Even if celebrity applicants don't want red-carpet treatment, they have little choice. Julia Halberstam's heart was set on attending Brown, but she pleaded in her 1998 application essay to be judged on her own merits and not as the daughter of David Halberstam, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of The Best and the Brightest and the baseball book Summer of’49.

  “I am really just someone who did not want to get in for the wrong reasons,” Julia told me. She ranked in the middle of her prep school class and had a 1340 SAT score, about 50 points below Brown's average. She said she “really excelled” in English and history in high school but had Cs in subjects such as math and science that didn't interest her. “I put in as much effort as I could to separate myself, to not be my last name.”

  Ordinarily, Brown does not interview applicants on campus; they meet with alumni representatives across the country. But when Julia and her father visited Providence, Brown admissions director Michael Gold-berger met with them personally—and spent most of the time talking baseball with the writer. His daughter was so infuriated that, at her insistence, she had a second interview with another Brown official. “It was just me and him and we talked and it was great,” she said.

  When I ran her story past Goldberger in 2003, he told me that he met with one hundred applicants and their parents a year, strictly as a courtesy. He said ten to fifteen of them were celebrities, donors, or alumni. No records were kept of the conversations, he said, and they had no effect on the admissions decision. Goldberger resigned as admissions director in 2005 to become Brown's athletic director.

  Julia Halberstam was admitted to Brown, graduated in 2002, and through the Teach for America program taught kindergarten at a school in Greenville, Mississippi. She remained troubled by the thought that she got in because of her father. “I don't know if I got into Brown because of my father's celebrity—I'll never know,” she told me in 2003. “I was very aware of it and uncomfortable with it.” She believes colleges should consider an applicant's race and social class—not celebrity status. “Not everyone has the same childhood that I did,” she said. “There's a difference between not knowing and not being able to learn.”

  Despite Julia's misgivings about benefiting from influence, she did use one family connection in the hope of boosting her Brown chances. At her request, former Brown president Vartan Gregorian recommended her. Although Gregorian had recently left as president, he retained some clout with Brown admissions.

  “I have known Julia since she was a child,” Gregorian told me. “She would come on her father's shoulders to my Christmas parties. I always said to her, ‘When the time comes, if you need a recommendation …”” He added that he had recommended to Brown the granddaughter of another well-known writer, E. L. Doctorow.

  It's hardly surprising that some celebrities think getting into an elite college is as easy as crashing the line at a chic nightclub. In the 1980s, Tatum O'Neal, the youngest Oscar winner in history, visited the Brown admissions office and expressed interest in enrolling—even though she had scant formal education before dropping out of a Beverly Hills school. Asked how she expected to be academically competitive, she answered, referring to fellow child star Brooke Shields, “I just decided, ‘Princeton had Brookie, so Brown needed me.”” In the end, she decided not to apply.

  For celebrity applicants such as fashion model Lauren Bush, niece of President George W. Bush, there's no such thing as a deadline. In February 2002, a month after Princeton's application deadline had passed, Lauren contacted the university through her personal college adviser and asked permission to apply. The adviser explained that Lauren had changed her mind about her college plans after falling in love with Princeton on a recent visit. Sure enough, Princeton granted her special dispensation to apply. Despite SAT scores considerably below the typical Princeton student and a B average at the Kinkaid School in Houston, she was admitted. A person familiar with Lauren Bush's application to Princeton acknowledged that “her credentials were a cut below,” but says Fred Hargadon, then dean of admission, was a political conservative “looking to inject personalities not from the liberal elite.” Lauren—who also submitted to colleges a poetry collection entitled Me—was accepted by a second Ivy League uni-versity as well: Yale, the president's alma mater. (Her father, Neil Bush, graduated from Tulane University.) Once at Princeton, Lauren became a member of its most exclusive eating club, Ivy, joining Catharine Edwards, daughter of Senator John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic candidate for vice president.

