Paris: The Memoir(81)

In the months that followed, the paps were relentless. I eventually had to sell my home and move to a gated community up off Mulholland. I loved my new house, but it was hard to leave the happy party house on Kings Road.

It felt like the end of an era.





Part 4

Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

MARILYN MONROE





19

Coachella and I have a history. We both entered the grown-up world in 1999, struggled for a few years, found our footing, and spent the next two decades raging in all our neon glory.

Coachella is held every spring at the Empire Polo Club, a seventy-eight-acre field about twenty minutes from Palm Springs. During the year I lived in Rancho Mirage with my grandmother, we spent many Saturday afternoons at Empire Polo Club, wandering the grounds and watching the games. I loved looking at the horses. She loved looking at the men. It was very much the same vibe as the polo scene in Pretty Woman, which was shot at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank but is pretty much a copy and paste of a typical Saturday afternoon in Coachella Valley. Gram Cracker and I were always dolled up and sophisticated in summer dresses and ballerina flats. You couldn’t wear heels; that would make for a brutal afternoon walking around on the turf.

In the early aughts, Coachella—officially the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival—was called the “anti-Woodstock” because they provided plenty of restrooms, food, and water for a crowd of beautiful people, who were generally nice and well behaved. This new generation of festivalgoers had zero interest in wallowing in the mud. If you’re in the mood for mud, I’ll see you at Glastonbury.

In 2009, Brent Bolthouse created the Neon Carnival, an A-list, invitation-only after-party. (Remember Brent? He’s still killing it, and we’ve been together since that sweet-sixteen birthday party at Pop in 1997.) From the first year, I was obsessed. Someone asked me last week, “Will you be at the Neon Carnival?” and I said, “Honey, I am the Neon Carnival.”

I’m writing this in 2022. Festival season is finally alive again after being murdered by COVID two years in a row. I’m a little stressed out about my wardrobe. I’m usually a control freak about wardrobe for Coachella and Burning Man, dissecting every detail months in advance, but I’ve been insanely busy working on a mirror event—a Neon Carnival in the metaverse—so at the last minute, I called my friend Shoddy Lynn, who owns Dolls Kill, this sick raver store that sells glitzy, Goth, artistic, crazy, sexy clothes and accessories. I love supporting this woman-owned small business.

I also had Michael Costello make me a few daytime dresses—flowing boho chic—that I can wear with ballerina flats from Nicky’s French Sole collab. I’ll be a floaty-lace angel in the morning and a shredded-fishnet brat at night. Every look involves glam and a photo shoot, so it has to be planned in advance or it eats up too much fun time, which is already limited because I can only be there for one weekend. Normally, I’d never miss the second weekend of Coachella, but Carter has a business function I need to attend along with all the other supportive spouses.

I’m weirdly thrilled by domestic “wifey for lifey” duties like that. Carter and I know how to work a room together—a power-couple dynamic we both learned from our parents. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s a thing—this graceful, sweeping ease, a form of unspoken communication that can’t be learned or faked. It only happens if you genuinely respect, trust, and support each other. Maybe the best word for it is alliance. We’re in this together. What’s important to Carter is important to me. What’s important to me is important to Carter.

Even so, I’m afraid the FOMO will be real when I see everyone else posting pictures from Coachella Weekend 2.

A lot has changed for me since the last time I was at Coachella. I’ve changed—for the better, I think—but the biggest difference is having Carter with me. The first couple years of our relationship coincided with quarantine. This is our first festival season together. Right now, Carter is standing in the foyer, in shock when he sees the quantity of luggage I need for a three-day weekend: two dozen suitcases and garment bags, multiple bins containing bags, crowns, sunglasses, several cases of glam and tech equipment, and a life-size cardboard cutout of DJ Paul “Let’s get Fizzy!” Fisher, founder of Fizz hard seltzer. It all makes sense. Trust me.

I don’t think about it on a conscious level, but Coachella is a good example of how my ADHD perception of time translates to trend spotting: In the eye of the Spirograph, I walk the polo field with Gram Cracker and the Neon Carnival with Carter. I feel the earth beneath my sturdy boots and pretty ballerina flats. If the right influencer says the best of both worlds is a pretty platform boot, then someone—preferably a small, woman-owned business—is going to sell a ton of those.

We load out and leave before sunrise, fly to Palm Springs in a private jet, and relocate to our home-base hotel suite, where my team helps me reorganize everything in a walk-in closet. Friday morning, we pull up behind the main stage at Coachella in an RV the size of a Greyhound bus. In the next seventy-two hours, I get maybe ten hours of actual sleep. I’d get even less if I didn’t sleep while people do my hair and makeup.

Marilyn Monroe used to do that, too—lie there sleeping while the glam squad did their work as if they were putting makeup on a corpse. It’s not good-quality sleep. More like a power nap. I’m okay with it for the weekend. It’s kind of fun to wake up with iridescent lips and Sailor Moon space buns, and I have to make the most of my only weekend at Coachella.