I answered my cell phone yesterday and a man with an English accent spoke my name. This isn’t an unusual occurrence; after all, my boyfriend is English. But he was standing just a few feet away from me, and while he’s certainly one for silly gags, this wasn’t one of his.
“Hi, Nicole? This is Alexander Hitchen with the National Enquirer,” the man said.
Luckily, I was actually expecting his call. See, just a few minutes earlier, my mother had phoned me, her voice strained with concern: “Nic, the National Enquirer just called looking for you!”
She didn’t know why they wanted me, and she didn’t give them my phone number. Of course, the latter didn’t matter — the mag was already several steps ahead of her. A quick glance at my missed-call log revealed three recent attempts from an “unknown” number. (I’d been down at the laundromat without my phone.) Like any good reporter who didn’t want to spook his prey, the caller hadn’t left any messages.
Now here was Hitchen speaking in my ear, summoning all the charm inherent to educated Englishmen (Prince Charles excluded, of course). He apologized for calling my parents' home.
Don’t try to soften me up, I thought, with the skepticism of a seasoned journalist.
Hitchen continued amiably: As you can imagine, we get lots of tips, he said, and many don’t amount to anything.
“Sure,” I said in a curt tone that I hoped conveyed how intimately familiar I was with the game we were playing.
“Well, we heard that you have a special relationship with Bobby Flay.”
[INSERT SOUND OF RECORD SKIPPING]
SPECIAL relationship?
Suddenly, I had a vision: I was standing in a grocery checkout line, pretending not to read the headlines glaring from the rack of gossip rags — “Oprah’s Cellulite Woes!” “Mariah Carey Loses 30 lbs on Twinkie Diet” — when I saw it: “Bobby Flay’s Secret Lover Revealed” Only it was written in Georgia 72-point. And just below was a photo of Bobby cuddling me in his left arm — a photo not unlike the one snapped after our taping of Throwdown and published on this blog. But of course in this one, Jorge, my friend and fellow judge, had been deviously cropped out.
“No, no, no,” I told Hitchen, trying to squelch the unreasonably nervous laughter rattling out my throat. “I met him one time for a Throwdown episode we filmed but that was it…”
Hitchen cut me off here. I gulped, ready for him to pounce. I expected him to growl: “Where were you on the night of September 19…?”
Instead, he told me that what I’d said was exactly what he suspected, having read all about it right here, on NY GIRL EATS WORLD. He said he enjoyed my blog and I should keep up the good work. Finally, before we hung up, he gave me his number, adding, “in case you hear from anyone else.”
I had no idea what he could mean, but I dutifully scrawled the number on a scrap of paper nearby.
It turns out Mr. Alexander Hitchen is one of two NE reporters who caught John Edwards after a late-night rendezvous with his mistress, and literally chased him down until the unfortunate pol barricaded himself inside a public restroom. Hitchen, it seems, is a pit-bull reporter — the kind you certainly don’t want to find outside your hotel room if you’re indeed having a “special” relationship with someone else’s spouse.
As preposterous as it sounds, after learning this, I felt relieved that he let me off so easily. That Hitchen believed me. But my boyfriend — my real boyfriend — had the more rational response. An established journalist himself, he responded grumpily, “You shouldn’t have even talked with him.”
But that’s how tabloids work, right? They latch onto any semblance of guilt, denial or evasion. Then, next thing you know, your face is plastered on the cover of the National Enquirer and an Extra camera crew is waiting outside your house. All of us bloggers are especially susceptible, of course. We do what we do because we want to get some kind of attention for it — from strangers with common interests, from editors and potential employers. Unfortunately, our public ramblings can also reap the negative kind, and so can our photos. My best guess is that the tipster who accused me of a "special relationship" with Flay was some scummy person who saw how easily the above photo could be cropped.
So, I guess the moral of the story is this: Don't lean in too close when taking a photo with a married celebrity. Unless, of course, you come from the Lindsay Lohan school of self-promotion in which no publicity is bad publicity.
