The Reinvention of Taylor Swift
She’s left country behind, sworn off dating and built a fortress around her heart
By Josh Eells | September 8, 2014
So my brother comes home the other day," Taylor Swift says, "and he goes, 'Oh, my God – I just saw a guy walking down the street with a cat on his head.'"
As an ardent fan of ready-made metaphors, as well as of cats, Swift was excited by this. "My first reaction was, 'Did you take a picture?'" she says. "And then I thought about it. Half of my brain was going, 'We should be able to take a picture if we want to. That guy is asking for it – he's got a cat on his head!' But the other half was going, 'What if he just wants to walk around with a cat on his head, and not have his picture taken all day?'"
For Swift – four-time multiplatinum-album-maker, seven-time Grammy winner and billion-time gossip-blog subject – being famous is a lot like walking around with a cat on your head. "I can have issues with it," she says. "But at the end of the day, I can't be ungrateful, because I chose this. But sometimes – sometimes – you don't want to have a camera pointed at you. Sometimes it would be nice if someone just said, 'Hey, I think it's really cool that you have that cat on your head. I think that's interesting.'"
It's 1300 hours in the San Fernando Valley, and Project Sparrow is in full effect. In a nondescript parking lot at a soundstage in Van Nuys, California, a Blackwater-esque platoon of personal-security professionals stands at the ready. Every doorway and stairwell is guarded, and every window is blacked out. The occasion: a Taylor Swift video shoot.
In 2014, a Swift shoot requires the kind of operational secrecy and logistical complexity rarely seen outside of a SEAL raid. Before Project Sparrow – the code name chosen by the video's director, Mark Romanek – there was Project Cardinal, a multiweek mission where Swift's social-media team scoured the Web for a representative group of fans to appear in the video. When one girl posted a photo of her invitation, she was quickly uninvited, then presumably renditioned to whatever CIA black site holds Swift's enemies. (Jack Antonoff, of Bleachers and fun., who has recently co-written several songs with Swift, says that "just having her songs on my hard drive makes me feel like I have Russian secrets or something. It's terrifying.")
At the moment, Swift is in a makeup chair in her dressing room, getting false eyelashes applied. She's wearing a black miniskirt, black tights and a fuzzy pink top with a cartoon drawing of a cat, and her wavy blond hair is pinned back tight. She's five feet 10, but she looks much taller, even with her lanky legs wrapped underneath her like a pretzel twist. "I need lunch like, whoa," Swift says, and an assistant tells her there's a sushi order happening. "Oooh," she purrs. "Get a boatload."
The video is for Swift's soon-to-be-Number One single, "Shake It Off," which she'll perform for the first time at the VMAs later this summer, but which at this point only a handful of people outside the room even know exists. There are worries about spies and recording devices. "Don't even get me started on wiretaps," Swift says seriously. "It's not a good thing for me to talk about socially. I freak out." As for who might bug a Van Nuys production office on the off chance that Swift is inside: "The janitor," she says, as if naming one candidate among hundreds. "The janitor who's being paid by TMZ. This is gonna sound like I'm a crazy person – but we don't even know. I have to stop myself from thinking about how many aspects of technology I don't understand."
Swift pauses, as if weighing just how paranoid she's comfortable with sounding. Then she plows ahead. "Like speakers," she says. "Speakers put sound out . . . so can't they take sound in? Or" – she holds up her cellphone – "they can turn this on, right? I'm just saying. We don't even know."
Swift says she never feels completely safe, especially when it comes to her privacy. "There's someone whose entire job it is to figure out things that I don't want the world to see," she says. "They look at your career, they look at what you prioritize, and they try to figure out what would be the most revealing or hurtful. Like, I don't take my clothes off in pictures or anything – I'm very private about that. So it scares me how valuable it would be to get a video of me changing. It's sad to have to look for cameras in dressing rooms and bathrooms. I don't walk around naked with my windows open, because there's a value on that."
And yet, despite the DEFCON-3 level of security, in a lot of ways Swift has never felt more free. She has a new album out in October, 1989, that she's insanely excited about, because it signals her transition from a country star who likes pop to a straight-up pop star. She recently bought a luxe apartment in New York. And despite what you may have read in the gossip press, Swift hasn't been involved with a man in quite some time. She's not dating. She's not canoodling. She's not even sexting. Taylor Swift is single and loving it.
"I really like my life right now," she says. "I have friends around me all the time. I've started painting more. I've been working out a lot. I've started to really take pride in being strong. I love the album I made. I love that I moved to New York. So in terms of being happy, I've never been closer to that." Which is not necessarily the same as being happy.
There's one way into Swift's new apartment building, and much of the time it's guarded by a former NYPD officer named Jimmy, who unlocks the door for residents and visitors alike. This may be a drag for neighbors like Steven Soderbergh and Orlando Bloom, who have dropped seven figures to live at one of Tribeca's toniest addresses, but it's an unavoidable fact of life when the 24-year-old on the top floor is one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. "Most of the neighbors know what's what by now," Jimmy says, locking the door behind him. Today is a good day for Jimmy, because the elevator is working again after a brief period of being broken. "It's six floors up," he says, frowning. "And we don't travel light, if you know what I mean." I tell him I think I do know what he means, and Jimmy laughs. "The shoes alone!"
Up in the penthouse, a barefoot Swift answers the door in a periwinkle-blue sundress: "Welcome to my apartment!" In the kitchen there's an assortment of pastries from a hip downtown spot called the Smile ("They have these banana-quinoa muffins that I'm obsessed with"), and in the refrigerator are a surprising number of varieties of sparkling water. ("I have black cherry, pomegranate, blueberry, strawberry, key lime, tangerine lime . . .")
