It stands to reason that a city like Los Angeles, which is home to so many of the famous and the semi-famous, would have an Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants (ACPA). The organisation describes personal assistants as ‘multitasking’, as ‘possessing the most resourceful, creative, insightful, and results-driven abilities.’
When I first got in touch with Josef Csongei, the organisation’s president, he was initially reluctant to talk to me because I was a journalist. As he sees it, celebrity personal assistants have not always been treated fairly by the press. But despite this, and all the hard work and lack of appreciation that can come with this line of work, he explained, the jobs were still widely sought after. He noted that people regularly travelled great distances to attend a seminar titled ‘Becoming a Celebrity Personal Assistant’, run by the ACPA. To prove his point, he told me about Dean Johnson. In the coming weeks, I heard this story from a number of assistants, including Johnson himself, and every time it left me baffled.
The story begins one night in September 1994, with Dean Johnson sitting at home in Columbia, South Carolina. Johnson is a single, 32-year-old business executive in charge of marketing and advertising at a sizeable company in the healthcare industry. It is 11 pm and he’s looking to unwind in front of the television after a long day’s work. A repeat of a talk show appears on the screen, and the host introduces her four guests: the celebrity personal assistants for Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Burt Reynolds and Carol Burnett. As these assistants talk about flying on private jets and attending Hollywood parties, Johnson reaches for a pen and starts taking notes. Without wasting another minute, he picks up the phone, calls directory enquiries in Los Angeles, and asks for the home phone numbers of the four assistants on the show.
Only one of them is listed: Ron Holder, who works for Whoopi Goldberg. Johnson dials his number, and a minute later Holder picks up the phone. ‘He said I was very lucky to get through,’ Johnson told me. ‘Apparently, in the three months since he had appeared on that talk show, he had received about 200 phone calls from people like me. He was in the process of disconnecting his phone, but he was nice enough to chat with me for a while.’ During their conversation, Holder told Johnson that he should consider attending the ‘Becoming a Celebrity Personal Assistant’ seminar in Los Angeles.
For someone like Johnson, with almost no connections in the industry, the notion of moving out to Los Angeles to become a celebrity personal assistant, something he did two months later, was extremely courageous - there’s no denying that. The typical American story of the guy in the remote provinces who falls in love with the glamour of the silver screen, packs up all his possessions and moves out to Hollywood to become a star is almost a century old. But Johnson’s story offered a new twist: he moved out to Hollywood to become an assistant to a star.
Of the thousands of people who work in Hollywood: agents, lawyers, stylists, publicists, business managers and others, many hope to rub shoulders with the biggest stars. What’s unique about celebrity personal assistants is that such proximity appears to be the only perk their profession offers. Most describe the bulk of their work as drudgery: doing laundry, fetching groceries, paying bills. Assistants typically make about $56,000 a year - hardly a fortune by Hollywood standards, especially given the round-the-clock obligations they often have. What’s more, the job is rarely a stepping stone to fame: celebrity personal assistants are, on average, aged about 38, right in the middle of their professional lives, and most of the ones I met described their line of work as a lifelong profession. For them, being an assistant was not the means to an end but an end in itself.