On behalf of the White House Office of Public Engagement, I wanted to extend an invitation to you and your clients to participate in a telephone briefing on the current response to the disaster in Haiti.
Since you may be asked questions on Haiti or on how to help, we are holding an off-the-record briefing to provide you with the most up-to-date information.
White House Briefing on Haiti
TODAY, Friday, January 15, 2010
3:30PM PST / 6:30PM EST
CALL: (800) 36[Redacted]
PASSCODE: Haiti Update provide in lieu of passcode
If you can’t make it, please let us know who will take your place.
Thanks,
Kalpen Modi
Associate Director, White House Office of Public Engagement
As I expected, people were overwhelmingly receptive. Everyone wanted to help. Well, almost everyone. There was one particular whopper of a response, from a publicist working with a well-liked Golden Globe nominee, that goes down as the most ridiculous email I’ve ever gotten. Because of the sheer absurdity of it, I’ve chosen to publish it here, in the spirit of humankind learning from the worst among us:
From: [Redacted X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X]
Date: Friday, January 15, 2010 3:11 PM
To: Modi, Kalpen S.
Subject: Re: White House Conference Call on Haiti
I know this is going to sound absolutely SUPERFICIAL to someone that works in DC, but I suspect I got this because of [Redacted] and with the Golden Globes being this Sunday and all hands are on deck dealing with dresses, shoes, hair, makeup, etc., we’re not going to be able to fit this in today. If there’s an email with information I’m happy to distribute that.
I couldn’t believe it. Imagine: hundreds of thousands of people have been hurt or killed in an earthquake. You have an opportunity to use your privilege to help the survivors. So, what kind of human responds with concerns about that Sunday’s “dresses, shoes, hair, makeup, etc.”? To me, the most appalling part about it is that they recognized it was “superficial”—and thought it was a good idea to go ahead and press Send anyway.
Holding my tongue, I replied to the email with the details the publicist asked for, and then got back to focusing on the job at hand. I couldn’t dwell on that bad apple, because right then, Valerie asked for help in dealing with a new issue involving another actor.
“Kal,” she said, “we got word that [XXX] is trying to take his private jet to Haiti. POTUS needs you to call him to let him know he can’t do this. The island doesn’t have enough fuel right now, so planes that are landing can’t take off again, and they take up space on the tarmac. We need to make sure we can land real aid planes as quickly as possible.”
Jesus. As if shoes and makeup weren’t bad enough, now an actor was trying to fly down to Haiti to be a hero, and it was my job to stop him. I called my buddy Tommy Vietor, who had recently been promoted to National Security Council spokesman (and was being deployed to Port-au-Prince himself), for more background on the actor. “Yeah, this situation is shitty,” he confirmed. “He actually seems like a good guy. He’s trying to bring three nurses with him and has volunteered in the country previously, so I’m sure he’s desperate to help everyone he knows there. Basically, since the Haitians control their own airspace and landing, we can’t prevent him from going. But it looks like he might try to pay them off in order to land his jet. It’s true that he’ll take up space on the tarmac, and those larger aid planes won’t be able to land.”
My job seemed simple enough: I’d have to call this actor and tell him not to go. If he was committed to saving lives, he needed to know that this was absolutely going to do the opposite—he’d be making things worse, not better. I dialed his agent. I made it clear to the assistant who answered that I was calling from the White House, on behalf of the president of the United States.
She put me on hold.
Fun fact: Hollywood is the only industry in which people would put us on hold when we called on behalf of the president or the White House. You could get through to pretty much anybody at all, in any profession in the whole world… except people in Hollywood. This always embarrassed me.
“Hi, sorry,” the assistant said, getting back on the line. “What is this regarding again?” To my Hollywood friends reading this, please promise me: When President Ocasio-Cortez’s staffer calls you, don’t put her on hold. I repeated where I was calling from and said specifically that it was about one of their acting clients who was trying to make a trip to Haiti in his private jet. “Oh, okay. Please hold.”
As I was holding on line one for this actor’s mega-agent, I saw another call coming through on line two: another 310 area code, another person from Los Angeles. I put line one on hold and clicked over to answer line two. This time, it was a Hollywood producer who sounded like Alicia Silverstone’s character Cher from the movie Clueless. She had gotten the conference call invitation email and wanted to pitch me something brilliant:
Hiiiii! SO. I have an idea? Like for Haiti? Okay. SO. It’s called: Heels for Haiti. And like, we were thinking you know, how like, these women? These poor, POOR women, right. They, like, have nothing? And we, like, have all these high heels and like, you wear them once and then you’re never going to wear them again but they’re still good heels. WE SHOULD SEND THEM TO HAITI!
Great idea! Except, oh man, by the time the heels get there, they’ll be out of season. I needed to get this delusional time-waster off the phone, so I could get back to—what was I doing?—oh yeah, waiting on hold for the agent whose client might try to bribe a foreign government to land his private jet. What a day. I hastily told the Heels for Haiti producer to email me a proposal, politely hung up, and resumed waiting on line one.
After another five minutes on hold, the mega-agent himself finally got on the phone and flat-out refused to give me the actor’s phone number. I reiterated that the White House was imploring his talented client to please not go to Haiti, that the president was instead calling on him to help with critical, lifesaving fundraising. As directly and respectfully as I could, I told him straight up, “That flight will cause big problems for aid workers and the victims they are saving. People could die. Please, we just need him to know.”
Hearing this, the agent laughed at me as if we were discussing someone’s frivolous hobby. “Oh, that’s just how [Redacted] is! He’s going to do what he wants to do.”
I looked out my two-foot-thick bullet-and-bomb resistant office window, staring at the Washington Monument in the distance, feeling angry and sick. My mind was racing. These are exactly the times when you’re not supposed to let your passion or emotions get the best of you because it’ll derail the rest of the work you need to do. I thanked the mega-agent for his consideration and politely hung up.