Fashion

It began simply enough. I was laid off from a syndicated television talk show, a blessing disguised as a reorganization. I’d started collecting unemployment and bartending under-the-table at a cocktail bar near my Hell’s Kitchen apartment when, one afternoon, my former manager called. His colleague represented an actress; would I be interested in assisting her a few days a week?

Days later, my Motorola flip phone rang, displaying an anonymous number. This was 2006, a time when no one questioned picking up the phone. I had been experimenting with mixing cosmos—the namesake of the aforementioned bar—and drinking my mistakes.

“Hello, Sarah? This is Angela Lansbury,” came the voice on the line. Then came an exuberant laugh. Angela Lansbury—a woman whose career I scarcely knew beyond my grandmother’s television set on Sunday nights—chatted with me as though this were all perfectly normal. I was an aimless, broke, 24-year-old kid standing in my tiny apartment, admittedly a bit buzzed, holding my ear to the voice of an enchanted teapot.

She planned to come to New York City to star in Deuce, a Terrance McNally play about two retired tennis stars, at the Music Box Theatre, and hoped to find someone who could help her with day-to-day odds and ends: setting up her new Manhattan apartment, accompanying her to interviews and appearances, keeping her schedule. Basic assistant stuff. This return to the city after several years away was a big deal, not only to her, but to Broadway, also—and very much to me, as it turned out.

That first phone call became an invitation to afternoon tea. Afternoon tea became a proper job offer. And with that job came a shopping buddy, a lunch date, a gossip, a confidant, a travel companion, and a nearly two-decade friendship.

***

When Angela came into my life, I was, at 24, a kid from Cranston, Rhode Island, living in a city still a bit too big for me. After graduating from college—during which I’d only narrowly escaped the 9/11 attacks, living in a dorm two blocks away from Ground Zero—I’d worked for Maury Povich’s production company and moonlit as a producer for a stand-up comedy show that paid in cheap gin and sexual harassment. Now, it felt like I was constantly rebuilding my social circle as close friends moved away for quieter lives. Both furious about everything and wildly insecure, I felt an emptiness I didn’t know how to fill, and a disillusionment with the life I was creating for myself.