In Los Angeles, if you want to feel like you're not in Los Angeles, stay at the Chateau Marmont. It's the kind of place, hidden as it is off an elbow of the Sunset Strip, where you imagine homesick Europeans holed up between screen tests, drawn to its provincial layout and shadowy bungalows.
On this summer day, it's the Saturday Night Live cast members doing the holing up. Amy Poehler is sitting alone, and minutes later Bill Hader arrives -- you know, the guy who isn't Andy Samberg -- not to meet Poehler but to decamp to a back table. Meanwhile, a group of British entertainment biz dudes make an entrance dressed, as Brits in L.A. are wont to do, like 13-year-old boys from the Valley waiting for their moms to drive them to the beach. And then at 10:30 a.m. on the dot -- not a minute later, no sheepish apologies needed -- comes Ms. Lily Allen. If you'd been following the tabloids up until then, you might have thought it impossible for Allen to get out of bed this early, much less meet a journalist for an interview at the appointed time, all on her own. Weeks earlier she had to be carried out of the Glamour Women of the Year Awards in her hot pink Giles Deacon dress and even hotter pink hair. But as Allen sits down inconspicuously and orders tea, it's clear that she's in L.A. to work on her music, not her profile.
Her hair is still pink, though fading into a mellow strawberry ice cream color (after the recent death of her "nan" last June, she dyed it dark). In her videos, Allen usually looks like the heir to Shirley Manson -- she has that kind of character-as-beauty attractiveness that you see in the expressive eyes and rounded features of veteran British actress Dame Maggie Smith. In person Allen is much prettier and younger looking. Without makeup, in a brown and white sundress and flip-flops, she's even a little tan, a nice complement to her eyes, which are the delicious light-brown color of ice cubes melting in a glass of cola.
She explains that she has been going to bed by eleven, getting up at eight, and then going to the gym with her trainer. Nightlife has been limited to seeing The Happening ("awful") and Lil Wayne at the House of Blues ("amazing"). She's even thinking about remaking Wayne's "A Milli" as "Lilli" for the entrance music on her next tour. Kind of like how she remade 50 Cent's "Window Shopper" into "Nan You're a Window Shopper," one of many memorable tracks amid "Smile," "Alfie" and "LDN" on her 2007 debut Alright, Still. The album is a ska-soul-pop sing-a-long that made her the Gwen Stefani of the U.K. and earned her a gold record stateside.
Jacket by Zac Posen and necklace by Subversive by Justin Giunta. All makeup by Chanel.
RSS