  Eyebrows were also raised when Lauren's younger brother, Pierce George Mallon Bush, enrolled in fall 2004 at Georgetown, considered one of the nation's top 25 universities. Pierce's academic struggles had been publicized by his own father, Neil Bush. Because his son had been misdiag-nosed with attention deficit disorder, Neil Bush told interviewers, Neil had cofounded an education software company offering a computer curriculum for Pierce and other “hunter-warrior types” who don't enjoy reading.

  “I did pretty good in elementary school,” Pierce, appearing with his father, said on Fox News's Hannity and Colmes show in September 2002. “And I got up to the middle school level, and I started running into some trouble just because I wasn't quite that interested in what was being thrown across the table, if you know what I'm saying…. Once you pick stuff that you're interested in, and that's like the thing, my grades have improved a lot.”

  That same month, on CNN's Connie Chung Tonight, Chung asked Neil Bush: “Now, your son is a straight-A student, isn't he?” Bush replied, “Well, he's not a straight A. I think he's doing very well this year, though.”

  The president's brother declined to be interviewed for this book but said in a voice-mail message, “Despite the burden of these two children being offspring of Neil Bush, they've managed because of their merit to get into two fantastic universities. Both are doing very well at their respective universities and both are very happy. Frankly, it's my contention that the universities are lucky to have them as students.”

  No UNIVERSITY in the country has practiced celebrity admissions more assiduously or successfully than Brown. Over the past twenty-five years, it has attracted, among others, children of Democratic Party poohbahs, including two presidents (John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter; Bill Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, visited Brown but opted for Stanford), three presidential candidates (Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry), and a vice presidential candidate (Geraldine Ferraro). Among entertainment notables, it has drawn children or stepchildren of two Beatles (Ringo Starr, George Harrison), two Grammy Award winners (James Taylor, Carly Simon), an Emmy Award winner (Candice Bergen), and at least seven Academy Award winners (Marlon Brando, Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins, and Susan Sarandon)—not to mention nominees Diana Ross, Richard Burton, David Mamet, Louis Malle, and Lee Strasberg. Fashion has been represented in the student body by children of designers Calvin Klein, Diane von Furstenberg, and Ralph Lauren. Allegra Beck, daughter of Donatella Versace and niece of the late Gianni Versace, enrolled at Brown in 2004. In addition, Brown has garnered its share of teen performers—such as actress Leelee Sobieski, who appeared in Never Been Kissed and Eyes Wide Shut.

  Academically, Brown's celebrity students lag behind their more obscure classmates. The top 20 percent of Brown seniors graduate with high honors. Yet of thirty-three Brown graduates from famous families whom I checked, not a single one received such honors, according to university records. Four of the thirty-three, or 12 percent, graduated with honors in their majors: Vanessa Vadim (Jane Fonda's daughter), Alexandra Kerry (John Kerry), Cosima von Bulow (Claus von Bulow), and Rhonda Ross (Diana Ross). By contrast, nearly 30 percent of all Brown students achieve distinction in their majors.

  But the success of celebrity children isn't only judged by grades or honors. Even though Brown has the Ivy League's lowest endowment ($1.8 billion in fiscal 2005), their visibility—and their parents’—has helped transform it from the “doormat of the Ivies,” as it was sometimes labeled, to one of the nation's top destinations for bright students with a creative or artistic bent.

  Ovitz and Hoffman, who weren't paid for their Brown appearance, are not the only prominent parents to headline events there. The late King Hussein of Jordan spoke at commencement when his son, Prince Faisal, graduated in 1985. Recent Parents” Weekend headliners at Brown included MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews (father of Michael Matthews?5), Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau (father of Ross Trudeau ‘06), and the late Superman actor Christopher Reeve (father of Matthew Reeve?2), while actor-director Tim Robbins (stepfather of Eva Amurri ‘07) spoke at an Ivy League film festival there.

