This added to me wanting to deny the symptoms I was experiencing and hide them from people. I didn’t ever want anyone to think I was shirking work or anything like that. I had worked so much to prove that despite the money, I still had a work ethic.

  So when Jaime and her mom began talking about how we could actually help teenagers, and how it was an opportunity to shine a light on real issues on camera, I began to think that maybe this was something in which I could become totally invested. Maybe there could be a higher purpose to this. Sure, some of the glitz and glamour will have to be there, but we really might be able to help kids. We have issues and we can talk about those issues.

  Maybe we can actually do something good.

  By the time I left Jaime’s, I was convinced I was about to embark on a great and meaningful TV show. You may be snickering. Please, you’re saying, how could someone ever be that naïve? Reality TV dealing with important social issues? No way!

  You have to understand that there was nothing with which to compare our show. The Kardashians were years away; Real Housewives wasn’t even an idea yet. Reality TV had not yet exploded in popular culture. The biggest reality show on TV then was The Osbournes, which, as I’m sure you remember, followed the rocker Ozzie Osbourne’s family. “Sharrrron!” The Osbournes was a huge hit for MTV and sent TV execs scrambling to come up with similar ideas: Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s The Simple Life for Fox was in production right behind us. No matter what you think of reality TV, it was a phenomenon that changed the television medium forever, and our show was on the leading edge of that cultural shift. We were in uncharted territory.

  I started to become excited, feeding off the energy around me—I just didn’t realize that it was negative energy. I put my producer’s hat on. I felt the way I had when we made Proud. I was going to put everything I had into this show. I was going to make it on my own.

  Seventy-five Rockefeller Plaza looks like something right out of an Ayn Rand novel. It has an all-marble entranceway and those old-style elevators painted in a gold leaf. We were there to sign the contract at the office of the lawyer to whom my father had introduced us. Jaime and I arrived without a guardian, manager, or agent. As I remember, the MTV people were a bit surprised by that. In fact, I never went to one MTV meeting with anyone other than Jaime.

  As we were ascending in the gilded elevators to the lawyer’s offices, I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the feeling you get when you know you’re about to do something dangerous. But I also felt that it was too late for me to turn back. Jaime was very excited, and so was my father. I thought it would be so spoiled, bratty, and stupid of me to walk away from an opportunity that many people would kill for. My heart was pounding as we reached heavy glass doors of the lawyer’s office, which had huge windows and was brightly lit.

  When we entered the office, the thick contract lay on a mahogany table. I’d tried to read it and could barely understand a sentence. I knew that our lawyer and the MTV lawyers had gone back and forth for weeks trying to get it in tip-top shape—at least that’s what I was led to believe. I was not privy to any of the negotiations. No one had actually even explained the contract to me in layman’s terms.

  In the office, I remember asking whether we would have any control over the editing process, and we were promised that we would get to see the dailies and rough edits and have some input. There was a clause in the contract about merchandising and I was told that MTV had control over all merchandise, from bobbleheads to board games. Though it didn’t seem fair, the thought of having a bobblehead doll of me did make me giggle.

  I remember asking how we could get out of the contract once it was signed.

  “You can’t,” our lawyer said. “You’re legally obligated to allow them to air however much they have filmed.”

  Jaime and I, of course, wondered how much we were going to get paid. Our lawyer prefaced his answer by telling us he’d worked hard to get the number up to where it was and that the “number is a good one. Trust me,” he said.

  “Is it as much as the Osbournes get?” I asked.

  “Not a good comparison,” he said. “They’ve been on the air for three years.”

  The amount our lawyer worked so hard to get was $36,000.

  Yet Jaime and I felt like the Beverly Hillbillies: Load up the truck, Jethro, we’re headin’ to Hollywood!

  We just had absolutely no idea.

  Then our trusty lawyer handed us two black Paper Mate pens.

  “Well, here we go,” I said as I wrote my name on the dotted line. “Signing our souls over to the devil.”

  Our lawyer laughed out loud.

  It had been only a couple of months since the afternoon I’d rode the long escalator up to see Wendy in my white Dolce & Gabbana jacket and wings. I had no idea how far the angel was about to fall.

  It was not until after I signed the contract that I told my mom about the show. Why would I tell her before? It was no surprise that she was very upset. “We are a private family,” she said. “They’re going to exploit us, our family name.” She asked if we had control over editing (how savvy was Mom, huh?). “Yes, yes,” I said, and I thought we did but we had no control, not even over the show’s title. I remember our lawyer told us he pushed for that—Jaime and I had spent hours thinking of cool titles.

  “What were you thinking?” my mother asked. “And what was your father thinking?”

