Lady Gaga’s former personal assistant Jennifer O’Neill (above right) is suing the star for overtime pay. In court papers, Gaga complained that O’Neill didn’t want to be her “slave.” (FilmMagic)
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Whenever Rebecca White arrived at a hotel ahead of her VIP employer, Naomi Campbell, she followed the drill.
Call housekeeping to unpack, steam and press the clothes. Check. Take out the contents of the minibar. Check. Put 25 lily-scented candles around the suite in the specific spots. Check.
“God forbid they weren’t [the luxury brand] Diptyque,” recalls White, who worked for the famously difficult, cellphone-wielding supermodel for almost five years. “There always had to be five candles in the bathroom, 10 in the bedroom and 10 in the living room.”
Step inside the rarefied domain of celebrity personal assistants — an intense and often fearful world where A-list stars behave like toddlers and the word “no” is never used.
Lady Gaga, currently embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with her former aide Jennifer O’Neill, gave us mere mortals a glimpse into that milieu when the star declared in court papers that she was the “queen of the universe, everyday” and O’Neill did not want to be her “slave.”
In court papers, Gaga whined that O’Neill failed in simple duties such as laying out her toothbrush and soap so that she knew where they were. She insisted that O’Neill lived large off her dime, wore her clothes, bagged the best bed on her private jet and left the 115-pound diva to lug her own suitcases.
Meanwhile, the disgruntled O’Neill, who is suing for $390,000 in unpaid overtime plus damages, testified she was “required” to sleep in Gaga’s bed “because she didn’t sleep alone,” and was expected “to be working and available 24/7” for an annual salary of $75,000.
Such hours and demands might seem absurd to those outside of showbiz circles, but to insiders like White, they are par for the course: “There’s no such thing as overtime or having your own life,” says the 39-year-old Litchfield, Conn., native.
“You are married to these people. You are literally in a relationship with them.”
Before Campbell, White was a personal assistant to “Homeland” star Claire Danes, then just a teenager, after her breakthrough role in “William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.”
“There are different levels of PAs — there’s the person back in the office who does the faxing and e-mailing — but my job was to be their best friend,” says White. “It’s sad, but true.
“On the outside, these celebrities seem to have everything you can imagine — money, fame, friends — but they don’t.
“Fame is a very lonely thing. It’s actually very depressing. You’re sequestered, in a way.
“I’ve seen a lot of celebrities cling onto their personal assistant, but it’s really just [wanting] somebody to love them unconditionally.”
White fondly recalls how she drove the obligatory U-Haul truck to drop off Danes at college when she began studying at Yale, and made up her bed in the dorm.
“I hugged her, and she was scared, and I gave her the kiss goodbye,” says White, who lived in Danes’ $5 million loft in SoHo rent-free and was paid $2,000 a week plus expenses while her charge was in school.
“I said: ‘I’ll be back this weekend to pick you up.’ ”
Some assistants get so close to their famous employers they end up sharing a bed with them. O’Neill isn’t the first to claim that Gaga, 26, insisted on her assistants staying the night with her. In 2010, Gaga’s former aide Angela Ciemny revealed that she had to sleep in the same bed as her needy boss.
“A lot of celebrities have this abandonment thing, or maybe it’s an acceptance thing, where they don’t want to be alone,” concludes White.
Meanwhile, Bonnie Low-Kramen, co-founder of New York Celebrity Assistants, a support organization, says the overdependency is unhealthy. In her book “Be the Ultimate Assistant,” Low-Kramen emphasizes the need to set boundaries.
“It’s really important for celebrity assistants to have a clear line between being a friend and an employee,” she says, adding that salaries in New York range from $50,000 to six figures for a top assistant. (Although Oprah Winfrey once reportedly offered her personal assistant $1 million not to defect.)
“It needs to be a business relationship. Otherwise it’s typically a revolving door.”
She recently counseled a 20-something whose A-list principal would greet her, naked, at the door: “She didn’t feel empowered or confident enough to say to him that it bothered her,” says the veteran PA who worked happily for actress Olympia Dukakis for 25 years. “She quit after a few months.”
Another eyebrow-raiser was an actor awakening his New York-based PA with an “urgent” phone call at 4 a.m. “He was five hours ahead in London, and he was asking her to call the hotel because his bathroom was running out of toilet paper,” says Low-Kramen.
When outrageous demands become the norm, as it seems with Gagagate, a personal assistant needs to re-evaluate.
Alex, not her real name, a member of NYCA who spoke to The Post anonymously and has worked for the same famous New Yorker for seven years, says, “If she [O’Neill] thought that the working atmosphere was unprofessional, she should have said something to Lady Gaga, to Lady Gaga’s reps, or resigned immediately,” says Alex.
She reckons Stockholm syndrome — combined with so-called “Acquired Situational Celebrity” syndrome, in which the PA adopts the attitudes of the kingpin — also played a part.
“Flying in private planes, being part of an entourage, being paid, quite often, a great salary, it becomes very overwhelming.
“You are the gatekeeper to one of the most popular artists in the world, but it’s secondhand fame.”
Another hazard of the job is that something terrible is going to happen on your watch: After Lindsay Lohan was arrested in November after an incident at a NYC nightclub, her personal assistant Gavin Doyle tweeted: “After bailing you out last night I HOPE and PRAY you get the help you so desperately need.”
But more often it pays to keep your mouth shut. Though she never worked for Michael Jackson’s ex-wife Debbie Rowe, White, a former friend, publicly spoke out about Rowe after Jackson’s death. She was successfully sued by Rowe to the tune of $27,000 (a default judgement as White never answered the complaint). Despite that, White is forging ahead with her memoir, “Pandora’s Box,” including her experiences with Campbell.
She says the key to her survival was refusing to let the tetchy model, who has admitted to using hard-core drugs in the past, frighten her. “She would intimidate and yell and gain her power by making people cry,” claims White. “I was never afraid of her.”
Still, White, who now lives in West Palm Beach, Fla., was always a “yes” woman. As well as setting out the 25 candles in Campbell’s suites, another key task, according to White, was taking out the alcohol in the mini-bar and stashing it in her own room. “She wanted to pretend to the outside world that she wasn’t drinking,” alleges White. “Every hotel we set foot in, I would move [the bottles] so that anyone, a manager, a maid, could say that she doesn’t drink.” Campbell would then “grab her two phones, grab me and go into my room to start drinking.”
Unfortunately the setup ended badly when the pair had a spat at the Hotel du Cap on the French Riviera: “I got on the train the following morning to go back to England,” says White, of the incident which, yes, you guessed it, did involve a lobbed BlackBerry. “Then I had to hide — with her American Express credit card, thank God — in a small boutique hotel in downtown London until I could go back into her apartment and get my stuff.”
jridley@nypost.com