Life of a star: Go to a party, and get paid for it

updated 2:42 p.m. ET July 1, 2009

NEW YORK - By day, Lori Levine's all girl from Long Island, her head full of Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, Kim Kardashian and the Shiny Toy Guns as she holes up in her office with a smart young staff and a pooch named Sukie.

By night, she's all rock 'n' roll, working a runway at the Hard Rock Cafe having "wrangled" said celebrities for the Power of Leather party, making sure they don't fall off their stilettos, experience a wardrobe malfunction or otherwise screw up in front of the cameras.

Reggie Bush and Kardashian show up 30 minutes late, leaving Levine to work her BlackBerry like a steely pro, never taking her eyes off the staircase until they arrive. She reassures Bush, the private NFL star, he doesn't have to speak.

Levine, 38, commands fees of $10,000 to $25,000 from corporate giants and high-profile charities for the talent booking and brokering services her Flying Television company provides. Through Levine, her clients sometime pay the famous five and six figures for walking through the door, not to mention pricey swag, transport, per diems and lots of other things they ask for this side of the law.

But she's that and more: event planner, publicist, brand marketer through her boutique firm of a decade. That's a lifetime for some in show business. Not bad for the daughter of a fire claims adjuster from Roslyn, N.Y.

"I've actually had to spend a lot of time disciplining myself on my BlackBerry," Levine said. "I used to never be someone who'd shut it off at night, ever. And then I got to a point where I was like, `OK, that's enough of that.' I've had to be careful. My father was a complete workaholic and had triple bypass surgery and three heart attacks, and still worked from his hospital bed until the day he died."

Celeb climate has heated up in recent years
Taming of her BlackBerry aside, the former Conan O'Brien talent booker and Lifetime television producer works 14 hours a day plus as she trots from New York to Los Angeles, Las Vegas to South Beach, Montauk to Dubai serving her clients.

When she's not wrangling celebrities to show up at parties, film festivals and charity fashion shows, Levine turns her attention to other clients. There's popchips and Nickelodeon's SpongeBob and Bethenny Frankel, the Real Housewife of New York who's trying to reach beyond her best-selling "Naturally Thin."

She does it with an electronic Rolodex of 14,000 contacts and counting, including her recent score of Beyonce's e-mail address after one of the singer's Madison Square Garden shows.

It's a sucker's bet that without Levine and the likes of Levine, fame today might look and feel hugely different, perhaps more like the innocent "Breakfast at Tiffany's" block print of Audrey Hepburn that Levine picked up at Ikea for $75 and has hanging above her desk.

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Levine recalls her early days when the stakes began creeping higher for the corporate world, and the corporate world came a callin' for help with its hip factor.

"I could see there was a change in the climate of the media and all of a sudden everything became acutely about celebrity, celebrity, celebrity," Levine said. "At these hoity-toity events where you had seen a ton of press they were saying, `Well, if John F. Kennedy Jr. shows up it'll be great but if he doesn't there's nothing to write about.'"

Kit Yarrow, a professor of psychology and business at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, cites the overwhelming choices consumers face for the influence of celebrity to sell products.

"Celebrity endorsements work and that's why businesses are willing to pay big bucks to get their clothes on the right backs, their food in the right mouths and their equipment in the right hands," she said. "This is especially important today as consumers spend less time with words and more time with images."

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