Dear Gossips,
It’s a week to Christmas Eve and…she did it, lambs! She did it! On the 25th anniversary of “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, Mariah Carey has the #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 for the VERY FIRST TIME. I mean, of course, the song never needed to go to #1 to be the hit that it is. “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is a stone cold classic. And now, finally, it can claim the top spot, which is also Mimi’s 19th #1, extending her record as the solo artist with the most. Our skinny legend wins again!
When you’re a skinny legend though, as Mimi would tell you, the haters will come and there was a story in Page Six yesterday about her or her staff’s alleged cheapness. Mimi and her team ordered takeout in Atlantic City the other day. The lobster tail, strip steak, chicken, salmon, crab cakes, pasta, and salads came to $493 and whoever came to pick up and pay for the food handed over $500 and kept the change, no tip.
BAD FORM, Mimi!
But also it’s a good opportunity for us to talk about how this sh-t works with stars and the people who work for them. How did this happen? Of course Mimi should have left and can afford to leave a better tip – but she wasn’t there and, also, she doesn’t have cash on her all the time. As if she worries about things like paying for the takeout. That’s the job of the manager or the assistant or anyone who is paid to make the Butterfly’s life easier, OK? Nobody bothers the star with these minor details, dahling.
So now you’re the intern or the junior coordinator or the PA who’s assigned to take your ass to the restaurant and get the food. Someone more senior hands you a wad of cash, not really knowing how much, exactly, it costs. Because, again, Mimi’s just listing off things she wants to eat when the order is made. Nobody’s looking at the price of any of the items. And the staff person shows up to pay and hands over the money and is, frankly, just happy that there’s enough to cover the bill so that they don’t have to dip into their own precious cash or put it on their personal credit card. If they do that, they’re never getting their own money back.
Did you read that article in the LA Times last month about how “Hollywood assistants are in open revolt”? Duana and I talked about it on an episode of Show Your Work recently because what we appreciated so much in that piece was that they were specific about LUNCH. Read this:
“Hannah Davis, now a script coordinator for the HBO show “Perry Mason,” recalled how during her first job three years ago as a writer’s assistant at a television network, she received a letter from the network’s accountant telling her she had gone over the allotted lunch budget and the overage would be deducted from her paycheck. Davis made $600 a week, and one of her tasks was ordering lunch for the writers room.
“I was a baby PA and it wasn’t cool to tell a writer, ‘Sorry you want extra salmon; we can’t afford it,’ ” she said. She was lucky: The writers offered to pool together $50 a month to cover any future lunch budget overruns.”
She WAS lucky. There are other PAs who had to pay for lunch overages – like extra salmon – out of their own pocket and they were not reimbursed. This is the situation that Mimi’s PA, or whoever it was that picked up the dinner order, could have been staring down.
So now they’re relieved that the $500 in cash that they were given by one of Mimi’s other handlers was enough to cover all the lobster tail and steak. But what to do about the $6 in change? If you leave a $6 tip on a $500 bill, you look like an asshole. If you don’t leave it, you look like an asshole. But, again, you’re not about to dip into your own savings to tip minimum 10% ($50) when you make, maybe, $600 a week. Because that adds up. If you’re the person who’s always doing the pickup order and you always have to cover the tip or etc, you’re not f-cking covering the goddamn tip, not even for the most precious Glitter Goddess in the world, every damn time because by the end of the week, you’ll have nothing in your account.
So what’s the solution? The solution, obviously, is better management. It’s the person or people who are in charge of delegating these responsibilities on Mimi’s behalf so that she doesn’t have to worry about it. I wish I could go in there and do forensics on how Mimi’s system is set up because, obviously, it doesn’t seem like it’s all that organised. Now look what’s happened. People are out here thinking our Glorious Christmas Supermodel is cheap AF and just as she’s celebrating her latest #1. God, lambily, why does it have to be so bleak!
Should we go back to being festive? Yesterday in Celebrity Social Media, Maria posted a clip from Mimi’s appearance on Billy On The Street. Have you seen the full episode?
Yes, as noted, Mimi is actually walking – and sometimes trotting! – unassisted on the streets of New York City. Also… it’s nighttime. I haven’t watched every episode of BOTS but I’ve watched enough of them to know that they mostly, if not always, take place in the day. Part of this is because, presumably, you can get more people out during the day. But also, when you’re running down the street in NYC and shooting on the fly, you don’t want to have to worry about it being too dark. You work with the daytime light.
As we know, though, Mimi is NOT a day person. Mimi sleeps through the morning, gets up late afternoon early evening, and stays up all night. She’s not getting up early to do Billy On The Street, no matter how much she enjoys the show.
But notice though how well lit she is throughout the piece?!
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
PS. You’ll see in these photos that we’ve chosen of Mimi in New York that she, at one point, just discards that feather wrap she has on. Just tosses it aside. Someone will come get it eventually. Same person who didn’t leave a tip?
