‘Gossip Girl’: Dirty Pretty Things

Honestly, every inter­view, someone asks me, ‘Are you really friends with Blake?’ ” Leighton Meester says. It’s a frigid afternoon in New York, and the 22-year-old Meester, who plays Gossip Girl‘s headband-loving mean girl, Blair Wal­dorf, is sitting in a booth at La Bottega, an Italian res­taurant near Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. She’s dressed in a gray sweater and jeans and is wearing a pair of chunky black librarian glasses that would surely be mocked by the uptown snob she portrays on the show.

“No, of course you’re not friends with Blake,” says Blake Lively, who is snuggled up to Meester’s left. An en­ergetic whirl of blond hair dressed in a soft blue sweater, the 22-year-old Lively plays Serena van der Woodsen, Blair Waldorf’s best friend and the bad girl gone good(ish) who serves as Gossip Girl‘s wobbly moral compass.

“We’re very close. We’re friends,” Meester says, rolling her eyes. “I can’t even remember a reason why people would say we’re not.”

But come on, this is America. Everyone knows that when a female-heavy televi­sion show becomes a success, the rum­blings that the stars hate each other’s guts must start. Grey’s Anatomy? Those women chase one another around the op­erating table with chest saws. Desperate Housewives? Poison one another’s Botox. Sex and the City? Regularly clubbed one another with Hitachi Magic Wands.

Isn’t it just old-fashioned sexism? Gos­sip Girl‘s high-cheekboned trio of male actors – Penn Badgley, 22, Chace Craw­ford, 23, and Ed Westwick, 21 – have be­come heartthrobby sensations themselves but have largely sidestepped the gossip at­tacks. (Except for the predictable rumors that they’re all gay.)

“Of course,” Lively says. “You never hear that Ed and Penn are jealous of each other, even though they are complete frenemists.” She laughs at her freshly coined word. “Actors can be just as competitive as girls.” “

Their hair,” Meester says. “The guys are all about their hair.”

“Eyebrows, too,” says Lively, waving a fork. “And they pout their lips.”

“Ugh, I hate it,” says Meester. “I can’t watch when a guy does it.”

Still, it’s good to be a Gossip Girl. Out­side La Bottega, New York is imploding, gutted by a financial catastrophe of its own doing. Day traders are now delivering piz­zas, and real-life Upper East Side social­ites are brown-bagging it out of Hermès, too embarrassed to be seen luxury shop­ping. But like insects preserved in amber, Gossip Girls occupy a fantasy world where young people don’t blanch at $18 cocktails or $700 Christian Louboutin pumps. It’s the spring of 2007, running on repeat – New York remains a boundless, optimis­tic place, in which the Dow is topping 13,000, Bernie Madoffs collecting cli­ents and the velvet-rope VIP party never stopped. Right now, you’d rather be Blake Lively or Leighton Meester than the head of Goldman Sachs.

Not that they haven’t felt an occasional pinch. “I was in Barneys for a shoe sale,” Lively says. “And there was this pair of boots I’d wanted for a long time that were really cheap, and there was another pair in a different color, and this woman says, ‘You shouldn’t dare buy a second pair of boots in an economy like this. You should be ashamed.’ Meanwhile, her face looks like she’s just gone through a crazy wind tunnel, she’s got on big rings and a Her­mès scarf. She looked like she’d just rolled around in diamonds and gold. I was like, ‘I can’t believe you’re saying this to me.'”

For those avoiding the human race completely: Gossip Girl, based on a sharply written teen-book series of the same name by Cecily von Ziegesar, is a one-hour television drama on the CW Network executive-produced and created by Josh Schwartz and Steph­anie Savage, who previously collaborated on another teen soap, The OC. While The OC followed sun-kissed rich kids brood­ing in the California sand, Gossip Girl is set in a more volatile hornet’s nest: pri­vate school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Its characters, most from Park Av­enue privilege, attend a pair of fictitious single-sex schools, Constance Billard (for girls) and St. Jude’s (for boys), separated by a leafy courtyard. Lively’s Serena is a former queen bee who mysteriously dis­appeared from campus, only to return and find her spiteful ex-best friend, Blair (Meester), in charge. There are crested-blazer-wearing nice boys (Badgley’s Dan Humphrey), pretty boys (Crawford’s Nate Archibald) and charismatic snakes (Westwick’s Chuck Bass), precocious kid siblings (Jenny Humphrey, played by Tay­lor Momsen, and Eric van der Woodsen, played by Connor Paolo), lusty parents, a put-upon Polish maid (Zuzanna Szadkowski), a mysterious unseen narrator (a.k.a. “Gossip Girl”) and…truthfully, it doesn’t really matter. Gossip Girl may lay on the complex, Wire-thick plotlines, but fans love it for its unapologetic deca­dence: beautiful kids spending lavishly, dressing fabulously, stabbing each other in the back, romping in limousines, snort­ing coke and boozing like teenage Peter O’Tooles. Gossip Girl is conspicuous and practically subversive in its lack of mor­alizing; there are few purely bad or good characters (“No heroes, no villains” is one of Schwartz and Savage’s mottoes), no prissy sermons from parents (the folks tend to be more screwed up than the kids), no After School Special-style tidy resolu­tions. And then, because it’s 2009, every­one goes home and trashes each other on the Internet.