Brian Williams, The Mirror, The Intern, and The Mean Girl
An homage to the dysfunction of the TV-producing workplace, and the relationships of professional women across the age divide.
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And now, story time….
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Everyone working on the short-lived CNBC TV show, McEnroe, had the title of “Producer." There was a Line Producer and an Entertainment Producer and an Associate Producer and an Assistant Producer and an Executive Producer, who would come round to dust off his Emmys and to keep rage-prone John McEnroe from flying into cardiac arrest.
My perfectionism, neuroses, naïveté, and now that I look back on it, my 18-year-old breasts, made me an instant success at McEnroe. I would hurry around the studio on the cusp of panic attack, greeting guests like Sting and Elton John, while other lesser interns would be sent out to scour all of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey to find Nicole Richie a Red Bull. (This was 2004 when New Jersey hadn’t heard of Red Bull, yet. It was a fool’s errand and Nicole had to settle for coffee.)
Through a series of lucky events, I had become the lead intern, quickly assigned jobs that would have been worthy of a real business card. I had done this in spite of a rough start.
I found out early on that I was to be working alongside Wendy Wasserstein’s nephew who, infuriatingly, was allowed into writers’ room meetings when I was not. Worse than that, Nephew Wasserstein barely spoke to me. My first words to him were something like “Oh, Wasserstein!? You’re not … like, related to Wendy Wasserstein, are you?" Followed by cackling nervous laughter from me. A scowl from him.
My first networking opportunity, thereby blown in the van on the way from Manhattan to Jersey on my very first day. After that, I decided to be a bit more circumspect. New rule: If someone had an impressive last name, that was probably because they actually were related to someone famous.
I sensed that I was now moving in a very different circle than in my previous summers, at dance camp.
Office attraction from older men at CNBC’s McEnroe came at me like a foreign language. I could pick out key vocabulary: the glances, smiles, and jokes, but all of the verbs were unknown to me, so I kept quiet and stuck to what I knew. What I knew was how to maniacally complete a relentless string of small tasks, as industriously as possible, for a team of people uniformly more important than I was.
At the end of each weekday, I’d come home from Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, not exhausted, but rather still fully wound up from a day’s worth of adrenaline and I would lie on the floor of my summer NYU dorm room on Water Street, by the Seaport. I’d stare up at the ceiling, having put on my favorite CD, A Boot and a Shoe, a moody, sultry Sam Phillips album gifted me by one of the many producers. I’d lie there, ostensibly to do sit-ups, which I often did, but many of those summer evenings were spent lying on that wooden floor, unaware of how or why to masturbate, simply hands-free dreaming up at the ceiling of all the married men who’d looked at me that way. It was the kind of profound and delicious teenage loneliness that grown ladies can only stumble back to in dreams, or wade through a river of whiskey to recapture.
***
“You know what, Emma?” Mallory was leaning in to me conspiratorially like a cool aunt. “You know about ‘mean girls’?”
The movie, Mean Girls, had come out that May of 2004, immediately before my summer internship had begun, and I had been viscerally lovesick, to the point of actual nausea, in my adoration of the film. To this day, I have never felt heartsick over anyone else like this. Tina Fey is the only love I’ve ever had who made me feel like I was going to puke.
I nodded, through my stifled, hushed sobs in Mallory’s little cubicle, where we were surrounded by framed photos of Mallory with her best friend, Amy Poehler, on the day that I, predictably, finally, snapped.
Yes, I was familiar with the film … and its auteur.
“Well, Bridget is a ‘mean girl.’ I mean, that’s all there is to it. She’s being a 'mean girl' and it’s not your fault.”
Mallory, the Entertainment Producer, was referring to Bridget, the Line Producer. I liked Mallory’s use of the term “mean girl” as if it were now an affliction, a clinical term used to describe older women who bullied unpaid interns. It wasn’t lost on me that a wise and competent woman like Mallory, in her thirties, knew that I loved Tina Fey and knew to sweetly comfort me by referencing what she must have intuited had been the most important movie of my life so far.
