Head in the stars

Recently it occurred to me that I know more about the celebrities I interview than I do about my own family. But admit it -- don't you, too?

By Jancee Dunn

Read more: Hollywood, Family, Fame, Celebrities, Life

Aug. 22, 2006 | For the past 16 years, I have made my living by interviewing celebrities. During that time I have been chased by paparazzi with Ben Affleck, eaten Velveeta with Dolly Parton and hiked mountains with Brad Pitt. I've chatted with hundreds and hundreds of famous people. The days leading up to an encounter are always a typhoon of feverish preparation as I assemble a phonebook-sized dossier and pore over it, memorizing every detail of my subject's life from birth onward.

If I know every facet of a star's life and convey this in casual interjections ("If memory serves, you got a B minus on that test, yes?") then he or she will be warmer and more receptive, knowing that I Get Them. And so I approach each article as if it were a dissertation. Did you know that Mary-Kate's two horses are named CD and Star? Well, I do! Did I mention I'm 40 years old? And although my work requires me to scramble to feed the beast that is always hungry for intimate details of the glitterati, I suspect that I'm probably not alone in this regard. I've only professionalized it.

Often the information I discover is toe-curlingly personal, like my recent perusal of a Web site that exhibits a close-up photo of Katie Holmes' ropy stretch marks, post-baby Suri. My two sisters have children, and I haven't examined their stretch marks. I'm sort of vague about their kids' birthdays, too. The irony is that whether paid to, like me, or pay to, like your average cable subscriber and closeted People reader, after we inhale the endless minutiae of the famous all the livelong day -- Is Britney a good mother? Is Lindsay's career in trouble? -- the idea of doing the same thing with loved ones hardly occurs to us. Who can bother?

A chasm has opened between my personal and professional life, widening a little every year -- measured by what I know about famous strangers and what I know about those closest to me. I've had conversations with celebrities that often were startlingly more intimate than those I've had with my closest friends. Not long ago, an emotional Harry Connick Jr. talked haltingly to me about the death of his mother when he was a teenager, something I've yet to do with friends who have lost a parent. Death, drug addiction, sex: It's all fair game. For Redbook -- Redbook! -- I was instructed to ask talk show host Kelly Ripa if she and her husband used sex toys, and if so, which ones? I saved that query for last, so I could dart out quickly if a crack appeared in her cheerful demeanor. (It did: Ripa turned bright red, sputtered that she didn't use sex toys, and talked about me on the air the next morning as I did a spit take into my coffee.)

I first noticed this imbalance between what I know about celebrities and what I know about my own family after interviewing Loretta Lynn three summers ago. I had spent a giddy day with Loretta in her kitchen in Hurricane Mills, Tenn., eating bologna sandwiches ("Just take the bologna right out of the fridge yourself," she urged) and making peanut butter fudge as we talked at glorious length about her hardscrabble life as a coal miner's daughter. When the fudge hardened into little pebbles after cooking too long, Lynn just stuck two spoons in it and we ate it like cereal. It was heaven, and I told my mother about it one night in her kitchen as we were drying dishes after a family dinner.

"Get this," I said. "As a kid, Loretta used to eat fried squirrel." My mom slapped a platter onto the counter. "Well, what the hell do you think I used to eat? Dad would take a shotgun out into the woods." This amazed me. At that point in my life, why hadn't I heard that story? I knew the basic elements of my mother's early years but rarely thought to press for details. Would I be able to write my own mother's biography?

This I knew: My mother hailed from the tiny town of Citronelle, Ala. She was a former beauty queen, in fact the very first Oil Queen of Citronelle, and it was exotic for my friends in my New Jersey hometown to see the yellowing photo of Judith Ann Corners from 1960, holding a spray of roses, with a crown shaped like a little oil derrick perched gaily on top of her head. But when my mother said, "We ate squirrel plenty of times," I just stared at her.

Growing up, like most of us, I suppose, I didn't imagine my mother as having an actual personal history. To my youthful eyes, she was Source of Cash Obsessed With De-Cluttering. One way to mark adulthood is to pinpoint the moment in which you view a parent with new eyes, as an individual -- but I spent my life so immersed in the stories of celebrities that I never thought to be interested in my own mom, even at 30, when I was well beyond any sort of rebellious stage.

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