The Closeup Agency

On hand models and Hollywood

I was in Las Vegas, where the medical care is so shoddy people joke that if you need to go to the emergency room, you should drive to the airport, so that’s more or less what I did. I flew to Los Angeles on a Sunday afternoon; my appointment with the specialist was early the next morning. The airport, usually abuzz with the sound of slot machines, also hummed that day with the chatter of Taylor Swift fans who had just attended her weekend concert. I could tell because they—they being adolescent girls in pastel clothing accompanied by fortysomething mothers in leggings and Ugg boots—were outfitted in various iterations of Taylor Swift merch: T-shirts on which her famous face peered Sphinxlike from beneath her famous bangs; sweatpants with her name emblazoned in white letters on one leg.

At the gate, in the restroom, on the plane, the talk was all about the concert. It was opening weekend of what in the next few weeks of Spring 2023 would prove to be a cultural phenomenon not unlike the Beatles. Only since this was a purely female phenomenon—a female pop singer causing ticketless girls to camp in venue parking lots for a mere secondhand contact high—no one seemed to be paying much attention. “Everyone was dressed in glitter,” I heard a mom say to another woman as we sat waiting at the gate. I imagined a sea of sparkling teens in a darkened stadium, an ocean of iridescent coral. I glanced at the adolescent girl seated next to her, presumably her daughter; she was wearing headphones and undergoing hypnosis by YouTube video. “She played for three and a half hours, forty-four songs,” the mom went on, flipping her long, caramel highlighted hair over one sweat-shirted shoulder, “I’m trying to memorize the set list.”

Our plane touched down in Los Angeles, and, as we loitered in the aisle waiting for the passengers ahead of us to deplane, I saw one mother-daughter pair spot another mother-daughter pair two rows up. It was like the same animal species recognizing each other in the wild. The mother half of the sighted pair was an actress who plays an FBI agent on a television show I confess I’d never heard of. But the first mother-daughter pair, celeb watchers extraordinaire, knew who the actress was and called out to her the moment we stood to pull our bags from the overhead bins. “Are you…X?” They had a lot of questions about the current season of her show, which they watched religiously, but above all they wanted a photo for Instagram. The actress, a woman with the bland, smooth ironed-out appeal of every woman in Hollywood now, gamely posed with her arm around the elated young girl, who was probably all of eleven. She was skinny in that almost alien way prepubescent girls are, her Invisalign braces an unfortunate un-flossed shade of polar-bear yellow.

People love to hate Los Angeles for all the reasons you’ve read a million times over: Its values are superficial; its people are pretty but dumb; everything closes early and has none of the culture or sophistication of New York. It’s not that any of that isn’t true, it’s just that you can take it as it is and be amused by it anyhow. I love its moneyed absurdities, the way the crazy of its inhabitants is often on full, flagrant display. Once, my husband and I visited the home of the brother of a very famous celebrity, only to see that at night he slept in a dog bed next to his dog on the concrete basement floor of his palatial home. I’ve also always found it delightful that people and characters you know from fictional narratives, from television and movies, are plonked down alongside you in the grubby reality of everyday life. I get a perverse thrill from seeing Darlene from Roseanne in the glass-bottled smoothie section at Erehwon on Fairfax in Hollywood, or from glimpsing Jaden and Willow Smith among the prepared foods at the gargantuan Erewhon in Calabasas. I can’t tell you how many times, in the first few years after I’d moved to Los Angeles, I’d be at a bar or a party and say to someone, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” They’d insist that I didn’t. But I’d persist. “I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere; maybe we met at another party?” And finally, to my great embarrassment, they’d say, “Actually, I have a recurring role on Boston Public.”  

I’ve always thought that Us Weekly’s photo feature, “Stars—They’re Just Like Us” is ingenious. “They Eat Dessert!” “They Go to Fruit Stands!” “They Carry Laundry!” “They Take Gym Selfies!” “They Sit on Benches!” They aren’t like us at all, of course, with their rooms dedicated to stacked pallets of bottled water or to rolls of paper for wrapping gifts. These people employ assistants solely to manage their social media accounts. But they still have to confront the quotidian truths of existence, just like we do: having a body, needing to eat and drink, being forced to run an errand because somebody isn’t always there to do it for you. Or maybe, I have often thought, they run their own errands on occasion because we all desperately need to feel ourselves bobbing along among the flotsam of humanity from time to time.  I once interviewed Owen Wilson for a British literary magazine; the story was supposed to be about the books he loves, and it was, but he also wanted to talk at length about his favorite grocery stores. (Not surprisingly, he was rhapsodic about Erewhon.) Several years before that interview, I was led by a nurse into the office of a famous Beverly Hills endocrinologist, who was on her cell phone when I entered. She covered it with one hand and said, “Hold on, I’ll be right off, Paula Abdul is giving my 14-year-old her hand-me-down clothes.”