  ON PARENTS’ Weekends, Brown students are accustomed to seeing actor/director Danny DeVito and his wife, Rhea Perlman (who played the barmaid Carla in the sitcom Cheers), at a coffeehouse or at student theater productions featuring their daughter Lucy, or Kevin Costner, in cowboy hat and boots, tailgating before a Brown football game. On one such occasion, the Oscar-winning director of Dances with Wolves vied with his daughter's classmates in Beirut—a drinking game in which cups of beer are arranged in a pyramid and the object is to throw Ping-Pong balls into them.

  Brown has long contended that it has no calculated plan to appeal to celebrity children; they simply fall into the university's lap. “We did not go out in search of these kids,” Robert Reichley, retired executive vice president for university relations, told me in his home on the edge of Brown's campus. “We did not cultivate them as you might a fine quarterback. They came in over the transom.”

  Whether by accident or design, Brown has positioned itself perfectly to attract students from famous families. Sometimes labeled the “alternative Ivy,” it blends Ivy League prestige with relaxed curricular requirements. Some Brown faculty and administrators evince an unusual sympathy for celebrity children. Richard Fishman, a visual arts professor and director of the Creative Arts Council, which sponsored the Hoffman-Ovitz event, went so far as to call them an “oppressed minority.”

  Brown has other gateways for celebrity children besides freshman admissions and Chris Ovitz's “special student” status. Several children of prominent parents have transferred from other colleges to Brown, which is easier to get into as a transfer than as a high school senior. Brown accepts more than one-quarter of transfer applicants, compared with 17 percent of freshmen applicants. Because Brown does not offer financial aid to transfers, they tend to come from wealthy families, as do Andrew Lauren, son of Ralph Lauren; Kimberly Ovitz, who came from New York University; and Princess Theodora, daughter of the deposed King Constantine of Greece. The princess transferred from Northeastern University in Boston, an urban school that specializes in providing workplace experience for students and doesn't traditionally cater to royalty. According to a person familiar with her situation, Theodora (whose family lives in England) chose Northeastern because it has a strong alumni base and reputation in Greece, even though it offers only a modest program in theater, her area of interest. After her freshman year, she decided that she wanted more extensive coursework in the arts and humanities and applied for a transfer to Brown, which her older brother, Prince Nikolaos, had attended. Although few Northeastern students transfer to the Ivy League, a considerable step up in prestige, Brown admitted her.

  Over the years, foreign royalty has been represented in the student body not only by Princess Theodora of Greece but also by the offspring of, among others, King Hussein of Jordan and the Aga Khan. Two children— Tatiana and Alexandre—of wrap dress inventor Diane von Furstenberg and Prince Egon von Furstenberg of Austria also attended Brown. The university's popularity among international students, not all of them royalty, is perhaps not surprising since Brown was one of the first Ivy League schools to pursue them. In 1978, former admissions director James Rogers recalled, he advised Howard Swearer, then Brown president, that the number of American high school graduates was expected to taper off as the baby boom generation reached adulthood. “I suggested that international students add a great deal to campus, and we should make a concerted effort to recruit them,” Rogers recalled.

  Swearer agreed, and a Brown admissions staffer began to visit private and international high schools in Europe and the Far East each year and send back names of potential applicants. Rogers would follow up with an annual trip to London, Paris, Athens, and Rome, holding a “Brown Night” in each city. “It started a lot of international buzz,” Rogers said. “The more cosmopolitan group was our audience in the beginning. People who had heard of Brown would be those who had the means to send their children there. I'm sure it helped fund-raising.”

  Within five years, Rogers said, the proportion of international students in Brown's freshman class doubled from one in twenty to one in ten. Since leaving Brown, he has operated his own counseling service for international students—including, he said, “a number of Saudi royals.”

  UNTIL THE late 1960s, Brown wasn't on the international—or even national—map. “I played basketball, and we had two kids on our team from Atlanta,” recalled Providence Journal columnist Bill Reynolds, a 1968 Brown graduate. “They were almost exotic. Everybody else was from New England, New York, or New Jersey. Then somebody made a very conscious marketing strategy to be favorable to children of celebrities.”