Mallory, the kindly Entertainment Producer had, overnight, given me the title of “Mallory’s personal assistant” and, in my frequent states of un-hideable stress, she would bark at me across a sea of fuzzy grey cubicles, “Delegate! Delegate!” I would nod fiercely and run away to complete all the tasks she had given me, all by myself.
I didn’t know what “delegate” meant.
I interpreted “delegate” to possibly mean: “Go around to another of the ten interns sitting idle in the waiting area and give up one of your forty tasks, thereby completely relinquishing your hard-won reputation as the most talented intern.”
It was out of the question. I sensed this environment to be even more competitive than the dance world and, by the mysterious grace of God, with my stage presence and keenly displayed sense of urgency, I’d been, miraculously, singled out by the staff.
All ego aside, I actually didn’t even understand physically what it would mean to “delegate.” What would I even say to demonstrate this mythical concept of ‘delegation’? Delegating seemed like a deeply vulnerable and weak state with no serviceable outcome, like bloodletting to treat an incurable plague, or prostituting oneself in exchange for tuberculosis medication: a last resort for when life has utterly failed you.
This sympathetic ‘mean girls' encounter with Mallory was the first time any employee had addressed me, emotionally, as a teenager. And now, with waterproof mascara streaming down my face, casting deep rivulets through layers of powder and foundation, my acne was beginning to show in honest red blotches. And it became apparent to me, to anyone looking up from their computer, that I was an unpaid, 18-year-old intern, wearing odd, dubiously artistic 80’s-inspired thrift store office clothes, and running all celebrity-related logistics for a TV show exclusively about celebrities.
The Executive Producer’s horrible six-year-old daughter, who had also attached herself to me and my youth, now helpfully chimed in, “I knew you wore makeup!”
***
This whole situation, of the star intern crying and falling apart at work, was Brian Williams’ fault. I had spoken with his agent and with his driver to coordinate his appearance on the show.
I was Mallory’s favorite and so she taught me terms like “ASAP” and then soon after, she taught me that using ASAP in every email was rude. That surprised me because, wasn’t it for the good of all that each sacred task be completed as soon as possible? She then taught me terms like “at your earliest convenience,” which I used constantly as a euphemism for, “Put everything else aside and make me look good, NOW.”
As with most of the show’s very famous guests, I had never heard of Brian Williams. It was my job, after coordinating appearance logistics, to greet the guests in the parking lot, to make them coffee, or whatever else their riders specified and then, in some cases, to usher them backstage and make sure they knew where they were going up until the moment they went onstage to have an asinine conversation with John McEnroe, who, unfortunately, found it very difficult to care about or engage with other people.
Standing backstage with Brian Williams before he went on to chat in front of a live audience, Brian asked me how he looked. I didn’t know what made him a celebrity. He looked like a newscaster to me, but I figured that’s what he was going for.
“You look good,” I said with a thumbs up, as I’d seen the camera crew use in various quiet moments of collegial communication.
His gaze darted around the backstage area nervously. “You guys really need to have a mirror back here so guests can see themselves before they go out.”
“Oh, wow. You’re totally right,” I said, welling up with deeply felt personal responsibility for the reputation of this terrible show that I would have given my life for. And right then and there, I promised Brian Williams, who might have been a famous shoe salesman for all I knew, “I will make sure that gets taken care of.”
If there was one thing that working on this show had taught me, it was that celebrities mattered. I watched Mallory interact with the guests whom she (and I!) had booked. She spoke to them like infants, and though I found it weird and depressing, I suppressed my judgment and spoke to Brian Williams as I had seen Mallory address Nicole Richie and the band members of Death Cab for Cutie.
I felt proud for how I had fielded this feedback from Sir Brian, who was perhaps an American knight? Or Oprah’s new doctor? Proud for precisely emulating Mallory with my quickness, with my amiably sycophantic assurances.
Also, Brian was right and I couldn’t believe I had missed it before. I had years of stagecraft behind me and many hours passed in front of mirrors before going out on stage, not the least of which were spent cleansing, exfoliating, moisturizing, and then expertly papier-mâché-ing my acne-splodged face into a new, pretend face, every day.
