The Greatest 'It Girl' Moments of All Time

This is my top ten list of great It Girl moments through history:

1. Marilyn Monroe singing the most mind numbing version of Happy Birthday imaginable, to the president of the United Sates, in front of the entire country.
2. Paulette Bonaparte (Napoleon's little sister) posing naked for Canova. When shocked socialites asked her if she was uncomfortable doing it, she apparently replied, "Not at all, his studio is heated."
3. Princess Di dancing with John Travolta at the White House.
4. Anne Boleyn getting Henry VIII to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry her. She did end up getting her head chopped off for it BUT she also changed the course of history and gave birth to Elizabeth I, arguably the greatest ruler in British History.
5. Brooke Shields bending over in those blue jeans and saying nothing comes between her and her Calvins. Wowwee.
6. Joan of Arc leading the French into battle.
7. Marlene Dietrich doing anything in a tux.
8. Ava Gardner peeing in the lobby of some ridiculously fancy hotel. Yes she really did this! I read about it in her biography; I just can't remember the name of the hotel right now. She was never allowed back in the place, as you can imagine.
9. Cleopatra killing herself with an asp. (Okay it is possible that this is one that Shakespeare made up but it is good nonetheless.)
10. Audrey Hepburn's profile.

All right I am sure I have missed some great ones. I have somehow managed to leave off Clara Bow, the actress for whom the term was so famously coined. Madonna was an ongoing It Girl phenomenon for so long it's impossible to distill all that into one moment. It was apparently pretty sensational when Ingrid Bergman ran off with Roberto Rosselini but that's more like marital discord than an It Moment. I liked it a lot when Drew Barrymore stood on David Letterman's desk and flashed him, but I started thinking that I couldn't have so many contemporary It Girls and I had to get some historical figures in there. Jackie Kennedy Onassis most certainly belongs on the list but her It Moments were so tragic you could hardly put them on a list of favorites. Also it is strange and odd to me that Julia Roberts and Katherine Hepburn and Greta Garbo didn't make the list but the more I thought about it the more I thought well just being a great actress doesn't make you an It Girl. Something else makes you an It Girl. Not that they didn't have It, just that It didn't make them It Girls. It made them Stars, which is different than being an It Girl, although many It Girls are also Stars (see Marilyn Monroe, above.)

Okay I'm spending a lot of time thinking about It Girls right now because as I think I've mentioned on this post last week, I wrote a novel about some normal girls who become It Girls. (It's called Three Girls and Their Brother and it's coming out on April 7 and I hope that you, dear reader, will buy it.) But the point is, because I wrote this novel everyone thinks that I actually know something about It Girls and so I'm getting a lot of requests, this month, to write about It Girls. I actually don't know much about anything except what's inside my own hapless brain. But I have some smart academically minded friends, one of whom pointed me fortuitously toward someone who does know a lot about It Girls: Joseph Roach, the author of the book It. I also have a standing one-click account on Amazon.com. After a few mishaps (everytime I clicked on "IT" a Stephen King novel showed up) I managed to get my hands on a copy of It.

Mr. Roach has a lot of interesting things to say about It Girls. He elegantly defines It as "secular magic," and observes that the person who has It seems to hold a "precarious balance... between polarities like egoless self-confidence or unbiddable magnetism." He quotes Eleanor Glyn, who blathered on about It incessantly in 1927, as being the kind of things cats are good at rather than dogs because dogs try to hard. "An air of perceived indifference counts heavily in the production of this special allure, which must appear to be exercised effortlessly or not at all," Mr. Roach explains.

He also starts his introduction with the greatest quote about It that I have ever heard:

"I belonged to the Public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else." That came from Marilyn Monroe who as usual completely underestimated her own talent, her own beauty and her own intelligence, while she effortlessly zoomed in on something else that It seems to entail: a kind of nothingness, a floaty quality, a sense that the It Girl maybe belongs to Me even though I've never met her.

After thinking about this stuff way too much I finally became a little worried about the current crop of It Girls. Whenever I ask anyone who are the It Girls now, the same list gets recited back to me: Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Nicole Ritchie, Lindsay Lohan and the Olsen twins. And when I started to think about It, through history, even recent history, and when I started reading Mr. Roach's excellent book about It? I thought you know, these girls aren't really It Girls at all. They're party girls who get in a lot of trouble and then get written about in slightly trashy magazines.

I would like to resurrect some sense of respect for the quality of It. As Marilyn so shrewdly observed, It has a lot to do with a kind of empty possibility upon which much can be projected. But endless possibility is not the same thing as nothing. And anyone who thinks that It Girls don't have to have talent should go back to the top of this post, and read my list of the greats. It Girls can be awesome. And they are.

