Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
It's not easy being a struggling artist when your dad toured with Bob Dylan.
May 10, 2000 | It's a rainy and cold Friday morning in February. Adria Petty is packing furiously for a trip to Los Angeles to raise money for and interest in her newest short film, "Issa." Her bed is a crazy mess of cats (three), Indian prints, press packets, suitcases, shoes and clothes strewn every which way. Aimee Mann croons from the stereo.
Petty's plane leaves in an hour and she's ordering in from Tea and Sympathy, the Anglophile eatery in downtown Manhattan. She throws hundreds of shirts onto her bed, searching for something that says, "Give money to a young, hip filmmaker." ("When in doubt," she says, sounding like a pull quote from a celebrity profile, "Agnès B.") You get the feeling this isn't the first time Petty has made a mad dash for a flight or, for that matter, put together a public presentation of herself. Anna Gabriel, Petty's partner on numerous projects, shows up, ready to go, packed neatly into a rolling bag.
In case you hadn't guessed, Adria Petty, filmmaker, is also Adria Petty, daughter of Tom -- a fact that Petty, 25, would like very much not to be the center of attention. Better yet, let's not discuss him at all.
Her work, she points out again and again, is her own. She doesn't want a "poor little rich girl" profile or one about "how Tom opens doors for his daughter." She's not an idiot, she points out; she knows how far her name and her background have taken her, but that "only gets your foot in the door," because without talent, she'd be ushered "right back through it." In fact, the whole line of questioning is more than a little uncomfortable.
It's impossible to be with her, as a reporter, and not constantly be struck by the paradox. The child of a rock star (read: irreverent icon), she was raised on money, celebrity, drugs, music and anti-establishment values. Now, thanks to her lineage, she has access to money, power and the media. And she wants to take that and turn it into an opportunity to be seen as an artist (read: irreverent icon) in her own right. Because while rock star may mean edgy, child of rock star means trust fund. And a trust fund kind of messes with your starving-artist image. Add to that the whole weird world of the music industry and what it must have been like to grow up in it ("I love your hand of God," Petty said, looking at the large silver hamsa around my neck. When I told her it was purchased in Israel, she said, "Oh, I loved Israel -- I was there when I was 13 and my dad toured with Bob Dylan") and you have one peculiar little package.
Petty (as well as Gabriel, Peter's daughter) has joined the ever-swelling ranks of celebrity children forging their way in the world while trying to navigate the fine line between exposure and exploitation. As Carrie Fisher once told the Los Angeles Times, she grew up as a "famous child just wanting to be normal." But she never was, nor really tried to be. And Petty is still a celebrity kid looking to stay famous, which makes it all the more ridiculous to hear her lament. She doesn't want to be written about because she's a celebrity child. How can she possibly escape it?
Petty's identity crisis began early, growing up as she did in the heartland of celebrity progeny. She was "way too eccentric for L.A.," she says without irony, noting how much she hated her private school ("I was voted most likely to forget where she went to high school"), filled with the children of people in the "biz." Hate it though she did, she acknowledges these contacts helped her later, grabbing her a lowly, yet prestigious -- as only these jobs can be -- $4-an-hour position in director Jonathan Demme's ("Beloved") office, where she "worked her ass off" as an intern. "No one wants to do things for sniveling rich kids who don't work," says Petty. In 1992, Petty moved east to attend the famously quirky Sarah Lawrence College, where Anna Gabriel was a dorm mate.
Until recently, Petty's Greenwich Village house (a peculiar little building, at once tiny in scale and huge in square footage, tucked in an alley) was filled with friends who helped her raise her much younger sister. We spend very little time explicitly discussing her father, but his presence is never absent.
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