  Brown's evolution into a celebrity campus began in 1969, when it adopted a curriculum eliminating the distribution requirements that compelled students to take classes across the academic spectrum. To ensure a well-rounded education, most universities require students, whatever their major, to take at least one course in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Brown's “New Curriculum,” which also reduced credits needed to graduate and let students take any course on a pass-fail basis rather than for a grade, enhanced its appeal to artistic students who hoped never to open another math or science text.

  “To any person who is brought up in advantaged circumstances or had European schooling, American distribution requirements look awfully jejune,” former Brown dean of admissions and financial aid Eric Widmer told me in his office at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where he is the headmaster. “They want to take ownership of their education, and Brown allowed them to do that. So Brown was more appealing to celebrities than a university that spoon-fed them.”

  Julia Halberstam, for instance, recalled that “Brown was just the perfect fit for me, because of the curriculum. There are no requirements. I never wanted to look at a number again.” More recently, Tess Curtin Lynch, daughter of the actress and comedienne Jane Curtin (Saturday Night Live, Third Rock from the Sun), aspired to Brown as a refuge from math and science. As a student at the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, she acted in school plays and was published in the literary magazine. Her grades were solid but not outstanding: “Everything was brought down by math,” she told me over the phone in 2004. Brown's lack of requirements, she said, was “a huge part of what made me want to go there.”

  The first time Tess took the math SATs, she scored 550 out of 800— well below Brown's standards. Her college counselor at Harvard-Westlake School told her she would need at least 600 to be competitive. Her family hired a tutor, who came to her house once a week and helped lift her score to 660 (along with a 700 verbal mark). “Probably a quarter of my classmates at Harvard-Westlake had the same sort of tutoring,” Tess said. She applied early to Brown, was deferred to the regular pool, and then admitted.

  Tess Lynch, who enrolled in 2001, acknowledged the dual advantage of her parentage: not only is her mother well known but her father, Patrick Lynch, is a Brown alumnus. “Probably that played a bigger part than my mom,” she said. She also had a recommendation from Brown alumna Nancy Josephson, an influential Hollywood agent.

  “I'm willing to admit I had the best possible set of circumstances,” said Tess, who graduated from Brown with a degree in art history. “I was very lucky. I don't know what my situation would have been without these steps up. I'm very, very pro-affirmative-action. I wouldn't want to go to school where all the people were just like me.”

  The “New Curriculum” caught a higher education wave, boosting Brown applications and allowing it to be more selective in admissions. Then, in 1979, Brown cemented its rising stature with a stunning coup: the enrollment of the late John E Kennedy Jr.—son of the assassinated president and crown prince of a political dynasty. “John-John” was widely expected to follow his father, grandfather, and sister to Harvard. But Harvard was leery of his mixed academic record in private school (first at the Co lie-giate School in Manhattan and then at Phillips Academy in Andover), while John wanted to escape his family's long shadow—and math classes. His quantitative skills were shaky, and Brown's strong theater program appealed to him.

  James Rogers, then Brown's admission director, recalled that John considered the state universities of Virginia and Vermont as well as Harvard and Brown. “I personally and other people in the office worked very hard with Andover in this case,” said Rogers. “We talked a great deal about what would be in his best interest. Other colleges were involved in these discussions. We believed, and Harvard also said, going to Harvard would not be in his best interest simply because of all the ghosts. In the end, it came out that most everybody agreed that Brown would really be a very good place for him, which was then passed on to his mother [Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis]. She kind of bought it.” Bruce Breimer, then and now director of college guidance at the Collegiate School, recalled that Onassis sought his advice about Brown, and he reassured her that it was the right match for her son. After graduating from Brown in 1983, John enrolled at New York University law school, and then exposed his scholastic deficiencies by failing the state bar exam twice.