  I can’t remember if I told her the title MTV had come up with. I probably didn’t. It would have only agitated her more to know that her Alexandria was now the star of a reality television show called Rich Girls.

  The night before we filmed the first episode I didn’t sleep. I was shaky for some time before, as if my blood sugar was off. I kept eating PowerBars and protein shakes—I thought I must have been hypoglycemic, but doctors found only that I had low vitamin D levels and low iron. Later I found that all Lyme patients have extremely low vitamin D levels. All I knew is that I felt as though vibrating fire was running through my veins and to my head, and the only thing that would help was food. I had to have something in my purse to eat all the time so that I wouldn’t feel lightheaded and woozy. I also didn’t know at the time that not enough oxygen was making its way into my brain, a condition that I later learned is common in longtime Lyme sufferers.

  Once the show started, there wasn’t much time for me to just pop into a place to grab a quick bite. In order to do that, we would have to get filming clearance first and God forbid we went anywhere without the cameras. I stocked my purse full of lollipops so I could get the sugar when I needed it.

  From the start, the show was a high-wire act without a net. There was no story line, plot, or even general direction toward a resolution. There weren’t any plans for character development or setup for conflict (although plenty of that would organically arise). There were no good guys or bad guys (some of that would naturally happen, too). There was no structure. There was essentially nothing but Jaime and me, our so-called lives, and a rolling camera.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  The first show was about shopping for the prom. They rented a limo for us, a form of transportation that I would never use to just shop around New York. I usually just hop in a cab or, better yet, take the subway. We went to private showrooms with my “uncle” Michael H. Michael isn’t really my uncle. Nonnie and Hippo sort of adopted him at an early age and he was best friends with Andy and Billy. As the camera followed, we spent ungodly amounts on our prom dresses (they zoomed in on the price tags). We had our hair done at Frederic Fekkai, a fancy midtown salon. We ate a late lunch in an Upper East Side restaurant. I was so tired during filming I couldn’t think straight. I had full-on Lyme brain and didn’t even know it.

  I started to say things that I knew were incorrect but couldn’t stop, like, “My dad invented cargo pants.”

  What? What the hell was I thinking?

  I knew my dad didn’t invent cargo pants; I was probably trying to say that he liked to design cargo pants. Too late. That one made it into the scene and ended up being one of the main things people like to make fun of me for saying.

  After we wrapped ten or twelve hours of shooting, I couldn’t help but think I’d made the biggest mistake doing the show and I had to shut up the voice of doom inside of me. I also felt trapped. Jaime was my best friend, and I didn’t want to disappoint my best friend. I knew how much she wanted to be an actress. I knew she was wonderfully talented. I’m sure I told her how I felt, but I don’t think I was forthright enough to make myself clear.

  Meanwhile, my mom’s voice was echoing in my head. As a teenager you don’t want to do anything your mom says. Her little speech probably launched me into a mindset that said, “Yeah, fuck it. Now I’m really going to do it.”

  Looking back, I think maybe Rich Girls was the ultimate rebellion against my mom. I can see how screwed up my thinking was: I’ll show you: I’ll hurt myself.

  eleven

  WILFRED AND THE BURRITO INCIDENT

  “If the disease [Lyme] remains untreated, a persistent infection can occur after a few weeks or months, leading to prolonged bouts of arthritis and neurologic problems, such as concentration problems or personality changes.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES

  So you want to be a reality TV star? Well, consider this: For a ten-episode season, we shot six days a week, if not seven, ten to twelve hours a day, for five months. Jaime and I were miked all that time, constantly. The microphone consisted of a little cigarette pack-sized gizmo that you’d hook on to your skirt and then pull your shirt over, or hook to the back of your bra under your shirt. After you attach the gizmo, you thread a wire from up under your shirt and clip it or pin it to the inside of your collar. Then they put a little piece of tape on it to hold it there.

  Pete, the soundman, was in his mid-forties and wore cargo shorts (which I don’t think he invented) and had a reddish mustache. He looked as if he went hiking and rafting on the weekends and knew a lot about how to build a kick-ass campfire. He was the only one of the crew I really trusted because I believed he didn’t have ulterior motives. Though we could ask Pete to turn off our mikes, like when we’d have to go to the bathroom, more times than not we’d forget that we were wearing them. Most of the day was so benign, so boring, that I’d even forget I was actually filming a television show that might be seen by a million people.

  If you add up all the time that the cameras were rolling, the total comes to around 1,200 hours of audio and videotape—twelve hundred hours of tape whittled down to four hours of showtime. I’m not very good at fractions, but even I can figure out that with those numbers you can tell just about any story you want. I’m not saying I didn’t give them material to work with; I did. Let’s just say they were very good at editing.