Every now and then, Los Angeles reminds you that it is not really a normal city.
You can be stuck in ordinary traffic on Wilshire Boulevard, and twenty minutes later you are standing in a ballroom where Jack Black is over there, Jennifer Garner is over there, Jennifer Lopez has just introduced you to her mother, Nicole Kidman is nearby, Gordon Ramsay is cooking dinner, and Barbra Streisand has somehow sat down beside you on a sofa.
That sounds like I am exaggerating.
I am not sure Los Angeles knows how to do anything else.
This particular story starts with the British Consulate.
For a while, I was lucky enough to become friendly with Bob Peirce, the British Consul General in Los Angeles. Through him, and later through the wider British-American and Irish-American business community, I was invited to some genuinely interesting events. The British Residence in Beverly Hills was one of those places that always felt slightly unreal to me. Elegant, warm, full of fascinating people, and every visit seemed to come with some moment I did not see coming.
One of my favorite examples happened in the back garden.
I walked outside and saw Sir Ken Robinson standing there.
Now, Sir Ken Robinson was not just some academic to me. I had been in the audience when he gave his famous TED talk on creativity, the one that became one of the most-watched TED talks in the world. It was brilliant, funny, thoughtful, and it hit exactly the nerve that creative people recognize immediately.
So I walked up and told him I had been there.
He was lovely. He said that talk had changed his life.
Then he asked me what I did.
This is always a funny moment for me, because depending on who is asking, “I make video games” can land in completely different ways. Sometimes people light up. Sometimes they look like you just told them you repair parking meters.
Sir Ken was an older academic Englishman, so I was not expecting the gamer response.
I said, “I make video games.”
He said, “Would I know any?”
I paused.
There was no way, I thought, that Sir Ken Robinson was sitting at home playing video games.
So I said, a little nervously, “Earthworm Jim?”
He gasped.
Then he turned and called over his wife.
“Terry! This guy made Earthworm Jim!”
She gasped too.
For a second I had no idea what was happening. Then they explained that their son had loved Earthworm Jim growing up. And of course, as a parent, you know the things your child loves. You know the games. You know the cartoons. You know the theme songs you never expected to have permanently installed in your brain.
It turned into one of the best icebreakers imaginable.
That is one of the strange gifts of making things for popular culture. You never know where they have landed. You make something silly, weird, colorful, and hopefully fun, and years later it comes back to you through a door you never expected, in this case through one of the world’s great voices on creativity.
I keep that moment in mind, because it was a small version of something I would see much more dramatically a little later. Even the people we put on pedestals have their own pedestals. Sir Ken had spoken to millions about imagination, and he lit up over a cartoon earthworm because his son had loved it.
Everybody is a fan of something.
Hold onto that, because it is really the whole point of this story.
At one point, when Dame Barbara Hay was Consul General, I was told there was going to be an event where I would meet Prince William and Catherine, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
So, obviously, I went.
This was July 2011, at the Beverly Hilton.
I walked into the room and immediately realized this was not a normal dinner. The room was packed with celebrities. Not “there are a few famous people here” packed. I mean every square inch seemed to contain someone you recognized from a movie poster, a magazine cover, a television show, or the kind of red carpet footage where photographers yell names for a living.
There was Jack Black.
There was Jennifer Garner.
There was Jennifer Lopez, who was extremely gracious and introduced me to her mother.
There was Nicole Kidman.
After a while, I started to get a little shy.
That may sound ridiculous given some of the situations I have found myself in over the years, but this room had a kind of celebrity density that made it feel like the oxygen had been replaced with fame.
So I did what any confident, worldly professional would do.
I sat down quietly on a sofa.
A moment later, Barbra Streisand sat down beside me.
Of course she did.
Because apparently the sofa was not a safe zone either.
Meanwhile, Gordon Ramsay was cooking our dinner, which added another layer of absurdity. It was not just a famous room. It was a famous room about to be fed by a very famous chef, waiting for a royal couple, in a hotel that has probably seen more flashbulbs than most small countries.
Then William and Kate arrived.
And this is where the evening became really interesting.
Hollywood is used to being looked at.
Celebrities live in a strange weather system of attention. People stare at them, whisper about them, ask for photographs, ask for autographs, tell them what their work meant, or simply lose the ability to behave normally in their presence. I have watched it happen many times.
But when the royal couple entered the room, something flipped.
Suddenly, the celebrities became the audience.
They stood to attention.
A greeting line formed.
The energy in the room changed in an instant. These were people who are normally the center of gravity in almost any space they enter, and now they were waiting, politely and formally, for their turn.
It was Hollywood royalty meeting actual royalty.
And what fascinated me was not that they were respectful. Of course they were respectful. What fascinated me was that many of them looked genuinely star-struck.
You could feel it.
If the situation had allowed it, I suspect a few of them would have asked for a photo. Not because they were unsophisticated, but because this was the rare moment when the usual hierarchy of attention had been turned upside down.
They were on the receiving end of the exact thing they create in other people every single day.
And that is when the Ken Robinson moment came back to me.
Everybody is a fan of something.
Even the famous. Even the powerful. Even the people who walk into every room expecting to be the most recognized person in it.
That was the lesson of the evening for me.
Celebrity and royalty are not the same thing.
Celebrity is powered by attention. It is built out of movies, music, television, sports, beauty, charisma, publicity, talent, timing, and a million photographs. It is enormous, but it is also personal. It attaches to a face and a name.
Royalty is powered by symbolism. It carries history with it. Whether you are into the monarchy or not, there is a kind of cultural gravity around it that is different from fame. It is older. Stranger. More formal. Less transactional. It does not attach to a person so much as pass through them.
Hollywood fame says, “You know me.”
Royalty says, “You know what I represent.”
A celebrity walks in and the room thinks about them. Royalty walks in and the room thinks about everything standing behind them: the centuries, the institution, the history, the idea.
That night, the difference was visible in real time, written on the faces of some of the most famous people on earth.
And I was ready.
Or at least I thought I was.
Prince William gave a short speech before meeting people, and I made what I considered to be a smart tactical decision. I positioned myself to the left of the stage, certain I would be perfectly placed to be one of the first people to greet them.
This is what is known in military history as a mistake.
When the speech ended, they went off the right side of the stage.
The greeting line instantly formed in the other direction.
Then it went out the door.
So after all of that, after driving there, walking into one of the most celebrity-packed rooms I had ever seen, watching Hollywood royalty line up to meet real royalty, and carefully positioning myself for my big moment, I never even got to say hello.
Genius.
That is probably why I like the story.
If I had met them, it would be a nice memory and not much more. Instead, it became something funnier and more useful. A small, perfect lesson in status, attention, symbolism, and the absolute danger of standing on the wrong side of a stage.
Los Angeles is full of surreal nights, but that one stayed with me because it revealed something honest.
Fame does not make people immune to awe.
Celebrities still have heroes. They still get nervous. They still line up. They still want a moment with someone who represents something larger than the room they are standing in.
Sir Ken Robinson lit up over an earthworm.
A ballroom full of stars went quiet for a young couple from England.
And somewhere off to the left of the stage, a guy who makes video games stood in exactly the wrong spot and missed the handshake entirely.
If you enjoy this kind of story, I should probably write next about the time I met the President of Ireland.
There seems to be a theme developing.