Sue Chester - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
March 9th started on March 8th when I got a call at 6p.m. Just as I was closing my notebook for the day, a Mimi Wotsit forced her way into my life, barking, "Would you like to help us with a story about Gisele Bundchen?"
After some probing it became clear this was paparazzi snooping; a very important story. Gisele had just started dating American footy player Tom Brady two or three months ago. He dumped his starlet girl friend two or three months ago. She's just announced she's three months pregnant by Brady. And now gossip has hit the celebrity circuit that Gisele ... shock, horror, might be two months pregnant. Apparently the rumour is she's started telling closest family and friends. And apparently Tom and Gisele just went to Horizontina in Rio Grande do Sul to spill the beans to Gisele's parents. So could I please jump on a plane and rush down to Rio Grande do Sul, poke around Horizontina, find out if the family went out to a restaurant anywhere, if there were any sightings of the couple and try to talk to her family and friends?
I didn't know quite what to say. After a stunned pause at the wonderful job offer, Mimi impatiently said, "Well? Is this something you would do?" More silence. She snapped, "So what do you usually do then?" "Arts and culture," I replied realising I sounded a rather posh. She then told me there was another reporter lined up who'd go, but I could do some research for the Web site the following day. I decided that sounded like quite a good deal. I'd happily leave that other reporter's ankles to the mercy of the Bundchen family rottweilers. And grateful for a little gig after three weeks of my super-duper ideas being deleted from various Inboxes and for a magnificent sum of $30 per hour, I'd nose from the privacy of my microwave office in Leblon.
And so March 9th started on another baking hot Rio morning. It was going to be all about Gisele and her possible bump. And what an insightful, educational journalistic mark I was about to make on the media world. I diligently surfed the net and went out and bought all the local Brazilian papers (except the Folha de Sao Paulo because I thought they would surely be above all that silliness) to see what was happening.
The Gazeta said she, her dad and her sister denied Gisele was up the duff. Glamurama said she might be preggers as apparently she took Tom to meet her parents. Then I found a site with a montage of joke pix showing her with protruding bump. One interesting snippet somewhere gave an authoritative quote from Folha de Sao Paulo's gossip columnist Monica Bergamo. Bah! Quelle horreur! I had to dash out and get the blasted Folha de Sao Paulo. They were tacky after all?
Ran out and rushed around in the heat (with a quick diversion into a dusty little boutique where I bought a hyacinth vest before I knew it - why?) and finally found a copy at the fifth newsstand after standing for hours in the hot sun before the lights changed to cross the blinking road.
Back to my microwave, and I bravely called New York and spoke to her booker at IMG who said she wouldn't comment (there's a surprise, but, hey, I was still clocking up $30 per hour) then delved into the papers.
The Expresso's gossip column headline ran "No Baby." Folha de Sao Paulo said the Brazilian Boobs, as she's known by UK fashionistas, was seen by a group of [nosey] Brazilians buying nausea medicine in a pharmacy in Paris, which meant she could very possibly have been knocked up. The Hello style mags had all been published on Wednesday and since the pregnancy rumours had only started on Thursday (Us Weekly take their news reporting very seriously and move fast), they weren't helpful. Contigo was still only reporting about her 'new' boyfriend Tom Brady and how Gisele had taken him back to meet her parents February 27th when she came back to Brazil from Milan to shoot a jewelry campaign. How dull were they?
By 5 p.m. I was flagging and well fed up with Gisele Bunda*. I could no longer cope and went out for a sticky bun. I called Mimi to say I was done and she assertively insisted I call the Horizontina local papers to see if I could talk to the family. Damn. I mean I didn't mind doing the research, but trying to talk to the family against a tirade of insults? OK, better be a profi. In one hour, I'd found both papers, spoken to both directors; one helpful (Simone) and one bolshi geeser who's name I forget. The helpful one agreed to call the family for me and see if they'd release their number. She also made a point of asking how I got her number and then I thought what a crafty paprazzi reporter I'd been. This would be the start of a whole new, fabulously paid career. Two hours later, Simone seemed to be stringing me along. But by now I was off the hook and I could lay the Gisele baby to rest, along with what seemed to be her phantom pregnancy.
I was keen to go out to an air conditioned theatre and watch a movie, where I could just passively let the images wash over me and where I could de-program Gisele's glamorous shagging history from my befuddled, addled and intellectually taxed brain.
By 7.45pm I'd changed my mind and decided to stay at home and slob. Just as well I did. At 8pm, the phone rang, and the Telegraph New York correspondent called to ask if I was willing to head up to the Amazon and interview the Slovenian character who's swimming down the Amazon. One of my marvellous proposals I'd sent out. Perhaps I was yet destined to become a noble, broadsheet reporter, hacking through the jungle to get the story and file my copy for the sake of the British intellectual elite ... who apparently like to read intelligent articles about the perils of the toothpick fish that can enter the body by swimming up the penis if one urinates in the river. They can only be removed by surgery. I thought I'd better go out and stock up on mozzie spray first thing in the morning.
* Bunda is Portuguese for buttocks
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