Flavor of the Week: Faking Helena

"You two look like interesting guys,” a brunette with a British accent said as she touched my elbow. Dave looked at me smiling. We’d been at Underbar barely long enough to get a couple of beers and an older woman was already hitting on us. “Why don’t you both join our party in the back,” she suggested. Dave and I followed Fiona to one of the lounge’s curtain-enclosed cubbies, where she pulled back the curtain and gestured for us to have a seat at the table where two other women and two guys—all roughly 10 years older than us—were seated. Fiona handled the introductions and squeezed into the seat next to me.

“How about some champagne?” asked Helena, who seemed like the group’s leader. She pointed to a couple bottles of Dom Perignon—one empty, one half full. “Sure,” said Dave. These people know how to party,I thought. A waiter was summoned to fetch a pair of champagne glasses.When the waiter returned, he came toting another bottle of Dom.

“Compliments of the house,” he said with a shit-eating grin. “It’s great to have you guys here tonight.”What the fuck was going on?

As the free champagne flowed, so did the conversation. Dave told our hosts how we met in the NBC Page Program and that he now worked in the news division. I said I was working as a glorified secretary to one of the network’s attorneys and mentioned that, as a page, I’d handled VIP seating for Saturday Night Live.

Fiona touched my knee and whispered, “Don’t you know who that is?” “Who?” I asked, not sure what she was getting at.

“Helena,” she responded. “I’m sorry,” I said, racking my brain trying to recognize her. “I don’t.”

“She’s an Academy Award nominee,” Fiona said, trying to help me think by raising her eyebrows. “Helena Bonham Carter.”

At that point, February 2001, I knew Helena Bonham Carter’s name and that she was British, but I’d missed Fight Club and, evidently, couldn’t identify the actress even while sipping champagne with her. “Oh, yeah… That is Helena Bonham Carter,” I said, feigning recognition. Fiona nodded and said, “I’m her publicist.”

And that’s how I ended up flirting with an Oscar nominee.We seemed to have been connecting. I’d never considered myself a starfucker, but, admittedly, there was a certain appeal about the possibility of having sex with someone who’d been nominated for an Oscar—perhaps because she seemed so down-to-earth. Helena probably wouldn’t even be fazed by my fourth floor walk-up on 96th and Amsterdam, I thought.

After we all had a good laugh about how Dave and I hadn’t recognized Helena, one of the guys, Chadwick, asked who was hosting SNL the next evening. “Jennifer Lopez is hosting and the musical guest,” Dave said. Chadwick asked if we’d be able to score them tickets. It was way too late to get tickets for a normal person, but Helena was a celeb. I asked Fiona if she’d called over to NBC yet. “We just got into town last night, so we hadn’t really made any plans yet,” she said. I told them not to worry and that I’d take care of things. As the evening drew to a close, Helena and I exchanged phone numbers. She grabbed my hand with both of hers, planted a kiss on my cheek and said goodbye.

The next morning, the events of the previous night clanked around my head like a drunken dream. A glance at my phone comforted me somewhat. Helena’s number was the last dialed in my call log. I still needed more reassurance, though. So, I looked her up on IMDb, just to make sure the woman I remembered hanging out with was actually Helena Bonham Carter.Yep.The headshot matched the face I recalled from the night before.

I dialed Ted at SNL. He worked in the talent department, which handles celebrity ticket requests. I told him I’d been out drinking with Helena Bonham Carter and that she wanted to attend the show with her entourage. “That’s weird,”Ted said, noting that celeb requests typically came in through higher ups. “Her publicist is from the U.K. and isn’t in the loop here,” I explained.Ted said he’d have tickets waiting for them, so I called Helena and told her where and when to meet Ted at 30 Rock. She overflowed with gratitude and suggested that we hang out sometime before she returned to the U.K. I agreed.

Sunday morning,Ted called and told me something went terribly wrong at the show. The woman I’d set up with tickets had been escorted out of the building for impersonating Helena Bonham Carter. I gulped.Ted assured me that no one at the show was blaming me for the attempted crashing. After all, he thought the woman was Helena Bonham Carter, too, and had sent her entourage upstairs to studio 8H.They’d almost made it into the studio when someone who knows the real Helena put the kibosh on the impersonation.

A few days later, after Page Six had run an item on the impersonation and we remembered that Chadwick had given Dave his business card, we paid him a visit in his Noho office. Judging by the look on his face, Chadwick couldn’t believe Dave and I had just walked back into his life.

No fisticuffs ensued, but we did press Chadwick on why they would pull such an annoying prank. His explanation:The waiter where they’d eaten dinner that night asked his friend if she was Helena Bonham Carter. She said she was Helena and they got their desserts comped. At Underbar, Fiona mentioned to the waiter that Helena Bonham Carter was in the house and the group was presented with endless free Dom Perignon. At that point, they wondered how far they could carry the ruse.That’s when Fiona approached Dave and I, Chadwick said.They thought we were bullshitting them about our connections at NBC.We seemed way too young to be able to get tickets to SNL, so the wilder they thought our “lies” grew, the more they returned the BS. For a moment, I lamented the extent of “Helena’s” duplicity.Then, I thought about giving her a call and asking her real name.

Andrew Tavani is a freelance writer. Visit him at [tavaniwork.blogspot.com].