The Bling Ring (10 page)

But then, she said, the girls began to change. “They became, like, these manipulative girls. They were good at getting guys to do what they wanted. They said they were older than they were. Their mom, Andrea, would do arts and crafts all the time. Tess was nice. She dated this boy who had inherited a lot of money. He had parties. Everyone would be there. Rick James' son Taz was part of the scene.”

And then, “Tess and Alexis started getting into modeling,” Emily said.

“They were always doing photo shoots,” said Susan. “Andrea let them do those boudoir pictures in Paris.”

In 2009, when they were 18 and 19, Alexis and Tess appeared in a video shoot for Issa Lingerie, which showed them in a Paris hotel room wearing fancy Victorian underwear and canoodling with each other. Their youthful allure was made use of, again, in a TV commercial for CamsNetwork.com, “The Hottest Adult Web Cams Site on the Net.” In the ad, they can be seen in matching sports bras and “booty shorts,” jogging bouncily down the street together, until they come upon a stunned male pedestrian, unaccountably stop, and begin caressing his face.

Emily said, “Alexis showed us all this stuff—she knew it belonged to celebrities. She showed us this dress she said belonged to Miranda Kerr”—the Victoria's Secret model and then girlfriend (now wife) of Orlando Bloom.

13

Rubenstein wouldn't allow me to ask Alexis about the Bloom burglary yet, which I wasn't thrilled about, but I decided to make the best of it and ask Alexis about herself. I did want to know the background of the kids, where they came from and who they were when they weren't allegedly burglarizing celebrities. I wanted to know about Alexis' friendship with Tess.

“She's been in my life since I was two-and-a-half and she was three years old,” Alexis said. She and Tess had met in ballet class as little girls, she said, and “she's stuck ever since. We've shared a bedroom for the last six years. We've legally adopted her,” she claimed. “She had a kind of dysfunctional background. We both did.”

“And I met her mom,” Andrea interjected.

“Can I talk please?!” Alexis snapped, turning around in her chair to glare at her mother.

Andrea stopped talking.

“The reason why we related so well,” Alexis went on, turning back around, “is my dad is a recovered drug addict and alcoholic, and Tracie, Tess' mom is—”

Andrea tried to cut in again to say something.

Alexis turned around and shouted, “Please! I told you that if you were going to be here you had to be quiet!”

Andrea shut her mouth.

The lawyers shuffled papers.

Alexis and Tess seemed to have a very close bond, so much so that they would sometimes pretend to be sisters. Their reality show,
Pretty Wild
, which would premiere on the E! network on March 14, 2010, encouraged the idea that Alexis, Tess, and Gabby were all actually sisters—wild sisters. The premise of the show was simply that—wild and pretty girls who lived in the Valley, with Andrea as the harried mom who can't figure out how to stop their out-of-control behavior. The show had been brought to comedian Chelsea Handler by a young comedian and actor, Dan Levy, who was familiar with Tess and Alexis' underage presence on the Hollywood nightclub scene; and then Handler brought it to the E! network.

When the girls appeared together—in short, tight dresses and high heels, beaming and giggling—on
Chelsea Lately
on March 11, 2010, to promote the show, host Handler said, “You're all sisters,” to which Alexis, Gabby, and Tess responded, “Yes.”

“So one of you was involved in that burglary,” said Handler, who during the interview did not disclose that she was the executive producer of
Pretty Wild
.

“Well, I certainly would not say I was
involved
,” said Alexis. “I've been accused of many things. The press constantly is hounding me. . . .We definitely use our philosophy of the Secret to get us through this.”

“It absolutely works!” said Tess.

“You were in a movie together?” Handler said.

It was called
Frat Party
(straight to DVD, 2009). Dan Levy had also appeared in the film.

“We had a love scene together,” said Alexis, coy.

“Alexis and I,” Tess said, proud.

It was a mini-make-out session in which Tess was topless.

“Sisters had a love scene together. So this was shot in the Valley?” Handler joked. The audience laughed, perhaps aware of the Valley's reputation as the capital of the adult film industry.

In real life (as opposed to “reality”), Tess was not abandoned, nor was she ever adopted. Born Tess Amber Adler to Tracie and Franklin Adler, she attended Oak Park High School and Oak View High School, another alternative high school in the area. (She took “Taylor” as her stage name.) After her parents divorced, she lived with her mother and then her father, according to sources who know the family.

When I had the opportunity to talk to Tess on the phone, in December 2009, she told me she had no contact with either of her parents. “My mom kind of fell off the face of the planet,” she said, “and it just luckily happened” that she was taken in by Andrea some six or seven years earlier. When I asked if I could talk to her mom, Tess said she was “unreachable. Honestly I have no idea [where she is].”

Soon after the premiere of
Pretty Wild
, discussions began to pop up online about the identity and relationships of the characters on the show, which was generally found to be unwatchable. “This is an example of the downfall of our society” was a typical complaint. (Joel McHale, host of E!'s
The Soup
, would quip, “
Pretty Wild
is like
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
without the intellect or the moral center.”) You can only put so much stock in anonymous comments on blogs, but there was a repetitive nature to some of the stories told by people online who claimed to know the family. And some of these claims were borne out in my interviews with Andrea and Alexis—for example, the fact that Andrea and Tess' mother Tracie had once been very close.

Alexis said, “My mom and [Tess'] mom became best friends and—”

Andrea interrupted, “And then—”

Alexis shouted, “Please! That's why I didn't want you in here because you talk!”