That Monday morning, I sat in another fancy waiting room for an appointment with another important doctor. The space was decorated with potted purple orchids; a glass dispenser of cucumber-infused water sat on a pristine white lacquer counter in the back of the room. I was there to see a world-famous urological surgeon I’d initially found in an online article. I’d read that he’d treated Stephen Spielberg’s CEO at DreamWorks, and that was recommendation enough for me. He saved my kidney after I was told by three separate doctors I would lose it. Four year later, he also helped my husband through a botched kidney stone removal that caused a harrowing surgical injury.  But that tale of two kidneys is a story for a different time. It’s enough to say that on this late March morning I was given good news: I no longer had to visit this teaching hospital, which had grown so familiar to me that I recognized its smell, a combination of medicinal astringency and cafeteria odors—some obscure blend of chicken pot pies, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, tater tots, and tomato sauce.

On that breezy, summery-warm spring morning in Los Angeles, I decided to celebrate with a Cobb salad, an afternoon of shopping, and an iced coffee as big as my face. I got the coffee and called an Uber to T.J.Maxx in Downtown Pasadena, where I tried on designer linen shirts and denim mini-dresses that would have cost me hundreds of dollars at the shops where they were originally sold. I tried on clothes until I felt like I might drop from exhaustion. Do people know that the key to success at T.J.Maxx is hitting the stores in rich neighborhoods? Well, now you know, because I’m telling you. Pasadena, Summerlin, Bridgehampton, Sutton Place. At the latter, I found a Missoni sweater dress for one hundred forty dollars that looked like it was tailor-made for me.

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Michael Walker / Alamy Stock Photo

By mid-afternoon, I am eating a Cobb salad by the hotel pool like a proper woman of leisure. In a bungalow to my right, a handful of Hollywood industry types sit on an outdoor sectional couch covered in putty-colored canvas and discuss lymphatic face drainage. A woman in a black rayon dress and black sunglasses with silver mirrored lenses asks the guy sitting to her right, a lanky fellow in a purple linen shirt, “Have you heard about The Face Gym? Oh my God.” She sounds almost orgasmic about this place and its lymphatic drainage services.

Her strong, clear voice pierces through the late-afternoon lassitude of all of us seated poolside. It is a voice accustomed to bombing its way through business meetings, a voice that enjoys luxuriating in its own performative cadences. I find myself thinking of another online article I’d recently happened upon in my scrolling, “8 Boss Ladies of the Animal Kingdom,” which explained that female lionesses control the social structure of the pride; they are the first to eat and in charge of kicking out under-performers. (For those who are curious, the other boss ladies are clownfish, lemurs, orcas, spotted hyenas, Topi antelope, bonobos, and naked mole rats.) This woman is clearly the top lion of this cabana pack. Her male half, a boyfriend or husband or partner dressed in a banker-blue button down, sits next to her and nods along with fulsome approval, but says nothing. He reminds me of an actor in a television commercial who has just tasted his first erotically delicious bite of food.  It is clear that enjoys listening to her as much as she relishes talking. An ideal arrangement, I think.

The conversation floats along for a while with a kind of dream-logic until it lands on the subject of actors’ hands. Some actors, the leonine woman explains, have ugly hands and require hand stand-ins whenever this body part enters the frame. I try to imagine what she means: stubby fingers; gnarled knuckles; hang-nails; dry, crepey skin; wrinkles.

“Do they have a modeling agency for just hands?” the guy in the purple linen shirt asks. 

“Yes,” she blares at him, “It’s called Closeup.” Later, when I return to my room, I look up the Closeup website, which features an array of hand photos: hands assembling jigsaw puzzles, hands holding cheeseburgers, hands tucked into belt loops and flipping up collars in that way that only happens fashion ads. Hands lifting small dumbbells, buckling sandal straps, plucking a single grape delicately from a bunch, shaking vitamins from a bottle. The agency also offers foot models, lips/smile models, eye models, legs/butt models, and full body doubles. I guess that this must be for sex scenes, or for actors with a decent face and nothing else, who are only acceptable from the neck up.

The purple-linen-shirt man, who appears to be in his late-thirties, peers down at his own hands, his fingers long and pale and spidery. “Do I have old-people hands?” he asks the woman, perhaps only half-jokingly.

