To look at her carefully curated Instagram feed, designer L’Wren Scott was a 1-percenter, a gold-plated member of the international elite: There she was on vacation in India with boyfriend Mick Jagger; at his retreat on the island of Mustique; about to board a chartered helicopter; lounging poolside in gold jewelry and designer sunglasses; stretched out on a private plane, using her $5,000 Louis Vuitton handbag as a footrest.
“I always say luxury is a state of mind,” Scott told The Sunday Times of London last November. “Because for me, it really is. It’s legroom, it’s a beautiful view, it’s great food at a great restaurant you’ve discovered because you obsessively read Zagat, as I do.”
And then, last Monday, she committed suicide, hanging herself in a $5.6 million Chelsea apartment that likely did not belong to her. Within hours, Scott’s life was revealed to have become an elaborate facade — her business at least $6 million in debt, her fashion-world friends and celebrity clientele unaware of her despair.
“Ironically, last week I said to three different people, ‘I wish I had her life, look at her life — she’s always somewhere fabulous and fancy,’ ” stylist Philip Bloch told WWD. “You think, here’s someone who has it all. You just never know.”
While the chasm between Scott’s marketed life and her actual life came as a shock, she was just one of countless New Yorkers who secretly fake their fabulous lives.
To be fabulous
As of September 2013, the median household income in New York City, according to the US Census, was $50,895. According to a 2012 report issued by the City Comptroller’s Office, 49 percent of New Yorkers had unaffordable rents — and rent, for half of us, gobbles up more than 30 percent of our income. This month, Forbes magazine ranked New York City the most overpriced metropolis in America.
Ironically, the New Yorkers most expected to live with no budgets, no cares and no limitations are members of the creative class, people with typically low-paying glamour jobs in media, the arts, fashion, publishing.
And the closer their proximity to wealth and fame, the higher the pressure — recall celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, one-time owner of three conjoined West Village townhouses who found herself $24 million in debt in 2009.
“How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz?” asked New York magazine. In 2004, Leibovitz was caring for her father, who had cancer, as well as her partner, Susan Sontag, who had also been diagnosed with cancer. She spent thousands shuttling Sontag around the country, in a private plane, for treatment.
But Leibovitz was also done in by reckless spending, possibly aggravated by too much time in the company of cultural and political power brokers.
“I see this a lot,” says Norah Lawlor, a longtime publicist who met Scott several times. “You come here, change your name and want to be fabulous. You get caught up.”
Scott was originally Luann Bambrough and was raised in a small Utah town by adoptive Mormon parents. But at some point, the persona she projected in the pages of Vogue — cool-girl courtesan to a rock ’n’ roll lothario, designer to A-list clientele — became her reality.
Until it wasn’t.
“She was turning 50, her business was closing, and she’s friends with celebrities but can’t go to them [for help],” Lawlor says. “People come to New York City and want to be part of a certain clique, and think they are. But it often catches up to them.”
The writer’s life
In 2008, Emily Gould, a former writer at Gawker, appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, and the accompanying article helped land her her first book deal. Manhattan was still in a “Sex and the City” haze, with thousands of would-be Carrie Bradshaws shopping and blogging and the global financial crisis just months away. Gould’s advance: $200,000. She was 28 years old.
“People who don’t know think, ‘Oh! You’ve won the lottery!’ ” Gould says. “Two hundred thousand dollars — even though it’s a lot for a first book — it wasn’t crazy by any means.”
Gould was hired at Gawker in 2007 with a starting salary of $45,000 a year — what she was making at her previous job as an associate editor at a publishing house. Even though she knew her $200,000 advance was a lot less in the real world than it was on paper, she says “that still didn’t stop me from making the decisions I made.”
She kept her one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, where she lived alone, paying $1,700 a month in rent. Health insurance was another $400 a month. She bought new clothes and went to good restaurants and had entree into a new social circle, a group of equally fabulous people who loved doing equally fabulous things.
“Socially, it’s a boon,” Gould says. “You were able to casually do things — go shopping in Soho with someone who walks into stores and they’re known by name. My thinking was nonexistent: ‘La-la-la. I’ll put the things I can’t afford right away on a credit card.’ People who are working in film, or in any creative job where you’re in flush times — it’s hard to believe it will ever end.”
