Gawking at stars from the streets of Hollywood

I’m sipping iced green tea with pineapple infusion at a cafe on Hollywood Boulevard, waiting, with about 3,000 other people, for a moment with Jessica Biel. You can’t imagine the crowds and craziness here, an hour before the red-carpet premiere of the remake of the 20-year-old Schwarzenegger killfest titled Total Recall.

Directly across the avenue is Madame Tussauds palace of paraffin — “The Most Interactive Celebrity Experience in Hollywood” — with its terrifyingly unblinking effigies of Leo, Michael, Clooney, Chaplin, Kobe, Tupac and Shrek. Beneath my feet are the terrazzo stars of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And just down the street is the faux-Fukienese pagoda of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where Jess is going to step from her limousine and sashay inside to see the flick.

It’s a Wednesday evening, just before the sun sets over Sunset Boulevard, two blocks away. The sidewalks are jammed with gawkers, hawkers, tourists, fawners, hoboes, geeks and bums. There are Japanese girls with pastel hair; ragged panhandlers with cavernous eyes; hundreds of Chinese mainlanders gaggled like geese by flag-waving, whistle-blowing guides. Shills for tours of film stars’ mansions hunch like hyenas, waving flyers in the faces of the mob.

Delirious with our proximity to greatness, we trample the inlaid tributes to the once famous and now forgotten. On this side of the street are Dennis Weaver, George Gobel, and Carole Lombard, the Jessica Biel of the 1930s. Elton Britt, an Arkansas yodeller whom my father especially liked just after the war, is immortalized directly in front of my chair. But who else remembers Elton Britt in the year 2012?

The masses stride on, walking all over Aretha Franklin, Veronica Lake, Christina Aguilera, the Munchkins, Godzilla, Kermit the Frog and Tennessee Ernie Ford.

A choir of screams from somewhere between Hooters and the Scientology building announces an arrival at the Total Recall opening. I teeter on Bette Midler on tippy toes, but I am so far away that I cannot tell if the man emerging from the limo is Colin Farrell or the third assistant director.

Now a woman walks up and tries to sell me a window seat on her bus. At Kalashnikov velocity, she rattles off the names of the immortals whose homes — or at least whose tall fences — we will see: Katy Perry, Ryan Gosling, Miranda Cosgrove, Kristen Stewart, Mila Kunis, Sofia Vergara, a couple of dozen more. (She might have said Tyler Perry instead of Katy, but who cares as long as they’re famous?)

“Why do we love celebrities?” I ask the tout.

“People want to be like them,” she answers. “People want to be their best friend, be around them, be in their presence. I tell people that the stars are just like us. They may make more money and live in nicer houses, but they’re just like us.”

The barker turns out to be a long-aspiring country singer named Shellee-ann Kellee, trolling for tourists between gigs. (“A combination of Las Vegas, Nashville, and Broadway, Ms. Kellee put on a show that would make nightclub acts Sinatra and Minnelli bow with pride,” a reviewer wrote a dozen years ago.)

Some nights, Kellee performs at the Roosevelt Hotel, right here in the heart of Hollywood. But most days, she drives a van around the hills, seeking out the shacks of the chosen few who made it much bigger than she.

Finally, it is time. I cross the boulevard and shoulder my way to the courtyard of Grauman’s, with its famous hand- and foot- and hoofprints impressed in mid-century cement.

A Cadillac Escalade rolls up. My Jessica is inside in a pastel pink gown and a pearl necklace that Arnold himself couldn’t lift.

“Get in! I’ve been looking all over for you!” she orders.

Yeah, that’s actually from the trailer to the movie. But I swear, she was looking right at me.