Lauren Brown West-Rosenthal was in the room when the teen pop era of the early aughts was at its peak, interviewing young stars who were reckoning with fame before their frontal lobes had caught up. As an editor at CosmoGirl, she talked to the biggest stars of the time — Avril Lavigne, the Olsen twins, Hilary Duff, to name just a few — and kept most of the transcripts and tapes from all those years ago which she's now revisiting on her Substack, The Teen Mag Time Machine.
Read back now, they're a record of how brutal the media cycle could be toward young women — and also how messy, funny and unscripted those conversations actually were before every celebrity interview came pre-approved. Lauren talked to me about the parts of those conversations that had to be left on the cutting room floor, and what those stars were going through that they didn't want the public to know.
Stephanie: I used to read CosmoGirl religiously back in the day, and I totally remember that Avril Lavigne rising star interview you did 20-some years ago. Before we get into that, what was it like to work behind the scenes as an entertainment editor there in the late ‘90s-early aughts?
Lauren: I always knew I wanted to work at a teen magazine. CosmoGirl launched in the summer of '99, which is when I moved to New York. Through a series of serendipitous meetings, my first job was as an assistant to the editor in chief, and it was such a crazy time looking back because we were giving the empowering advice I would've loved to have as a teenager while also in the middle of this insane pop culture moment that I don't think can be duplicated, because there was no social media.
It was Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, Eminem, Avril Lavigne, Blink-182 — we were right in the middle of that explosion. Everyone was trying to pretend they were so innocent, because there were paparazzi but no social media. We were trying to lift these girls up — Britney Spears was deeply troubled even back then — while also kind of pigeonholing them into being role models.
Stephanie: Let’s talk about the interview that you said was one of your worst celebrity encounters, Avril Lavigne. What went down behind the scenes of that interview and what were the reactions like once the interview was published?
Lauren: I had interviewed Hilarie Burton from ‘One Tree Hill,’ when she was still a VJ on MTV — very out of character for CosmoGirl, we wanted her to spill gossip about stars who came into the studio, who was the biggest diva, who had the biggest demands. She hated Avril and gave me a whole thing about how awful she was. This must have been after I interviewed Avril, because Avril was by then a TRL staple, and Hilarie said all the VJs fought over who had to interview her, that they couldn't stand her. We printed that, which was a whole thing on its own — but then, when I interviewed Chad Michael Murray, and he told me he was a prankster on the set of ‘One Tree Hill.’ One of his best pranks was that he and the crew wallpapered Hilarie's trailer with Avril Lavigne posters, because — he says in the interview — she supposedly had a beef with Avril. We didn't print that at the time, but going back to the transcript 20 years later, I'd completely forgotten it, and I thought, oh my god, that beef is because of me! She's always been polarizing. Honestly, for my whole career, two decades now, whenever anyone asks who my worst interview was, it's her and Justin Bieber.
Stephanie: What era of Justin was this?
Lauren: It was before his first album came out — I did his bio for the record label, which made it even more frustrating, because I wasn't even trying to get gossip, just his backstory, straight out of the press kit.
But anyway — with Avril, they wanted her on the cover, so we gave her a one-page Rising Star instead. Her publicist talked her up for months. Back then, we'd go to the record companies months before an album release, into a locked conference room, and they'd play the album on a CD player — we couldn't even bring phones in, we just had to listen and take notes. With Avril, they were insistent that she was amazing and that her songs really spoke to this generation, that she wrote her own lyrics — though she really didn't. When I finally got her on the phone, she hadn't slept, and it was clear she wasn't media-trained. She wanted to play the part of this skater-punk who lived that lifestyle, but she was 17, still living at home, and her brother had to take her around New York — she was too afraid to get from her apartment to the studio without him walking her to the door. For someone who was supposed to be this amazing new thing, she just wasn't prepared, and it was real.
