For the last few months, Jessica Rose only dared leave her house in a huge floppy hat and sunglasses, "pretending I'm Madonna," she said. She was afraid she'd be recognized, her real identity revealed and the lonelygirl15 Web-mystery project ruined.
Fans of the YouTube phenomenon finally did track down the identity of the New Zealand-raised actress, after the project's creators confessed that the story told through brief video blog postings was fictional, not the real-life confessions of "Bree," a sheltered home-schooled girl who is possibly in some kind of danger.
It remains to be seen whether fans will stick around now that they know it's fictional -- a "new art form," as the creators called it. But in the meantime, on Day 1 of her public life as an actress, the 19-year-old Rose was put through an immersion course in being a traditional celebrity.
Thursday morning, she found herself on the fifth floor of a Sunset Boulevard high-rise, doing nine back-to-back TV interviews in the offices of Revver, the Internet company that now hosts the lonelygirl videos. Then she headed next door to CNN. Then it was on to "The Tonight Show," where she "confessed" her real identity to Jay Leno and then danced with Tucker Carlson. Later came a meeting at Hollywood's powerful Creative Artists Agency.
At 7:30 a.m., the sun was just peeking through the dense haze outside. In glass-walled offices across the Revver suite, crews from the morning news shows scrambled to set up their cameras and lights. In a small office apart from the hubbub, the lonelygirl creators, Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders and Greg Goodfried, huddled around a computer poring through the e-mail arriving by the second from fans.
The night before, they had posted a new video, in which Bree sneaks out to attend a party with her friend Daniel. Already, they have received more than a thousand comments on the new piece, including a handful that insist the recent revelations are themselves a hoax and that lonelygirl is in fact real.
Next door, in a large corner office, Jessica and her costar, Yousef Abu-Taleb, sprawled on a canvas-draped table while a photographer snapped away.
She may not be a shy home-schooled girl, but as the petite Rose waited for instructions in a purple top, jeans and black leather shoes with 2-inch heels, she seemed almost too small and fragile a figure to have provoked such a frenzy.