Swift shuts the fridge. "Do you want a tour?" She breezes into the living room, pointing out the fish tank filled with vintage baseballs ("I was like, 'That's so cool, they're so old!'") and some enormous scented candles ("I was like, 'That's so cool, they're so big!'"). "There's my piano," she says. "Here's my pool table that always has cat hair on it. That's my skylight." She bumps into a doorway. "That's a door that I walk into."
Swift bought this apartment about six months ago, for a reported $15 million. (Swift also bought the unit across the hall, for about $5 million; she uses it to house her security team.) It took a lot of work just to see it: It belonged to the director Peter Jackson, who had an actor friend crashing here, so the brokers didn't want to bother him much. "Sir Ian McKellen," Swift says seriously. "I think once you're Gandalf, you can always just stay in Peter Jackson's house."
Swift leads the way into one of her four guest bedrooms. "This is where Karlie usually stays," she says – meaning supermodel Karlie Kloss, one of her new BFFs, whom she met nine months ago at the Victoria's Secret fashion show. There's a basket of Kloss's favorite Whole Foods treats next to the bed, and multiple photos of her on the walls. Against another wall, there's a rack full of white nightgowns. "This is a thing me and Lena have," says Swift – meaning Lena Dunham, another recent friend. "We wear them during the day and look like pioneer women, fresh off the Oregon Trail."
Swift met Dunham in 2012, after she watched Girls and became obsessed. She went on Twitter to follow Dunham, and coincidentally saw that Dunham had just tweeted admiringly about Swift. "I was really scared she was being ironic, but I decided to follow her anyway, just in case. Within five minutes I had a direct message from her. Let me see if I still have it." She spends a minute scrolling through her phone. "I still have it! She said, 'I am so excited about the prospect of being friends with you that I added the adjective best in front of it.' 'The idea that you like my show is so thrilling, and I can't wait to lavish you with praise in person.'"
As a recent New York transplant in her mid-twenties, Swift says Girls is like her Sex and the City. "I could label all my girlfriends as Shoshannas, Jessas, Marnies or Hannahs," she says. And which would she be? "I've thought about this a lot," she says. A pause. "I'm Shoshanna."
She seems resigned to this. "Shoshanna gets excited about things, she's really girly. And when she was in a relationship that was very comfortable, she made the decision to get out and go experience new things on her own. And now she's becoming more sure of herself and taking life head-on, in a way that I can relate to. Even though I've never accidentally smoked crack at a warehouse party and run pantsless through Brooklyn." (Dunham, meanwhile, thinks Swift is more like "Hannah, minus the horrid sexual behavior. Or Marnie, if she wasn't an *******.")
Swift leads the way upstairs to her bedroom. Asleep on her massive four-poster bed is a tiny white ball of fur. "Olivia!" Swift says, scooping her up. It's her two-month old kitten, named after Olivia Benson, from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. "Hear how loud she's purring? She's a stage-five clinger, for sure." Downstairs somewhere is her other cat, Meredith, named after Meredith Grey from Grey's Anatomy. "Strong, complex, independent women," Swift says. "That's the theme."
She steps onto her patio and climbs the staircase up to the roof deck. "Careful," she says. "It's construction central." A forest of skyscrapers surrounds her; the Freedom Tower looks close enough to touch. Swift gestures to a set of planters: "Those are hydrangeas, and over there are the roses and basil and rosemary." Heading back downstairs, she passes an antique lamp with the inscription CALADIUM SEGUINUM on it. Swift took Latin in high school, but says she isn't sure what it means. (Later, I look it up. It turns out it's a homeopathic remedy for male impotence.)
For years, Swift was terrified to move to New York. "I was intimidated by it for so long," she says. But now that she's here, she loves it. She can walk down the street to get dinner, or go furniture shopping with friends in Brooklyn. Even the paparazzi are better, she says. "They don't provoke me, or ask weird questions. And a lot of them are long-lensing it – which, if you have to have paparazzi in your life, is such a better way." She likes it so much she's trying to recruit friends to move here – like her buddy Selena Gomez. "Project Selena," Swift says. "I think I can do it."
Back in the living room, Swift settles into the couch with a muffin and starts talking about her Fourth of July. She invited a bunch of friends up to Rhode Island, where she has a house in a fancy community called Watch Hill. It was raining, and the day looked like a bust, until her friend Jaime King's husband came up with the idea to buy eight Slip 'N Slides and lay them end to end like some unholy Slip 'N Slide centipede. Even with the rain, the slides still weren't slippery enough, so they got a bunch of olive oil and poured it all over themselves. ("There was a dangerous level of slipperiness," Swift says.) Later they all went to the beach, which is normally full of Swift-gawkers ("Hotel fees have doubled in the year we've been there," Swift says), but was empty that day because of the rain. That night they cooked a huge feast, with Swift assigning everyone jobs ("You make salad dressing! You chop apples for apple pie!"), and afterward they played Celebrity, the game where everyone puts a bunch of famous names in a hat and takes turns drawing one and trying to make their team guess. The game got a little heated, because one team had a lot more famous people on it, which gave them what some guests thought was an unfair advantage. (Swift: "It was like, 'You dated him! 2010!'") But in the end, everyone was appeased, and the game went on as planned. And did Swift's team win? She smiles. "Of course we won."
ve her outfit!
