About Celebrity Personal Assistants

Lights! Camera! Action! When a movie star is on the set, treading the red carpet, or doing a magazine spread, there's an entourage of stylists, makeup artists, and wardrobe mistresses to make sure she's glam from head to toe.
Away from all this fabulous attention, though, many celebrities need a competent personal assistant to help manage the more "normal" aspects of their lives. If glitz, glamour and a lot of hard work are your calling, that someone could be you.

History

Ever since the dawn of film a century ago, Hollywood and the rest of the world have always known that stars deserve star treatment and endeavor to keep them happy with plenty of perks and peppy personnel. The more mundane errands of day-to-day living, however, were routinely performed by the actors themselves, their non-actor spouses, or their own household staff. Celebrities today delegate these tasks to a paid professional who is essentially on call 24/7 to attend to whatever a star either doesn't have time for, has no interest in, or believes is beneath her dazzling status as an icon.

Function

A celebrity personal assistant wears many different hats in the course of his employment, all of which share the same objective: to keep his employer's life as stress-free and blissful as possible.
These roles can include social secretary, relatives' chauffeur, personal shopper, intermediary, party coordinator, cook, accountant, babysitter, exercise buddy, reservations agent, receptionist, fan mail manager, general gopher and occasional confidante.
A personal assistant will have interface with the celebrity's agent and/or manager insofar as ensuring that the star's calendar is kept up-to-date and that he'll always show up--cool and collected--wherever he's supposed to be.

Benefits

True, you may abhor driving the star's monster children to their soccer games, taking the family poodle to the groomer's, buying perfect birthday presents for people you've never met, or being called at 1 a.m. to come over immediately and hunt for a missing remote.
The flip side is that you'll be invited to tag along to gala parties and award ceremonies, hear a lot of juicy gossip, get tickets to prestigious events, and--if your boss is particularly generous-- be rewarded at year's end with the bonus of a new convertible.
Definitely beats a stale fruitcake. The bigger the celebrity (and this goes for sports figures, elected officials, captains of industry, and best-selling authors), the more you'll be called upon to do to keep their images intact and their lives running smoothly.

Potential

A celebrity personal assistant's salary can range from $35,000 up to as much as $125,000. When you throw in the freebies, the lifestyle, the gifts, the travel, and the priceless opportunity to be an insider, it's no wonder that this is such a popular path to pursue.
Another advantage of being an assistant is that it offers the employee a deeper awareness of and access to the type of venue he might like to one day join as a writer, artist, musician or politician.
The glamour factor, of course, makes this employment opportunity an extremely competitive one, especially since these kinds of positions aren't typically advertised in the classifieds. To assist prospective job seekers, there are a number of books, professional organizations, and websites that allow prospective candidates to network, float their resumes, and to hear the kinds of things that really go on in a celebrity personal assistant's work day.

Warning

"Personal assistant" is not interchangeable with "best bud" in a celebrity's dictionary. Although many a long-term employer/employee relationship has gradually evolved into a meaningful friendship, just as many new hires have found themselves terminated after their first three days for assuming a level of familiarity that has yet to blossom.
No matter how much time you share the same posh space with one another, it can't be forgotten that the celebrity is still your boss and, therefore, has the power to fire you whenever she wants.
It should further be kept in mind that your tenure as a personal assistant rises and falls on whether your boss stays on top of his shining pedestal or takes a disastrous tumble from public favor.

Resources

• Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants
• Personal Assistant
• CNN Money