I returned to my computer in the office I shared with all the interns and they looked on as I called the maintenance guy asking him to put a full-length mirror backstage for guests. Brian Williams had suggested this, I added.
During this time, I misunderstood male attention as friendship and was under the profoundly naïve assumption that all the men in the CNBC building were my actual, bonafide friends. The maintenance guy was, by this flawed metric, definitely my best friend. Because I had spent my every conscious hour, prior to this summer, in dance class and in theatre school in the company of women and gay men, I felt that the maintenance man, though energetically different from my cohort—was my close professional contact. I figured I could call him up and throw the show’s budget around any which way I pleased.
Moments later, Line Producer Bridget burst into the intern room, eyes aflame, set on me. “Did you just call Bob and ask for a mirror to be installed backstage?”
Bridget levied this accusation with such incredulity and disgust, as if I had ordered cocaine in bulk, leaving a wake of human traffickers murdered, their bodies littering the campus of the Englewood Cliffs CNBC, all clues leading back to me.
“Yes?” I replied, my voice quaking, tears immediately springing to my baby eyes. Bridget was mad about something so much bigger than a mirror, and I intuited that, but it didn’t mitigate my terror or my shame. Without knowing what exactly, it certainly seemed likely that, given that I daily had no idea what I was doing, that I had done something wrong.
“No. You can’t do that,” Bridget glared at me with laser eyes and spoke low, as if placing a curse on me. She looked personally affronted. Maybe it bugged her that there were, like, twenty producers, but only one hot, young, female intern.
Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, would see me sprinting in my platform sandals through the halls every day, literally sprinting, in pursuit of errands, and he’d playfully holler after me: “Get me that intern, the one who runs! None of my interns run. We need that one!” I knew he was joking. But I also knew he was serious. What sort of person, besides me at 18, would be unafraid to RUN through corporate hallways, unabashedly caring that hard for no pay. I knew I had value, but I also knew I was clueless to social codes and could not compete with women in their forties, who knew the mores of this inscrutable culture.
I was beside myself. This awful encounter with Bridget was maybe the third time an adult had yelled at me in my life. “Does he know, do—does he—" I was having trouble breathing. The other interns looked on—at the girl who never delegated. “Does Bob know that I’m … just an intern?” I sobbed.
It was very much like after Anne Hathaway finally, inevitably, sells her body in Les Mis. I had resorted to reminding Bridget that I was an intern and didn’t know anything about anything. This was truly a fight or flight moment for me, and I had chosen combustion.
Bridget, herself, was now somewhat emotional, too and this scene, if made into a movie, by another exhausted film and TV crew, would be underscored by battle music. Bridget spoke, low and rumbling, in her very-adult-woman voice, “We don’t see you that way, though. We don’t see you as an intern. We see you … as an employee.”
This was her cryptic admonishment that had suddenly turned on itself to become an inspirational speech, or a call to arms, or maybe just a giant mindf*ck.
Bridget left and I ran, my primary form of transportation, from the intern holding cell to Mallory. I was totally dejected and confused when I arrived to receive her benediction. “Bridget is being a ‘mean girl,’” she explained, in an attempt to reframe a situation that, for me, seemed deeply significant, but to her, was little more than a grouchy employee going after the littler guy, laced with a distinct tinge of ‘mean girl’ syndrome.
***
My last day working on this show that you’ve never heard of, McEnroe, was the day before Janeane Garofalo was to be the guest. In a stroke of magic, I ran into her at the very end of that summer, while she was walking her dog in Washington Square Park.
I went up to her and said, “Hi, I was supposed to meet you. I was the guest coordinator intern on McEnroe. I was sad that I had to leave the day before you came on.”
She didn’t seem all that surprised to be stopped by an intern on NYU’s campus. “Oh,” she said, “that show was so weird.”
“Yes, it’s nicer to meet you here, in the park.”
We both agreed and she went on walking her dog.
Brian Williams, The Mirror, The Intern, and The Mean Girl
Brilliant Emma!! I loved, laughed, teared and felt so happy! Thanks