From a frightening encounter with a “Rocky IV” villain to saving Johnny Carson from an autograph hound, St. Joseph resident Julee Laurent had a slew of celebrity encounters while working for Wolfgang Puck at his famous Spago restaurant in Los Angeles.
Decades later, Laurent is long-removed from the LA lifestyle. She has spent the last two decades working as a freelance journalist in southwest Michigan, and also owns local marketing company Think Tank Marketing.
She has, however, compiled her most memorable stories into a new book, A seat with the A-List: Stories from working at the original Spago.
The book is currently available for purchase on Amazon, and an official release party is scheduled for Friday, Jan 27 at Waterfront House of Framing & Fashion downtown St. Joseph.
Ahead of the official release, we sat down with Laurent to talk more about her book, the Hollywood life and lessons learned from her time seating the stars:
On ending up in Los Angeles:
When I finished college, I had a friend who said ‘come on out to LA I’m working for this guy named Lawrence Bender and Quentin Tarantino’ – and this is before they were really big, you know, and I went out there and thinking I was gonna work in that office, but it was horribly abusive. This guy, Lawrence Bender, was so mean. … Long story long – eventually I got hired at Spago and this book Chronicles the four and a half years that I worked there. It was quite an adventure.
On the book origins:
I had been telling a friend of mine a story about how I thought Bridget Nielsen was gonna kick my butt one night. I really thought she was gonna beat me up for giving her a bad table – which is chapter one. Then, I started to remember all the stories from the book. There’s a night that I saved Johnny Carson from a autograph hound. Michael Jackson and Madonna came in for Oscar night one night.
There’s the night that one of our hostesses tried to hand Stevie Wonder a menu, not realizing he was blind. Like there are all these little moments that I kind of had in my head that I wanted to write out.
On the celebrity whirlwind:
That working environment, it’s really intense. You know, you’re at the biggest Hollywood restaurant coming off of the eighties into the early nineties when fame was just really such a massive deal. These were some big personalities and some big celebrities, and working for Wolfgang Puck, you had to be on your ‘A’ game. You had to manage this on a nightly basis.
We’d have people that would come from The National Enquirer come try to give us money just to be informants and stuff. All the little things that swirl around working in this restaurant was one of the reasons I wanted to write this– just to kind of encapsulate just what it was all about and what it felt like.
On Wolfgang Puck:
He’s quite an amazing person to work for. I only realize it in retrospect how he really had his game on lock. He knew every single thing that was going on in that restaurant. He was the first to walk in, the last to leave. Just a great spirit, great energy, but also that Austrian toughness that he had. He’s the reason that I’m not a cheap date.
On being starstruck:
I was in the back of the restaurant and I just felt something had happened in the restaurant and I turned and walked to the front an and just Donald Sutherland standing there. The energy that these huge celebrities had and the way they commanded a room of other celebrities with big energies was just so mind blowing.
You stop being starstruck after a little a point in time. Then, when you think you’re not starstruck anymore, somebody will come in that you always wanted to see or meet, and then you’re starstruck all over again. But you can’t show it. Actually, if you show it, you get fired.
On rumors:
What I really learned is to take people at face value while you’re talking to them. Don’t believe any lies. You know, our society is filled with rumors about people – even in small towns, you hear somebody talking about somebody else or’ I heard this or I heard that.’ For me, after working there, I know I never believe anything until I see it myself. I think helped me really meet some really cool, really real people.
On life lessons:
One thing I loved about Wolfgang was even though we hooked up these celebrities with these beautiful tables at a moment’s notice, if somebody has was from Wisconsin that had booked six weeks in advance, they still got treated with the same kindness and the same respect because that’s what Wolfgang demanded – because they were coming to eat his food. …
I think something that translated into my regular daily life. Everybody should be treated with dignity and respect, no matter if they are a big CEO or a movie star or you know, somebody that you meet that’s just slinging away at life.
You know, we’re all doing time on this planet together, so we need to treat each other with kindness.