Online comments painted a picture of two New Age friends, pretty Andrea Neiers and Tracie Adler, who had two pretty little dark-haired girls they would take to ballet classes and services at the Westlake Church of Religious Science. Tess, especially, showed a talent for dancing at an early age; people who knew the family thought that one day she would go professional. As the little girls grew, their mothers began to have trouble at home. Andrea's husband, Mikel Neiers, left her for another woman. Alexis told me that when she was three, her father left her mother for a production assistant on
Friends
. The breakup was hard on her, Alexis said. Neiers married the woman, but then later, “his wife left him,” said Andrea. (Mikel Neiers declined to comment.)

Tracie Adler also got divorced from her husband Frank. Their daughter Tess was becoming “wild,” hanging out at nightclubs in Hollywood, and not getting along with her father. “Frank and Tessy's relationship was tough,” Alexis said. Tess moved out of her father's house when she was around 18, preferring to stay at Alexis' house, where her unofficial mother now also acted as an unofficial manager, encouraging Tess and Alexis in pursuing careers in modeling and acting.

In July 2009 Tess became a
Playboy
“Cybergirl.” Andrea was there for Tess when she began working for the porn empire where Andrea herself once had modeled. “I was in the magazine doing ads all the time,” Andrea told me. “I was a centerfold in the international edition. I was a Playmate.” Stephen Wayda, the veteran
Playboy
photographer who shot Tess' Cybergirl shoot, also photographed Andrea in the 1980s, Andrea said. “I remember those days,” she told me nostalgically.

Cybergirls, who appear on Playboy.com rather than in the print version of
Playboy
magazine, are considered second-string; but Tess was an instantly popular one. She was “Cybergirl of the Week” for the week of July 14, 2009—coincidentally the week after Alexis allegedly participated in the Orlando Bloom burglary. Tess was “Cybergirl of the Month” for November, the month after the Bling Ring suspects were arrested and her face and midriff appeared all over the media. And she would be “Cybergirl of the Year” for 2010.

“Enough about Tess,” said Susan Haber curtly.

14

“In my life,” Alexis said, dabbing at her eyes, “I've had a lot of struggle, with my dad falling off the face of this earth—he wasn't a father. He wouldn't give any child support for years and he was a drug addict and alcoholic and thank God now he's sober and lot more in my life than he was before.” (Mikel Neiers declined to comment.)

“And that's why I want to be doing charity work,” Alexis said, “and that's why I want to encourage women to take a stand for themselves. To realize that they don't have to
deal
with this in their lives and through certain steps you can eliminate negativity in your life—”

“Or the possibility of it,” murmured Andrea.

“Or the possibility of x, y, and z,” Alexis said.

“I dealt with a lot,” Alexis went on, “with a lot of women leaving and coming into my life. My dad had a lot of girlfriends, and there was a lot of abuse with my dad. Some physical.”

“Um, Alexis—” Andrea cut in.

“I'm being honest!” said Alexis.

“Okay,” said Andrea, “but you also have to be considerate of where your dad is now.”

“He's raised his hand on me a couple of times.” Alexis sniffed. “He's smacked me in the face. Stuff like that. Just a lot of verbal abuse, emotional abuse—just pain, in seeing him in bad positions.” (Again Mikel Neiers declined to comment.)

While as a reporter I was interested in knowing these things, I was also curious as to why Alexis was revealing such intimate details about her life just minutes after we'd met. I wondered if it could have anything to do with the confessional culture in which she'd been raised, with celebrity confessors like Oprah—whom her mother told me she idolized—and Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer, and Maury prompting their guests to spill their guts posthaste, as this made for better TV. Exposing one's pain had become a celebrity rite of passage, and Alexis seemed to think of herself as a celebrity, although her reality show had not yet aired, or even been picked up by a network. Whatever the reason for her confessions, she clearly felt traumatized by something.

“You seem really emotional,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” she said, sniffling again. “I'd rather talk about it than not talk about it.”

She would have gone on talking about her pain that day, but Rubenstein cut the interview short, saying Alexis would be available another time. I was disappointed that he wouldn't allow her to discuss her case, but he assured me she would do so eventually. On my way out of the office, I stopped by a conference room where Alexis was now meeting with Susan Haber and her mother, Andrea. Alexis was begging Haber to let her fly off to Mexico with a friend on his private jet.

“My friends are telling me, ‘you need to chill out,' ” Alexis was saying. Her voice had taken on a different tone—it sounded flip.

Haber reminded her that she was not allowed to travel out of the state, much less out of the country, as she was a suspect in a burglary case.

“Nobody will find out,” Alexis whined.

“You'd be in Mexico and TMZ would catch you on a beach,” Haber said.

It turned out that Alexis actually wanted to go to Mexico for a
Pretty Wild
shoot in Cabo San Lucas, which she eventually did. The episode, “What Happens in Cabo, Stays in Cabo” featured Alexis and Tess doing a photo shoot in bikinis to “raise money for Haiti.” “We are successful, strong independent women. I know this is the truth. . .and so it is,” they prayed, outfitted in their bikinis.

Alexis started telling me more about her career.

“I started modeling about four years ago,” she said, brightening up. She said she booked her jobs herself; she didn't belong to an agency. “Just print work. I'm not tall enough to do runway unfortunately. I
wish
. Maybe in, like, six-inch pumps.

“I went to Paris in August and stayed at the Crillon [Hotel]”—this was for the Issa Lingerie shoot for FashionTV—“and it was
gorgeous
,” she said. “I flew first-class there and back. . . .I took my sister Tess. We got shopping money every day and a personal driver and Ferraris and Mercedes took us around. It was like two weeks of
total luxury
. It was
incredible
.”