It Girls

In October of 1999, The New Yorker magazine ran a picture of two pretty teenagers dressed in really snaky dresses. They sort of loosely held onto pillows in which they were not even vaguely interested; they looked at the camera with a sultry teenage confidence as if to say, ah, you've interrupted us in the middle of our girlish pillow fight but we all know this pillow fight thing is really sham, a wry set up cooked up by this photographer to give some sort of narrative to a picture which is actually merely being taken because we're young and pretty and rich. It is a sensational picture. The two girls are Paris and Nicky Hilton, and they were 18- and 16-years-old at the time.

They were also -- we are told by the column of copy accompanying the photo -- New York's new "It" Girls. It's a charming little piece about how their great-grandfather was Conrad Hilton, and how they would swan around New York and stay at the Waldorf and go to parties. The issue which presented this fabulous picture of these two at the time completely unknown teenage girls was titled The Next Generation. The premise being, that in the waning months of the 20th Century, The New Yorker would tell us which rising stars we should take note of, as they were going to be Big in the New Millennium.

Other folk who were featured in this issue were David Howell (an eight-year-old chess champion), Sergio Garcia (some golfer), Zadie Smith (babelicious young novelist), Haley Joel Osment (11-year-old movie star), Vincenzo Sarno (11-year-old soccer star) and McSweeney's, a literary quarterly begun by ultrahip lit guru David Eggers.

To date, of all those people-and-things-to-watch, the one we've heard the most from is Paris Hilton, hands down. Those New Yorker editors were definitely right about her. The question does remain, however: Why would The New Yorker run a picture of Paris Hilton in the first place? Isn't The New Yorker supposed to be about culture and art and literature? Why on earth is The New Yorker publishing puff pieces about pretty girls who go to parties?

So, naturally I started obsessing about that picture and I got it in my head to write a novel about It Girls, and what it would be like if cultural lightning hit a relatively normal family and relatively normal girls got abducted, more or less, by the media machine, and transformed into It Girls. So then I started reading alllll the magazines that obsess about those girls. I also looked at the pictures. Mostly I conducted my research at the gym, where a lot of people tended to leave these magazines lying around. So I would go through the leftover magazine rack, and find old copies of OK and Celebrity Life and Style and Us, and try to get a sense of what the appeal was.

My friend Julie calls these magazines "crack," and she knows of what she speaks. Within no time, I had opinions about a lot of things I know nothing about. I could hold long discussions with near strangers about who I liked better, Angelina or Jen. I developed a preference for issues that covered the awards shows because it was so much fun to look at everyone wearing those long pretty dresses. I found some It Girls boring (Britney, sorry, couldn't care less) and some fascinating (Lindsay Lohan, seems like a nightmare but I used to like her red hair). Before I started conducting my "research" I spent my time at the gym listening to books on tape, or sometimes I even listened to lectures on tape, say, about the Fall of the Roman Empire. But bettering my mind was no longer on the agenda: All I wanted to know was who Cameron Diaz was dating.

My husband, meanwhile, had no interest in these magazines, nor did my son, a healthy 13-year-old boy who thinks that Jessica Alba is a really good actress, especially when she's wearing her superhero spandex. While both of them seem to be red-blooded heterosexuals (my son once Googled "Lindsay Lohan naked" on my computer) they could not be less interested in the It Girl narrative of glamour and destruction. When I bring these magazines home, they couldn't care less. They don't look at the pictures of pretty girls in fabulous clothing; they don't read about Brad and Angelina; they don't even check out Rihanna on the red carpet.

Not so long ago my feminist education taught me to ask the question "Is the Gaze Male?" The answer, apparently, is yes, which is why so many movies and television shows are about men, and not women. Our distorted media culture sees men as subjects and women as objects; Woody Allen gets older and older and still dates 20-year-old babes; movies about women are called "chick flicks" and men make fun of them. Because women's stories are about women and men don't want to understand women; they want to look at women, as long as they're young and beautiful. Because the gaze is male.

But if the gaze is male, then why don't guys want to look at endless pictures of gorgeous It Girls, doing crazy things? Trust me, Britney Spears isn't dressing like a slut because she's trying to get the attention of a bunch of ladies at the gym. But it's the ladies at the gym who are buying. Why? Because Us magazine, and Ok, and Star, are chick flicks. It Girls, apparently, are the objects of male desire who have found themselves in a chick flick.

So we've created a culture that celebrates girls as sex objects, turned that into a cultural ideal, and moved it to the center of a bunch of addictive narratives for women. It's not a brilliant equation, frankly; it's like turning athletes into meth heads and sending them out to play the Superbowl. Whatever. In any case, I'm done with it. All these gorgeous young girls getting drunk and partying and sleeping around and ending up in rehab, or jail, or the morgue? Come on; there's a better equation out there; there has to be. Maybe somebody should buy Lindsay some books on tape. I recommend Our Mutual Friend.