Chelsea Handler
(5 of 7)
In profile, with the trees of western Oregon passing behind her outside the Escalade window, she looks more Scandinavian than anything else, with stern, handsome features, Chanel sunglasses pushed up over brown roots, gold hoop earrings bouncing from lobes. She gets a text from her then boyfriend, the hotelier Andr Balazs, and studies her BlackBerry. She has written about and extensively discussed her romantic life; her willingness to riff on that is part of her rapport with her fans. She lived for years with Ted Harbert, former CEO of Comcast Entertainment and now chairman of NBC Broadcasting, before moving on to Animal Planet star Dave Salmoni and then a dalliance with the rapper and actor 50 Cent. She says she won't use Balazs in her books and stand-up routines as she has her other boyfriends, in part because he has children but also because she realizes that her power and success have changed the dynamics of her relationships. "It's just not fair--because of my platform, I can really hang someone out to dry. I can't just use him like that."
But if they were to break up?
"I'm never going to be the kind of person who is like, I'm not allowed to talk about that. But for me, now, this is a good kind of learning gauge: not talking about someone in my life."
They broke up in November.
Handler's books describe her childhood and womanhood in such unflinching detail that a reader goes from shocked to benumbed at how much is revealed and how graphic she is willing to be. She writes, with steady humor, about the whole range of female sexuality, from discovering at age 8 how to pleasure herself to acting on her fondness for African-American men. Her first book, My Horizontal Life, was published in 2005 when she was 30. Among other ribald episodes, she writes, "My relationship with my father had been on the proverbial fritz since the time I was fifteen and called the police to report him for child molesting." She goes on to say she made the episode up to get him out of the house so she could go to a party.
"If I wrote that book today," Handler says, "I couldn't write everything I wanted. I wasn't a big celebrity then--it was just a book, so nobody was like, Oh my God, she's going to talk about things that nobody famous would talk about."
The books may well be the most important part of her media empire. They make her tours far more lucrative than those of her fellow stand-ups, and her audiences are much more personally invested. After the Portland show, a line of about 500 fans snakes up the stairs and out into the street. Autograph seekers are required to buy books in order to get them signed--most bring one or two and buy one or two--and Handler is obsessive about signing each and every book. The devotion of those fans, who spent $50 on a ticket and are now waiting in line to spend a second or two with a woman they regard as their buddy--and who will probably insult them as they present their books--is the kind of loyalty a brand manager dreams of. Megan Hahn, 22, drove three hours from Seattle to meet Handler because, she says, "She's like your best friend, if you had a really funny best friend."