Nancy Jo Sales talks The Bling Ring in her new book
- Photo by Jayne Wexler
In writer-director Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, a troupe of spoiled California teens tries to wriggle into Paris Hilton’s world by breaking into her house (along with a bunch of other celebrity homes) and stealing armloads of swag. It sounds like a broad comedy (and it’s an effective laugh generator), but Coppola is telling a true story – one based on Nancy Jo Sales’ 2010 Vanity Fair article “The Suspect Wore Louboutins.”
An alumna of Yale and Columbia who has profiled Russell Simmons and Angelina Jolie in magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and New York, Sales has just published The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World. In the book, she updates readers on the fate of those hapless adolescents and examines their crimes in the chilly context of our media-saturated world.
Sales answered our questions in an e-mail exchange.
The Pitch: You point out in the book that founding father Alexander Hamilton was 19 when his first anti-colonial essays were published – making him a founding juvenile delinquent. How do we go from someone like Hamilton to the participants in The Bling Ring?
Sales: Some of the founding fathers were barely more than teenagers themselves, as were members of the Boston Tea Party and the Sons of Liberty, a revolutionary group at the time of the American Revolution. The rebelliousness of teenagers played a big part in the many protest movements that occurred over the centuries in America. Now, in a strange twist of history, we have teenagers who are not so rebellious – at least not politically, generally speaking. We have teenagers who are interested in making money and maintaining the status quo, teenagers who are interested in becoming a part of the “lifestyle” lived by rich people and celebrities.
You can’t really blame the teenagers for this, the values of wealth and fame have been pushed by their culture and pop culture for the better part of 30 years, since the so-called Reagan revolution, which actually the opposite of a revolution. Teenagers today grew up watching shows like Gossip Girl and Entourage and 90210 and The Hills, all which promote a luxe lifestyle. A lot of teenagers these days want money and things, not change – certainly the teenagers in The Bling Ring did. They wanted to live like celebrities and have the things that celebrities have, even if they had to steal it.
Rachel Lee, the alleged Ringleader (“Rebecca” in the movie), has never granted an interview. How tough was it for you to get all the stories straight?