To the outside world, Gould was a phenom who, one year into her career as a blogger, wound up with a six-figure advance and media-vacuum fame. In actuality, Gould had done the math, and here’s how her book deal — like most every book deal — broke down:
• $200,000 in four installments: one-fourth upon signing, one-fourth upon acceptance of the manuscript, one-fourth upon hardcover publication, one-fourth one year later or upon paperback publication.
• 15 percent ($30,000) to her agent.
• After-tax take-home: about $45,000 a year, her original salary
Then, in May 2010, her memoir, “And the Heart Says Whatever,” was published. It sold about 8,000 copies — or, as she recently wrote, “a fifth of what it needed to sell to not be considered a flop.”
The book’s poor sales meant she’d never get that kind of advance again, and Gould, New York’s newest fabulous young writer, found herself jobless and broke. She could no longer afford to run with her more privileged friends.
“It was a fun peek into a world that I don’t think I’ll have access to in the foreseeable future,” she says.
Gould now works at two startups and has sold a novel, “Friendship,” for $30,000. She rarely dines out anymore, and no longer has a credit card.
“Now, when younger writers talk to me, I tell them to get a job,” she says. “There are a lot of people who think being a writer is glamorous, but anyone who does it for a living knows there’s nothing glamorous about it.”
‘Real’ and fake
When Alex McCord was cast to star in a reality series on Bravo in 2007, she thought it was going to depict the lives of frazzled Manhattan moms. But after the success of “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” the concept was retooled. It became “The Real Housewives of New York City” — a peek into the private lives of the city’s wealthiest women. The mandate was clear: Consume, consume, consume.
“That first season,” McCord says, “every single one of us went out of pocket and spent more money than we made.” Each Housewife got $10,000 for that first season, which didn’t cover the parties they were expected to throw, or the clothes they were expected to buy, or the trips they were supposed to take.
“There is tremendous, tremendous pressure among the Housewives to have the biggest, blingiest, most tricked-out lifestyle,” says McCord, who now covers the franchise on TheStir.com. “I was absolutely shocked when we first started doing this. We’d finish shooting a scene and go for drinks or dinner afterward. And we stopped doing that because you wouldn’t believe how many people skipped out on the bill.”
Over the franchise’s eight-year lifespan, 12 Real Housewives have filed for bankruptcy, one has been evicted on camera, several have battled substance-abuse issues, one couple has pleaded guilty to fraud in federal court, one husband has been indicted for fraud and identity theft, and one husband has committed suicide.
What makes it easier for New York City Housewives to fake it, says McCord, is the proximity to fashion designers, publicists, restaurateurs and charity organizers — most of whom are happy to barter free goods for camera time.
Or were.
“The problem is that the darker these seasons have gotten” — alcholism, divorce, foreclosure — “the less these companies want to be involved.” Besides, she adds, the more Bravo “clings to the branding of the Housewives as ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ the more these people have turned out to be financial frauds.”
Chasing ‘model’ lives
In the world of fashion modeling, the pressures are much the same. “It’s a superficial industry where there’s always a significant gap between image and reality,” says model and activist Sara Ziff, executive director of The Model Alliance. “The vast majority of models do not command vast sums and are working in debt to their agencies.”
And the more high-profile the job, the less a model is paid — if she’s paid at all. “It’s a little-known fact that most designers don’t pay models to walk,” Ziff says. “They’ll pay in trade: a tank top, or samples from their last collection. Of course, you can’t pay your rent with a tank top.”
To make ends meet, models commonly agree to shoots they’d otherwise never do, Ziff says, or submit to “inappropriate offers.” And then there are the club promoters who sidle up to the most naive, offering them free food and drinks while using their presence to boost a nightspot’s profile.
“It’s a little sad,” Ziff says. “Many of these girls have no idea that this underground economy exists. They think these promoters are their friends — and it’s a business where relationships and who you’re friends with, or at least who you pretend to be friends with, is very important.”
So you have models who need to be friendly with the right designers, and many of these designers can’t afford to pay these models because they’re barely getting by themselves. (Rachel Roy is the latest designer to go out of business, folding two weeks ago. Her ex-husband, former rap mogul Damon Dash, was worth $50 million but is now broke.)
It’s a city where you go to the rock show or the play or watch the fashion runway at Lincoln Center, and just about everyone on that stage is barely making ends meet even though they look like they have it all and more.
Intentionally or not, Scott’s suicide laid bare the unglamorous truth about her life and the world she so tenuously inhabited.
“In the midst of all the air kisses,” Ziff says, “are a lot of relationships that are extremely superficial. And a lot of people don’t have the emotional support to back them up.”