FAMOUS, DESCENDING STAIRCASE
LOS ANGELES, JANUARY 20, 2000, 9:13 A.M. At the Chateau Marmont hotel, a reclusive Englishman of some celebrity sends messengers from his suite. He needs a map of the area with elevation changes. He needs a sedan, nothing flashy, maybe a Volvo. He needs a latte, a coffee, a muffin. A famous actress in a bathrobe descends the stairs -- a big name actress, though I can't recall her name. Her bulldog wears a pink zirconia necklace. She enters the garden and chats briefly with Estella Warren, who sits with two movie producers. Estella is in L.A. to take meetings on the possibility of her being an actress.

Estella Warren is a 21-year old model born in Peterborough, Ontario. Her mother works as an elementary-school principal, and until he became her manager, her father was a used-car salesman. He once sold a 1988 Pontiac Sunbird to Estella for $4,000. When Estella was 12, she moved from her parents' house to Toronto, two hours south, to train with the Canadian national synchronized-swimming team; in 1996 she won the national championship in the solo and duet categories. High school was spent living with one or another of her teammates' families and training for six hours a day. At 15 she met a guy who worked for a cellular-phone company; at 16 she moved in with him; at 17 she made her first real money modeling and bought a split-level bungalow near Toronto, which she decorated to be "the sort of suburban home I always imagined as a kid"; at 19 she was cast by Luc Besson as the new Chanel No. 5 girl; at 20, last year, she gave up the suburban dream early. "The more I stared feeling comfortable with myself alone in New York," Estella says, "the more I saw my house in Canada as something that was going to stop my progression as a human being. And I know that sounds really like I'm trying to be deep, but it's not."

If you were this big-name actress, though, none of that would matter. Just back story like anyone else's. You see Estella as you approach her table -- looking luridly bored in a pink halter top with slinky spaghetti straps, trim jeans and Puma sandals, one of which will dangle for the next two hours from a single, tanned toe. You say hello to her as if you know her, calculate her chances of ever being someone whose ass you'll have to kiss....

BRAVE NEW WORLD
MIAMI, NOVEMBER 16, 1999, 8:47 A.M. Say you were a member of the Israeli consulate in Miami. We'll call you Shlomo. Shlomo Artzi. Don't be mad. This is for journalism. Well, Shlomo, you work in a thirty-story building called New World Tower on North Biscayne Boulevard. One morning last November on your way to work, you have your first impression of Estella Warren. Six thousand three hundred square feet of her face has been unfurled across the eastern wall of the New World Tower in the form of a Perry Ellis billboard. All across the country that month, American men have similar first impressions, though not on the same scale -- there's Estella in The New York Times Magazine, baring a shoulder; there's Estella in Vanity Fair, appearing drugged with wantonness; and there she is in an open white shirt, lying supine across a Sunset Boulevard billboard.

Last year, Perry Ellis decided to make its vibe less "sleepy" and so hired a marketing guru who hired renowned photographer Bruce Weber, who in turn proclaimed Estella Warren, just 19 years old, the next Anita Eckberg, stripped her naked, draped a white shirt over her and then carpet bombed America with her image. Estella had certainly done work before this and has done plenty since, but Perry Ellis was a different phenomenon, a wholesale rollout of Estellaness to perfume the brand identity of a line of menswear.

And now as you, Shlomo Artzi, look up at the fifty-foot eyeball of Estella Warren as it come-hithers the morning rush hour, you're stricken with the particular brand of unsleepiness Estella has lent the house of Perry Ellis: To you she has parted lips, the wide cheekbones, the creamy dermis, the knowing look of the underage Eastern European farm girl gazing at you, finally, in the penultimate scene of the film. In the ultimate scene, of course, you are carted off to jail....

THE CURSE OF THE ROSEBUD LIP BALM
INTERSECTION OF BEVERLY DRIVE AND SUNSET BOULEVARD, LOS ANGELES, JANUARY 20, 2000, 12:42 P.M. If you pulled up next to her, you'd notice that, in person, Estella Warren doesn't have the wide cheekbones of Eastern European jailbait. Her features are more subtle; she has long fingers that look more experienced that the rest of her; unlike the girl in the print ads, the in-the-flesh Estella sometimes fully closes her mouth. As you unwrap your Wendy's Cheddar-Lover's bacon cheeseburger, you stare even against better judgement.

Inside the car, Estella is talking. Sometimes she comes off cagey. She's been interviewed only a handful of times and forgets which things she wants to keep secret. She lies and then slips up later, giving the impression that she may always be lying.

