The young woman who approached the table by the window at the Pinkberry on Eighth Avenue and 18th street was nervous, breathless. She was sorry to interrupt, sorry to be a bother, she said. It was just that she loved Taylor Momsen so much.
The just-barely-15-year-old Ms. Momsen, who plays aspiring queen bee Jenny Humphrey on the CW show Gossip Girl, gave the woman—who looked to be at least in her mid-20s, and was clutching a napkin and shaking like a whippet in winter—a warm, practiced smile and helped her locate a pen and piece of paper so she could sign the autograph on something suitable. Ms. Momsen scribbled her name with a girlish curlicue flourish, and offered a friendly wave goodbye as her fan skipped elatedly out the door.
It’s a regular occurrence now for Ms. Momsen (“The older girls get nervous. The younger girls, cry,” she said), who, over the summer, has become the obsession of a strange and ragged slice of New York. Even as her co-stars have ascended the ladder of gossip-worthiness—the golden-locked goddess Blake Lively and the impressively sideburned Penn Badgley have had a very public romance while dandy-dressing, secretly English Ed Westwick has hardly been shy about his carousing—Ms. Momsen has emerged as the show’s true It Girl: admired, lusted after and, of course, scorned. Girls and young women covet her style (which ranges from bright, simple and sophisticated to mix-and-match punk). Boys and men—in their teens and 20s and beyond—can’t help but be drawn to her coltish beauty (even as that fact could make them uncomfortable). And there are the requisite haters, too, so unnerved by Ms. Momsen’s uncanny poise and sudden ubiquity that they can’t help but snipe at her. As photographs of her—on location for Gossip Girl, making the rounds at parties and movie premieres, riding the subway around her newly adopted city—have cropped up on celeb-tracking blogs and Web sites, they’ve also collected captions and comments snarky and vicious enough to be straight from the cell phone of Gossip Girl’s eponymous blogger. Read the rest of this entry »
Blake Lively is starving. She slides into a booth at a charming restaurant in New York City’s West Village and immediately buries her head in the menu. “Let’s share a bunch of stuff,” she says, then adds, “On average, I order about three meals for myself in one sitting.” She isn’t kidding. Two bread baskets, two appetizers, two pasta entrées, and three desserts later, she decides that’s enough food…to start with.
