Move over, Kevin Bacon — it’s six degrees of Spencer Pratt
The former reality star can be connected to O.J., Kardashians and even the Queen-to-be
Things just got real.
Mere hours after O.J. Simpson was released from prison last Sunday, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt became parents of their first child, a baby boy born Gunner Stone. As far as signs go: like seeing 11:11 on the collective clock.
For if O.J. symbolizes the moment when America itself became a reality show, the gavel-to-gavel cov- erage of his trial setting the dam-break for the election of Donald Trump (one of whose weddings Simpson once attended), and also giving us a bottomless elevator-drop into Kardashian-world (the surname itself becoming etched when Robert Kardashian appeared as a supporting character to the defendant), Heidi and Spencer — the tragicomic couple from the mid-aughts pseudosoap The Hills — were among those to first ace the reality game.
Regarding the made-in-L.A. “Speidi” — a celebrity relationship portmanteau applied to the duo and one that’s bizarrely endured past others of the era, like Bennifer and even Brangelina — it’s a case of this: whether you watched them or you didn’t, know them or only sorta, they were both portents of a culture we’re all in knee-deep, consciously or not.
Playing out their lives back then — but in real-not-real way like any random 16-year-old today on Snapchat or, heck, any 40-year-old curating their lives in visual form on Instagram — Speidi stumbled back into the public square of relevance earlier this year when news broke of Montag’s pregnancy, some nine years into the couple’s marriage.
Not only did the couple nab their first US Weekly cover in years, but our man Pratt has emerged as a kind of swami of celebrity itself: showing up on podcasts galore and even earning a story in the venerable New Yorker that posited, “How the former villain of The Hills became a commentator on fame culture in the age of Trump.”
The 34-year-old has become, yup, the proverbial goldfish to talk about the particularities of H2O. In some cases yapping about politics (during the James Comey hearings, Pratt tweeted, “The producers gotta give this cast some more drinks”) and, in others, on the changing celebrity economy: He and Montag had assumed they could live comfortably off paparazzi photos after The Hills folded but, as social media exploded, the value of those declined and boom!
Why would Star buy a paparazzi photo when they could use a celebrity’s own Insta-selfie for free?
The gestation of their coming heir —“the world’s first unborn social media star,” as the Guardian snorted this past summer — spurred much in-on-the-joke commentary.
Showcasing his signature surfer drawl and a cavernous smirk, Pratt said in one interview, “I don’t want a name that’s on Google,” confirming that some names were automatically eliminated because they didn’t have social media mojo or the appropriate “handles” weren’t available.
“I’m gonna teach this kid how to Snap when they’re born,” he said. “I would just like my baby to be a professional content maker.”
The extent to which he’s being serious or wry — possibly both — is classic Pratt, flowing effortlessly from the “villain” role he blithely played on the MTV-enabled show that made his name.
Following a group of vaguely employed pretty things living and loving in a pre-recession America, the show fixated on the “emotional warfare between best friends Lauren and Heidi,” as one critic described it at the height of its popularity (triple the number of people that watch the Kardashians on TV now), and was filmed with a kind of “Antonioni-esque plotlessness and dreamy cinematography.”
If nothing else, Pratt’s ominous six-degrees separation has become a thing to behold in retrospect. Who else is going to connect you to Gigi Hadid, Caitlyn Jenner and even Meghan Markle? Move over, Kevin Bacon.
First things first: In 2004, while only a USC student and inspired by the early success of the reality show The Osbournes, a pre- Hills Pratt went, on a whim, to Fox to pitch a show called Princes of Malibu with his childhood pal Brody Jenner, whose dad was the then-Bruce Jenner and whose mom, Linda Thompson, was at the time wed to Grammy-winning impresario and songwriter David Foster.
The show got picked up and bull’s-eyed the zeitgeist, but only six episodes actually made it to air, primarily because Thompson (once the girlfriend of Elvis Presley) had decided to split from Foster.
Fast-forward a few years and Bruce would go on to being Stockholm syndromed by Keeping up With the Kardashians (with his then-bride Kris Jenner) and David would go on to do some time on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, alongside his latest (now not) wife, Yolanda Foster, whose daughters Gigi and Bella Hadid got their first exposure on that Housewives franchise before exploding into supermodel-dom. You still with me? Pratt’s reach into the world we live in today extends to the fact that his sister, Stephanie Pratt, who starred on The Hills with him and with whom he’s always had a prickly relationship, went on to join a ridiculously popular U.K. answer to their original show, titled Made in Chelsea.
On that show, as it happens, she was linked with resident bad boy Spencer Matthews. Yes, another Spencer. One whose brother, unbelievably, is the same rich dude, James Matthews, who married Pippa Middleton earlier this year, Pippa being the sister of the woman who’s married to the future king of England, William, whose brother, Harry, is romantically entangled with a certain Suits actress. It’s a small Speidi world after all. Having kept his media persona going by continuing to extrapolate on his longtime interest in crystals — Pratt sells kits starting at $25 — and, more recently, by rebranding himself as a hummingbird aficionado (he nurtures some 100 of them, offering up freshest nectar every day), the reality guru’s biggest legacy perhaps is his hustle. A wear-on-his-sleeve hustle that is everywhere now. And is forever embodied in his just-in baby.
Glory be to Gunner.