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Equally absent were the other accessories of the single woman: the moments of despair; the tears, the tantrums and the constant lamentation on the lack of men. Far from the SATC universe in which conversations are always about men and sex, they almost inevitably revolve around the etiquette of replying to the question, ‘How’s your love life?’, the latest self-help books and how so and so met her new boyfriend. Very few single women actually have that much sex.
SJP volunteered that she never really felt comfortable having those conversations, in any case, ‘even among my girlfriends: I have a child, I have a husband, I have really followed a far more conventional life than Carrie. In every city I have known single people say it’s hard to find men, and I don’t see that New York is any harder [than anywhere else]. I always think Los Angeles might be harder, because you’re in your car all day. I feel like in New York, if you walk out on the street, there’s all this hope and potential. In the subway in New York you meet men, you’re in restaurants and you’re waiting outside in the street — you’re pushed up against each other in the city, you just have to be willing to be surprised by somebody and not have a fixed idea about who you’re supposed to date.’
As she was saying this, and more, I had another SATC reality check: that, unlike Carrie, SJP was not totally sweet-natured. Occasionally she didn’t bother to hide her impatience — ‘Why do we need a Sex and the City movie? You don’t!’ — and she openly rolled her eyes at the notion that she and her fellow actresses didn’t get on. ‘How tired is that? Have you ever heard that of The Sopranos? I actually heard that of The Sopranos, but you guys didn’t. After a while it’s actually an offensive, insulting question when it doesn’t exist in any other way, in any other job you do, and this story kind of repeats itself. You start to think there’s a misogynist overtone to it — this idea that four women cannot work or function and be happy and like each other.’
This woman, you realised, was in fact as far as you could get from the über-rich, über-stylish, über-poised goddess of a million articles. She was just normal — cleverer, undoubtedly, than most actresses, but still, just a normal woman labouring like an ant with a crumb under the fabulous weight of her fame. She hardly ever shopped for clothes, she explained, and if she did she got only one or two things; she would always borrow from designers and give things back. She did the school run unless she had to work, she was intimidated by the fashion shows and she had as many — maybe more — insecurities as anyone else.
It was the last fiction — that we were all being brainwashed to live like a celebrity, like Sarah Jessica Parker, when even she didn’t live like that. The whole thing really was madness. Her character in the show wouldn’t have behaved the way she did in real life, in real life SJP didn’t behave like her character, in real life she certainly didn’t look like her character, and she definitely didn’t live like the celebrity we assumed she was, which had us so irritably on the back foot. I know, we knew that. But it seemed to me that we kind of didn’t, at the same time. And as I was thinking this I looked up from my laptop to see Kristin Davis, who played the Pollyanna-ish Charlotte, wander into the suite. She was in high, shiny, pointed black boots that were almost hookerish, and she looked as much younger in real life as Parker looked older. She chatted idly to the PR, then glanced round and noticed the trailer looping on the TV in the corner. ‘Oh, I haven’t seen that!’ she exclaimed, and she and her friend went and plonked themselves on the sofa to watch. It was a mesmerising moment, because all the journalists looked at her, not knowing how to react.
Their uncertainty was spelled in the air like a plane trail: did they react as if she was normal, like them, which was how she was behaving and how, after all, she actually was; or did they react as if they were in the presence of celebrity, one of the women they had flown across the world to interview, read about all night in their hotel room, waited all day to meet? It teetered for a moment, and then the journalists all did a kind of collective mental shrug, and lowered their eyes to their laptops. The balance had fallen in favour of reality even as they went back to their profiles, doing the opposite.
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