What's life really like for a celebrity's personal assistant?

IT'S not all glamorous parties and rubbing shoulders with the stars. Rita Tateel reveals what life is really like as a celeb's PA: lonely, full of pressure, and sometimes downright nasty.

Anne Hathaway played the quintessential A-lister PA in The Devil Wears Prada.

IF YOU think the life of a celebrity's personal assistant is all glitz and glamour, think again.

Stuck on the sidelines of big parties and red-carpet events, it can be an around-the-clock cycle of loneliness and high-pressure ... sometimes with a nasty boss to boot.

Rita Tanteel is one of the founders of the Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants, a group set up to provide support for celeb PAs, who are apparently in desperate need of a little group therapy every now and then.

She told the New York Times the job can be an isolating existence.

"Well, by its very nature, the operative word being "personal" for a celebrity personal assistant, the position is very isolating," she says.

"The U.P.S. guy and the pool guy become your best friends, because you really don't have a lot of interaction with other people, except the people related to the household."

She says celebrities expect their help to be on-call 24/7, and sometimes the work environment is abusive.

"When we hear that kind of thing is going on, as friends we try to advise people in ways that they can set certain limits that won't get them fired, but will still set up some respectful kind of communication," she says.

"That said, there are certain celebrities who, no matter what, are simply mean, evil people, just like in any industry. But word does get around. People do know who are the screamers, who are the difficult ones to work with, and those people tend to have a revolving door of assistants."

She says anyone interviewing for a job as a PA to the stars should ask how many other assistants the celebrity has had in the past year.

In some ways, the assistant's closeness to their famous boss gives them the upper hand, especially in negotiating limits.

"Celebrities do learn to trust and rely on you so much that if you're not around, some celebrities are totally lost. They don't know what to do, They don't know how to accomplish certain tasks that are everyday matters for you and me." she says.

Oh please elaborate with hilarious examples.

"They may not know how much postage is; how to put a stamp on an envelope; how to mail it. And the bigger the star, the more they rely on their celebrity assistant to handle things."

So how about the perks? There's the world travel, but Rita says even on vacation, you're on the clock.

"Some of them talked about White House visits and meeting the president. These are experiences of life that an assistant to a celebrity will get that the average person on the job somewhere else would not," she says.

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