‘You’re a character in their world’: the impossible job of the Hollywood personal assistant
It sounds like the dream gig: working as a personal assistant to a Hollywood celebrity, becoming immersed in a rarefied world of movie sets and production meetings and A-list parties and, who knows, climbing the ladder to an entertainment career to call your own.
Sometimes, it works out exactly that way. Winona Ryder’s former assistant, Sibi Bla?i?, became a stunt driver and married Christian Bale. Kevin Spacey’s former assistant, Dana Brunetti, became an Oscar-nominated producer.
Just as often, though, young men and women find themselves in a job with no set hours, few boundaries and little protection from the whims and eccentricities of their employers. They can be asked to perform impossible tasks, like producing a meal from a restaurant thousands of miles away, or they can be subject to verbal or sexual abuse. Sometimes, they are asked to break the law – to procure illicit drugs, for example – and feel unable to say no for fear of being fired if not also blackballed across the industry.
The powerlessness of the job helps explain the alarmed reaction across Hollywood when Matthew Perry’s former assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, was investigated for his role in the actor’s death last October and ended up pleading guilty to one count of “conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death”, a charge that could land him in prison for as many as 15 years.
On the face of it, the details of Iwamasa’s actions seem deeply troubling: he has, according to court documents released last month, admitted to helping Perry procure ketamine from a variety of sources and injecting his boss with the drug, including the fatal dose on 23 October last year. Perry told him to “shoot me up with a big one”, the documents say, and he complied.
One question the charging papers do not address, however, is whether Iwamasa felt he had a choice. Many Hollywood veterans have sympathised with his plight, because they know what it is like to work for someone who has all the power in the relationship and you have none.
In the words of a music industry veteran who has mentored a number of assistants stuck in abusive workplaces, who did not wish to be named to protect them as well as herself: “Emotionally, physically, mentally, you are immersed in their narcissism. You’re a character in their world, they’re not a character in yours.”
That sentiment was echoed by Rowena Chiu, a former assistant to super-producer turned convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, who wrote in the New York Times: “As an assistant, you’re in a double bind: You have almost no power yet you carry a disproportionate amount of responsibility. In a fundamental sense, assistants do not belong to themselves.”
It is extremely rare for assistants to face criminal charges, even when the celebrities they work for die in questionable circumstances or are suspected of committing a crime themselves. A number of assistants, though, have come close.
Michael Jackson’s last personal assistant, Michael Amir Williams, dropped the pop idol at home after a music rehearsal in 2009 and happened not to be with him when a doctor Jackson had hired, Conrad Murray, injected him with a fatal dose of the anesthetic propofol, which he was taking as a sleeping aid. Williams ended up as a witness at Murray’s trial, not as a co-defendant, telling the jury that Murray had called him in a panic and told him “get someone up here right away”.
Phil Spector’s assistant, Michelle Blaine, was similarly fortunate not to be at his mansion on the night in 2003 he shot and killed Lana Clarkson, a hostess at the House of Blues in West Hollywood whom he had taken home. Blaine later described having to “babysit” Spector for the next week and resisting his multiple offers of marriage, which she suspected were a way for him to ensure she would not testify against him, since a wife cannot be forced to incriminate a husband. Blaine did not ultimately testify at either of Spector’s trials.
More commonly, assistants become so enmeshed in their employers’ worlds that they defend them to the hilt even when much of the rest of the world is casting them in a more negative light. When the actor Robert Blake went on trial in 2005 for the murder of his wife, his former assistant Daryn Goodall undermined a key piece of the prosecution’s case – that Blake betrayed signs of his guilt by vomiting on the night of her death. Goodall testified that Blake “always” threw up after eating dinner – “in the gutter or on the grass” – and there was nothing suspicious about it. Blake was ultimately acquitted.
Two of R Kelly’s staunchest defenders during his multiple trials on charges of child sexual abuse images and sexual misconduct with minors were two sisters, Lindsey Perryman-Dunn and Jennifer Emrich, both of whom had been his personal assistants. “There’s a group of people saying a lot of wrong things about a really great guy so we had to speak out,” Emrich later told a documentary team. Perryman-Dunn, commenting on a videotape of Kelly having sex with and urinating on a 14-year-old girl, said that in her mind it was “two consensual people having sex”, not rape.
Kelly was acquitted in one high-profile trial in 2008 but later convicted on multiple charges of child sexual abuse images, racketeering and human trafficking in follow-up trials in 2021 and 2022.
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Many former assistants describe the job as close to impossible, a juggling act in which you have to make yourself indispensable even when your boss regards you as eminently disposable. The Hollywood super-producer Scott Rudin, who has since apologised for his behavior, once chewed and yelled his way through 119 assistants in five years. Chiu, in her New York Times piece, said she often thought of herself as a “terrified butler”.
“My job was to be both invisible and everywhere all at once,” she wrote.
Sometimes, even posterity hangs a personal assistant out to dry. According to long-standing Hollywood legend, established largely by Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon, the silent-era German film director FW Murnau died in a car crash on his way up the Pacific coast to Santa Barbara in 1931 because his 14-year-old Filipino assistant was at the wheel and he was in the boy’s lap performing a distracting sexual act.
Subsequent examination of contemporary records has shown, however, that the assistant was in fact a 31-year-old Mexican American and Murnau was in the back seat, too far away for intimate contact, when an oncoming truck forced their car off the road and threw the occupants on to an embankment. Murnau suffered a fatal head injury and died the next day.
The assistant, Eliazar Garcia Stevenson, lived another 54 years but never quite managed to dispel the unfounded rumors.
