The secret life of Cory Kennedy

In the summer of 2005, when she was 15 but not yet famous, Cory Kennedy went to a Blood Brothers concert at the El Rey Theatre. She remembers what she was wearing--black leg warmers, beat-up black Converse sneakers and a canary-yellow Lacoste mini-dress that she'd had to beg her mother to buy her. It was "back in the day," at the end of ninth grade, when she was still going by her full name, Cory Kennedy-Levin. She was going to a lot of concerts then, and at this one, a guy named the Cobra Snake saw her and took her picture for his hipster-party photo website.

In the non-Internet world, the guy's real name is Mark Hunter, and the scary nickname was mostly wishful thinking. Bright, friendly and energetic, Hunter was also young. A year or two's difference, and Cory might have recognized him as the 2003 Associated Student Body vice president at Santa Monica High School. After graduation, he had discovered a knack for taking pictures of L.A. nightlife, and he had been posting them for free on thecobrasnake.com, which was becoming a fairly popular website. Hunter, then 20, especially liked the El Rey because all sorts of interesting people went there, from movie stars to posses of L.A. teenagers like the pretty girl in yellow he saw that night out on the town.

That was how it started. That was the first flicker of what would become the--What? Phenomenon? Moment? Cautionary tale? Success story? Footnote?--of Cory Kennedy.

If it's hard to characterize, it may be because hers is a dispatch from uncharted cultural waters. Never before have media, technology and celebrity collided with adolescence at such warp speed. Never before has it been so easy for, say, a middle-class kid with a curfew and no driver's license to rise to international fame almost without her parents' knowledge.

Put it this way: By the time Cory Kennedy's mother realized that her child had become, in the words of Gawker.com, an "Internet It Girl," the Web was riddled with photos of Cory posing, eating, dancing, shopping, romping at the beach, looking pensive and French-kissing one of the (adult) members of the rock band the Kings of Leon. She had European fan sites. She had thousands of people signing on to her MySpace pages. She had fashion bloggers dissecting her wardrobe ("a cross between the Little Match Girl and the quintessence of heroin chic," one wag called her taste in fashion). She had people watchers from the Netherlands to Japan speculating about her life story. (Was she a junkie? A refugee from Hyannis Port?) She had designers begging her to wear their clothes and deejays offering her money to show up at their nightclubs. She had invitations to party with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.