Technically, there was still a chance she could have been on the cover. If I'd come out of that interview and told my editors it was amazing, we might have jumped on it — but it was so bad. She didn't know how to reply, even to things where I could hear a hint of joy in her voice — I asked about Johnny Rzeznik, her idol, what she'd said to him, and her answer was "hi." Cool story, groundbreaking. People in the comments were saying, well, you were asking yes-or-no questions, how did you even get your job at CosmoGirl, you're a terrible interviewer. And I thought — you can say a lot of things about me, but I know this is some of my best work, because that interview lasted 34 minutes. I tried every trick in the book to keep it going. I can't force someone to open up.
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Stephanie: How bad was the actual transcript itself? Were you getting one-word answers from her, basically?
Lauren: Yeah. Going back through it, it was bad. At one point she said, "I'm sorry, I didn't sleep last night," and I assumed she'd slept badly, but she said, no, I was home, I hadn't been home in a while, and I didn't want to go to sleep, so I just stayed up all night to be in my house without sleeping. Okay, fair, but — she'd say things like, "I would get in trouble in school a lot, I'd get detention," which made it into the final piece because we could couple little things together. But what people don't realize is I was trying to figure out why she was getting in trouble, what she was doing, and she'd say, "Well, I wasn't paying attention." I'd ask, "Were you writing song lyrics?" and she'd say, "Yeah, I think I was." I feel for someone like Hilarie Burton, who had to do this live on TV with her — that's another level of hell, especially since I do some live TV producing now, so I get it. At least we had the benefit of being able to retry and rephrase questions until we got something we could write around. With the Rising Star section, sometimes it would be a 150-word intro and then quotes, a little subhead — you could get a better sense of who the person was, since they were new. We couldn't do that with her — there weren't chunks of usable quotes. Thankfully we didn't style it as a Q&A, though maybe that would have been more revealing. It's funny, because clearly she made such an impact on culture, people are still obsessed with her — she was just at Taylor's wedding — she still has a place in this world. But at the same time, she made it very difficult. She's lucky it worked out for her.
Stephanie: Did you ever interview her again afterward, or was that a one-and-done for you?
Lauren: One-and-done. It's funny — I was on the verge of leaving CosmoGirl, they didn't know yet, and [Avril Lavigne] ended up being the June/July cover — probably about a year and a half after that first interview, after the Hilarie Burton debacle, too. By then I'd finally started getting most of the cover stories, which had been my goal, so I wanted to go out doing one last cover story. I went to lunch with the entertainment director at the time and her publicist. Much different conversation now, since we're talking covers. I made a comment about how badly the Rising Star interview had gone, and next thing I knew, I wasn't assigned the story. I don't know if it was intentional — I don't even know if Avril remembered me — I've heard from other editors from that time with the exact same situation. I think the publicist wanted someone fresh. In hindsight, I also think my director probably knew I was about to put in my notice, word was getting around that I was interviewing. I remember that lunch being kind of awkward, and in my head I was thinking, do I even want to interview her again? Part of me did. Part of me thought, all right, good luck to whoever gets this.
Stephanie: Yeah, really. Speaking of CosmoGirl covers, I read your essay about interviewing Mary-Kate and Ashley and you mentioned they were guarded too, but for a slightly different reason. It felt like, from your vantage point, they were trying to protect themselves from the scrutiny young women that age were facing from tabloids at that time. I also noticed your questions for Avril were humanizing — not gotcha questions, which felt dissonant with how a lot of media treated young women back then.
Lauren: No, and it's funny you say that, because I have a ton of CosmoGirls over here — either from my own collection or bought off eBay — and I was looking at the first cover story we did with Britney Spears. I didn't do that interview, I was still a very junior editor, but the first question asked was, "So everyone thinks you have implants, what's the deal with that?" I can't believe that.
