One Year Later
March 2010
Tucked away in a quiet corner of a clamorous steak house in midtown Manhattan, at a safe remove from the pin-striped after-work crowd, Taylor hunches over a notepad and contemplates her future. At the top of the page are four letters, M-A-S-H, denoting four categories of real estate: mansion, apartment, shack, and house.
Pretty much everyone under the age of thirty-five knows the game. Everyone except Taylor, who, although is still technically a teen (she turns twenty in just three days) and perhaps the most effective apostle of adolescence since Walt Disney, is not exactly representative of the species.
"I think I've definitely played it before," she tells me. "It's been awhile, though."
In person, Taylor's beauty is almost otherworldly, a slight contrast from when I last saw her just a year ago. Tall and whiplike in a red cashmere sweater from Topshop, black Citizens of Humanity jeans, and Rag & Bone flats (all of it topped off with that cascade of corkscrew curls) she appears almost suffused with light, like a stage performer pursued by a follow spot. Her manner is still girlish, but she's also extraordinarily self-possessed. She speaks in well-constructed sentences, pausing first to formulate her thoughts and unfailingly weaving the question she's been asked into her response the way media coaches recommend. And she's generous with hugs, which she tends to deliver sideways like a tall person (she's 5'11) who poses for a lot of photos.
Al Wilson, her drummer and bandleader, met her three years ago and remains awestruck. "She just glows," I remember him telling me later that night, shaking his head like someone trying to describe a UFO. "She has an electricity that's just profound, man. She's wired so well it's unbelievable." (According to her best friend, Abigail, Taylor does have one teensy fault: an annoying tendency to clear her throat a lot. Though to be fair, nobody else seems to have noticed.)
Returning to our attempt at middle school fortune-telling, I ask her to name three cities she'd like to live in and fires off Nashville, New York, and Los Angeles. But when it comes to citing one she'd hate, Taylor hesitates. The last thing she wants to do is snub some random municipality in my semi-popular blog. She settles on the perfect answer: "Kablamphnar," which doesn't actually exist. I jot it all down, along with four numbers representing how many children she might eventually have.
Now for the tough part: Three guys you think are hot?
"Like, how do you mean?" she asks, scrunching up her face. She knows how I mean. "Um, well...Taylor Lautner," she says finally, a certain nervy resolve in her voice.
The eighteen-year-old Taylor Lautner, the other half of what the tabloids dubbed "Taylor Squared," is the impish, abdominally gifted New Moon hunk who has played her beau onscreen and off. She joked about the relationship in a charming Saturday Night Live monologue. Her appearance, as both host and musical guest, was SNL's best-rated episode last fall, until, that is, he hosted the show and reciprocated with a Taylor shout-out of his own. During our interview, she declines to chat about him at all, and wisely so: a few weeks later I learn she cuts him loose, and a member of her camp makes sure Us Weekly has the proper spin.
Back to the game. Taylor name-checks John Mayer and Carter Jenkins, another Valentine's Day costar, as her remaining hotties. I don't even bother to solicit a response to the last question: a guy she can't stand. I just write Kanye West.
"Oh my God, no you didn't!" she says, her almond-shaped eyes glinting a bit. "You're so scandalous. Do we have to?"
Relax, it's just a game, I tell her.
"Mmm, right," she says skeptically.