Before she can reply, another man in the group announces, “One of the best guys is a 40-year-old Filipino hand model.” This man, slightly balding and probably in his forties himself, is wearing an army green long-sleeved cotton shirt. Bright yellow novelty socks printed with a pattern I can’t decipher from where I sit peek from the cuffs of his jeans, which are the inky shade of brand spanking new denim that has not yet been washed.  Since he isn’t facing me, I can only see the back of his head, where his hair has thinned to a tonsure-like bald-spot.

“Do they shake hands?” the purple-linen-shirt man asks him.

“No, they don’t shake hands,” the guy with the tonsure says.

“Don’t touch the talent!” purple linen jokes. At this, the group, seven people—I count them then—all seated under a putty-colored umbrella that matches the sectional couch, hoot with laughter.  There are two other women providing much of the laugh track, and a fourth man, a dapper older gentleman, who hangs back and surveys the scene but never speaks.

I can tell that purple linen is the odd one out here, someone the others don’t know very well. He’s performing acrobatics to impress them. When he stands up to fetch a pitcher of water for the table—a lovely gesture, or an obsequious one, depending on the context—I can see his pink polka dot shorts: vacation-wear. Everyone else is dressed in the synthetic fabrics and predictable somber hues of business-casual clothing. Maybe, I think, he lives in Pasadena and day trades while the rest of them toil on set. Or maybe he doesn’t even work?

I nurse my iced tea, feign interest in my salad, and consider the possibilities, while trying not to betray that I am invested in their dynamic to an almost creepy degree. Purple linen’s hair is shaggy and asymmetrical in front, like a skater’s. He looks vaguely disheveled, as though he’s been day-drinking for hours. He reminds me of a particular actor, but I can’t quite figure out who. At one time, I’d have walked up to him and asked if we’d gone to high school together, only to learn he had a bit part on a network drama. Today, though, I eventually realize he’s just a dead ringer for the brooding, dissolute, darkly handsome actor Ed Westwick, who played the manipulative son-of-a-billionaire playboy character, Chuck Bass, on the original incarnation of Gossip Girl.

“It’s really weird to see an adult with child-like hands,” the man in the army green shirt tells the group with an air of authority. He says that adult actors with tiny hands are often hired to play with toys in commercials. “One of them who played with Legos was a little person,” he says, “She was British and so nice and cool and hard-working.”

“Now she’s selling vape pens down on Hollywood Boulevard,” purple linen jokes. They all scream with laughter.

I wonder where the army-green-shirt man acquired his singular knowledge of Hollywood hand models. I decide that he must be a director of commercials; I’ve heard they make a lot of money but that the job is stressful and ultimately thankless.

The lion-woman will not be outdone by these men. “Once on set,” she hollers, “an older woman actor had an agent for her chickens.” She pauses a beat, drawing in the others. “And I was like, “I’m just trying to eat lunch.”

“I’m just trying to sell a reality show on chickens,” the army-green balding man says, getting in on the competitive joking.

“Well, this lady would have submitted every chicken she had,” lion-woman rejoins.

My attention drifts from them for a few moments as my check arrives. I fish my credit card from the swamp of my wallet. When I next tune back in, lion-woman has begun a new story about how she was once attacked by a bee. “Thankfully there was a baby there to distract it,” she says, and the others roar with laughter, ribbing her that she wanted to sacrifice the baby to the bee. “No no no,” she says, frustrated, waving a hand of manicured fake nails around like a flustered conductor. She tries to explain what she meant. They laugh over her, drowning her out, exacting their petty revenge for her domination of the afternoon, of their precious time and attention. It occurs to me as I watch them how much humor among adults consists of pretending not to understand one another.

On my return flight to Las Vegas, a dark-haired baby in a white Hugo Boss puffy parka—the name of the brand, repeated over and over in black, is the print on the coat—is directly in front of me in the security line. His mother, who has slung him over one shoulder, has long fringed false eyelashes; they are like small furry animals on her face. The baby in the Hugo Boss parka keeps making eye contact with me, even once he starts squalling. I’ve noticed this often. Babies, when they are crying, will look over their mother’s or father’s shoulder at you, a stranger, and when you meet their eyes, you know that they know they are faking it, exaggerating their emotions to elicit the attention and solicitude of their parent. But you, you are not invested in their drama, and they know that, too—even the tiniest of babies have the emotional intelligence to understand this. And if you smile at them, as if to say, “I know the real score here,” they will often drop the act, stop bawling all at once, or look impish, even a baby version of embarrassed: They get that you are onto them and their manipulative ways. Sometimes they will smile back, proving how labile their emotions are, how superficially rooted. In this, they aren’t any different from the rest of us. Everyone is full of shit.