When I started doing celebrity interviews, I wasn't comfortable asking things like that. I always came at it from the vantage point of having grown up a fangirl myself — obsessed with New Kids on the Block, ‘Beverly Hills, 90210,’ deeply caring about the pop culture in my life. When I read about it in a magazine, I wanted a deeper perspective. With Mary-Kate and Ashley, there were so many conversations about how we were going to talk with them, because we knew they were going to be guarded. There was a lot of back-and-forth about what they were willing to talk about and what they wouldn't — they didn't want to talk about ‘Full House.’ They wanted to really emphasize the fact that they were studying for the SATs and they wanted to go to NYU, and they're just trying to be like normal girls who happen to run this billion-dollar business. And they also wanted to make it very clear that they were the CEOs of Dualstar. But they weren't great interviews either. I did them separately, 20 minutes each — I kind of wish I'd done them together.
It's funny, because where I went after leaving CosmoGirl was US Weekly, which was the biggest mistake of my life. I thought I'd be in a "real" entertainment magazine, and quickly realized I wasn't cut out for the gossip side of it. My first week there, Mary-Kate went to a rehab for her eating disorder, and Janice Min, the editor-in-chief at the time, called me into her office with the executive editor and said, there are rumors she's too skinny, we're not allowed to ask about that directly, but what sources do you have, what do you know — you did the CosmoGirl cover story on them. I said, honestly, I know nothing, they offered nothing, they were laser-focused on NYU and being entrepreneurs.
Stephanie: For the people you've interviewed years later — what was the most surprising thing you heard? I know you just recently re-interviewed Chad Michael Murray.
Lauren: That interview was funny — I went for it, and we actually got picked up by People and Vulture, because I asked him, Hilary Duff says she purposely went with you to the ‘Freaky Friday’ premiere in the midst of her drama with Lindsay Lohan — what say you? Since he was in ‘A Cinderella Story’ with Hilary and ‘Freaky Friday’ with Lindsay. He had no idea, and told this whole story about how they were told to spend time together because of the big kissing scene in ‘A Cinderella Story,’ and how much he loves Hilary. It's almost fun now, a lot of them just weren't paying attention to what was going on at the time. He got married and divorced his co-star and then had to keep working with her.
Even with Ashley Parker Angel from O-Town — I interviewed him in person, which was lovely, reconnecting, because he was kind of an asshole back in the day. Honestly, a lot of them were. They knew they were on a short leash — their 15 minutes felt more like 15 seconds — so they were trying to get it all in. They were also founded on a reality show, which at the time wasn't seen as a cool origin story, especially with the Lou Pearlman stigma starting to build, after NSYNC and Backstreet left him. So they were trying to play it cool, and probably thought they were more famous than they actually were, but also very aware their time was limited. He's not in O-Town anymore, but he was the only one who went on to do solo stuff, had his own TV show — he was the "famous one" of the group. He was really humble and grateful talking about it now, and surprised me by saying his mental health was a mess back then, and he wasn't allowed to say it, didn't have the tools to say it, and he knew if he had, no one would have listened. He said that's part of why he's not in O-Town anymore — he's focused on wellness now, has a whole wellness brand. He said if he'd been able to say back then, ‘I need a break, we can't do 50 days in a row on tour, I need a week to reset’ — he thinks it would have made a real difference in how things unfolded, how they treated people, how interviews went, because it was just too much. I think that's true for Britney too, for all of them — they weren't allowed to be seen as anything other than dollar signs. Mental health has always been a factor, we just talk about it more openly now, but they were absolutely not allowed to back then.
Stephanie: Do you think that was because they were afraid of the stigma, and that it would impact sales?
Lauren: I think it was two things. Yes, absolutely there was a stigma — especially for the male stars. I think Demi Lovato was one of the first to really help break that stigma for this generation — there are others, but she's the one who comes to mind. But there was also the machine itself — as Ashley put it, if he'd taken a break, someone else would come in and he might not get his spot back. So it became, what's more important, my mental health or my career? And if the career was going to affect the mental health, so be it, because even taking a week off wasn't really an option.