I asked Rubenstein if I could ask Alexis about her upcoming reality show, Pretty Wild.
He said, “I have to get clearance.” He didn’t tell me he was also going to be a character on it.
Now Rubenstein’s colleague, Susan Haber, brought Alexis and her mother, Andrea Arlington Dunn, into the room. Dunn was tall and curvy and wearing a fuzzy bronze-colored Juicy sweatsuit. A pair of headphones dangled from her ears, connected to a cell phone inside her purse. She had highlighted, shoulder-length brown hair and wore a startled expression. There was a flirtatious lilt to her voice, which brought to mind sex kittens of another era.
And then there was Alexis. She was a leggy five-foot-nine, wearing black tights, a long gray sweater, and six-inch heels. She had big hypnotic green eyes and a cascade of chestnut hair. On her wrists there were tattoos of cherry blossoms—“a sign of consciousness,” she told me—and on her hand there was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for life. She was like something out of a Philip Marlowe tale, the beautiful suspect whose story sounds a bit suspect as well.
“I’m an indigo child,” Alexis said in her squeaky baby voice, after she’d settled into a chair. “Which means I have a special energy, a spiritual energy.”
Her mother nodded, wide-eyed, from Rubenstein’s couch. I was trying to remember when I had seen a mother look on her daughter with such devotion—it was Kathy Hilton, mother of Paris.
An “indigo child,” I later learned, is a tyke who’s said to be blessed with extraordinary and supernatural gifts, according to husband-and-wife New Age self-help gurus Lee Carroll and Jan Tober in The Indigo Children (1999).
“I believe that I’m an old soul,” Alexis said.
“Yes, she is,” Andrea murmured.
They told me that they lived by a spiritual philosophy, which relied heavily on the teachings of The Secret, the 2006 self-help best-seller by Australian television writer and producer Rhonda Byrne, which posits that wealth, health, happiness, and weight loss are all achievable through positive thinking.
“It’s the law of attraction,” Andrea said. “It’s the study of man’s relationship to the divine. It’s not Scientology. It’s not Christian Science….”
“My mom is a minister,” Alexis offered. “She’s been a masseuse. She’s an energy healer. She does holistic health care for people with cancer.”
“I don’t serve at a church currently,” Andrea interjected.
She later told me that she’d been ordained through an online course, “the Ernest Holmes* Religious Science Ministerial Program, whose teachings include ancient wisdom principles from spiritual teachings since the beginning of time.”
“Our church does a yearly trip to Africa where they build wells and schools for the kids,” said Alexis.
I asked her which country; she couldn’t remember.
“It was like three years ago,” said Andrea. “We participated in that fund-raiser.”
“We do bake sales, car washes, and we go to women’s shelters during Christmas, feeding the homeless and all that type of stuff,” Alexis said.
“Alexis has expressed to me a lot of her humanitarianism,” said Haber, the lawyer, an angular woman with angular hair in a conservative brown suit.
I remarked that there seemed to be a bit of disconnect between Alexis’ good works and her now being charged with burglary.
Haber interrupted, advising Alexis not to respond.
But Alexis insisted: “I have a good statement to say.”
“I’m a firm believer in Karma,” Alexis began, “and I think that this situation was attracted in my life because it was supposed to be a huge learning lesson for me to grow and expand as a spiritual human being. I don’t think the universe could have really chosen a better person than me because for this—it’s not just affecting me, it’s affecting the media, it’s affecting everyone—and I think that I’m meant to bring truth to all this.
“I think that my journey on this planet is to be a leader,” she said; her voice was trembling now. She was welling up. “I see myself being like Angelina Jolie but even stronger, pushing even harder for the universe and for peace and for the health of our planet.
“God didn’t give me these talents and what I look like,” she said, “to be sitting around and just being a model or be famous or whatever path I want.” Her pretty face was screwed up with emotion. “I want to do something that people notice, so that’s why I’m studying business”—she had taken some classes at Pierce College—“because eventually I want to be a leader. I want to lead a huge charity organization. I want to lead a country, for all I know. I don’t know where I’m going just yet, but eventually I can see myself taking a stand for people.”
“And so it is,” said Andrea. It was their family motto, a Hindu prayer and the mantra of the movie version of The Secret.
* See Dr. Drew Pinsky and Dr. S. Mark Young, The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America (Harper, 2009).
* In the 1920s, Holmes was a founder of the spiritual movement Religious Science, or “Science of Mind,” a precursor to New Age thought.
Christopher Lasch’s 1978 best-selling book, The Culture of Narcissism, noted a trend of Americans becoming more self-absorbed at a time of diminishing economic expectations. Since then, sociologists and psychologists have been trying to puzzle out the reasons for the precipitous rise in narcissism in America. Over the last three decades, American college students have scored increasingly higher and higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), a test of narcissistic personality traits developed in the 1980s by psychologists Robert Raskin and Howard Terry at the University of California at Berkeley. (The rising of the scores has actually accelerated over the last decade. The increase between 2002 and 2007 was twice as large as the increase between 1982 and 2006.)
Without being told what the test is about, respondents are asked to rate which statement in a pair describes him or her best. The first question on a shortened version of the test says, “Choose the one that you MOST AGREE with … A) The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me. B) If I ruled the world, it would be a much better place.”
The American spirit is about confidence; in “Self-Reliance” (1841), Emerson said to “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” But the kind of spiritual wholeness presupposed by that encouragement is very different from believing, as high scorers on the NPI do, that, “I can live my life any way I want to,” or “I will never be happy until I get all that I deserve.” The Bridezillas and Real Housewives of reality television, with their outrageous demands and insistence on being treated like queens, are cartoonish symbols of an age in which many people seem to feel so entitled they believe they “deserve” royal treatment. Advertisers happily cultivate the notion. JetBlue assures us that we “deserve a vacation”—and snacks. Time Warner Cable’s slogan is “The Power of You.” Kohl’s department store ran an ad with a 2007 song by the punk band The Dollyrots (also featured on Paris Hilton’s reality show The Simple Life) entitled “Because I’m Awesome”: “I’m a leader/I’m a winner … I don’t need you … and I beat you/’Cause I’m awesome.”
The self-importance and diva behavior on display in shows like Keeping