She prefers talking about Canada. When she lived in Canada, she was an expert fisherwoman. She hunted frogs on the banks of Lake Muskoka, pinched their spastic bodies in her wise fingers, pierced their lower jaws with hooks and trawled them for bass. When she'd catch one, she's slit it and let it bleed. When she was after muskies, she used leeches. "Leeches catch good muskie," she says. Words to live by. Canada is offered as ballast against a life that must essentially be very floaty to a 21-year-old. Canada reminds Estella about how people now are quick to judge her, the hegemony of first impressions.

"People don't know me, but they think they do," she says. "I mean, people think they have a right to know who I'm sleeping with [read: That's why I'm cagey]. And for me -- and you can even write this -- I've slept with less than all the fingers on my one hand. I just don't know that world."

Estella pauses, appears to look directly at you, the fellow in the car next to her. And then, with her finger, she applies a sheen of Rosebud salve to the vast acreage of her lips. At this point, you're a test case for the evolution of the human race. And you freeze, your Wendy's Cheddar-Lover's bacon burger oozing a greasy cheese into your lap. To be fair, Estella's administering Rosebud in an act that would probably garner an NC-17 rating were she to do it on film. This is the curse of Estella: to appear unseemly to a guy in a Hyundai Sonata at the corner of Beverly and Sunset simply by putting on lip balm. The light turns green....

HOPE IS A SLOBBERING DOG
ASPCA, 5026 JEFFERSON BOULEVARD, LOS ANGELES, JANUARY 20, 2000. 2:30 P.M. Estella has an unfurnished apartment in TriBeCa, a hotel room in L.A., and a storage facility in Canada stocked with furniture from her split-level bungalow in suburbia. She spent Christmas at her parents' and her birthday in New York and has a ticket next week for Miami. Which means that, essentially, Estella lived Nowhere.

"I flew from Paris to L.A. to Hawaii to L.A. to Jamaica to L.A. to New York to Australia. And that's ridiculous for one month. I'm putting my body through hell. What do you do on a flight for fourteen hours by yourself other than watch movies you've already seen? And you get there and you have to suddenly be whoever they want you to be in Tokyo."

Because she's never home, Estella can't have her own dog. Which is why Estella has stopped by the pound and is roughhousing with a hard-luck case named Timmy, a black pitbull mix that cops found in a crack house. Estella rubs Timmy's belly like a pro and says, "Oh yes, Timmy! Oh yes!"

If you were Timmy, and hope were a commodity measured in saliva flow, you'd be positive this woman was going to take you home and be your mommy. The ASPCA volunteer gives Estella Warren the hard sell.

"He likes you," she says. "This little yard is the only grass Timmy's seen in a year. It's so sad to put him back, isn't it, Timmy?"

Estella goes rigid. She may have some reservations about modeling, but she by no means plans to give up her residency in Nowhere. No, Timmy, sorry, this visit is strictly magazine-article conceit. Timmy is led back into his cage, the residual hope of salvation dangling from his jowls.

In the car, Estella cleans slobber from her jeans and says, "I hate to be alone. I hate, hate, hate to be alone...."

SHE IS FINISHED
THE PACIFIC, JANUARY 20, 2000, 4:17 P.M. It's foggy in Malibu, one of those freak overcast afternoons that make L.A. appear as if it's capable of foreboding or at least a measure of grumpiness. If you were Estella Warren, you'd find yourself being filmed walking the beach. You're finishing up a special on your Canadians for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Between takes the crew stops o watch a sea lion surfacing from the brine and eat a slice of Wonderbread. The cameraman says, "That's so weird." It occurs to you that the sea lion could say the same thing.

Perhaps, walking, trying to look pensive, you actually become pensive. Will the universe expand forever? Do bugs go home to sleep at night? And what about my future? There are people who say you're that next Anita Eckberg. On the other hand, there are people who have declared you over. That's the language they use: "She" is over, not "her career". Partly, Estella, you wouldn't mind being over. You wouldn't mind having a dog. You harbor a secret desire to be a writer. You also want to be an actress, a wife, the proprietor of a bed-and-breakfast in Tuscany. You express no secret desire to be a more super supermodel.

"Sometimes I feel self-indulgent," you say later as the crew breaks down equipment. You're in the beachfront house you borrowed from a friend of a friend you've never met in order to have a nice backdrop for the interview, "There's so much else that's so much more important to do on earth. And I feel that I'm an intelligent young woman with potential."

But you also know that sometimes you get a great deal of money and a sense of importance for doing something that doesn't use those qualities you're sure lie dormant in you. And that's fine. You pack your bag. You make sure the house is clean; it belongs to friends. Oops, did you say you didn't know them? Then you're back at the Chateau to begin your week of meetings, having coffee with one producer or another, watching him beam at you, inventory you, catalog you, make notes about you in his little book until it's time for you to leave, which you do, hoping he got the right impression.

Devin Friedman is a GQ staff writer.