Why the beautiful cast of television's most sexily subversive show, Gossip Girl, may be the last people in America living the fabulous life.
By Jason Gay

Honestly, every interview, someone asks me, "Are you really friends with Blake?" Leighton Meester says. It's a frigid afteroon 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, and Italian restaurant near Manhattan's Meatpacking District. She's dresses in a gray sweater and jeans and is wearing a pair of chunky balck librarian glasses that would surely be mocked by the uptwon 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. And energetic whirl of blond hair dresses in a soft blue sweater, the 22-year-old Lively plays Sererna van der Woodsen, Blair Waldorf's best friend and the bad girl gone good(ish) who serves as Gossip Girl's wobbly moreal 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 televison 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? Posion 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 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-baggind it out of Hermes, too embarrased 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 Madoff's 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 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 gone through a crazy wind tunned, she's got on big rings and a Hermes scarf. She looked like she's 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 sharpy written teen-book series of the same name by Cecily con Ziegesar, is a one-hour television drama on the CW Network executive-produced and created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, who previously collaborated one 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 honert'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), precious kid sibling (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 conspicious 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 trashed each other on the Internet.


For all the hype about fashion, drugs and sex, it's technology that truly defines Gossip Girl. There have been plenty of shows about the idle rich, and almost as many stylized drams about adolescent angst: Beverly Hills, 90210, My So Called Life and The OC, to name a few. But while Gossip Girl's characters suffer through the same teenage rituals - heartbreak, pretty feuds, college-acceptance panic - they do it with a thumb pressed to a keypad. On the show, "Gossip Girl" is the name of an anonymously written website that dishes on the daily scandals at Constance Billard and St. Jude's. Its authorship is a great mystery. Everyone leaks to Gossip Girl via text message - who's stepping out on Serena, who might share a half brother, who smoked has in the courtyard. Gossip Girl adheres to the observer's paradox of modern teenage life: If it isn't blogged or texted about, it didn't happen.


But technology also partly explains why Gossip Girl is not a conventional television hit. And average episode attracts about 3 million Nielsen viewers, roughly a quarter of the audience that watches Jennifer Love Hewitt connect with the beyond in Ghost Whisperer - no one's idea of a sexy show. CW executives blame Gossip Girl's ratings anemia on an antiquated system that doesn't account for the millions watching it in groups, online or downloading episode from iTunes, where it routinely sits at Number One. "We'd wake up in the morning and look at the ratings and say, 'Wow, that's pretty low,'" says Schwartz, a Providence, Rhode Island, native who launched The OC when he was just 26 and oversees Gossip Girl with Savage long-distance from Los Angeles. "But then you'd hear people talk about the show and you'd think, "This is weird.' The reaction to the show feels much larger than the audience."


The truth is you're either in or you're out with Gossip Girl. If you're out, you're out: These beautiful kids might as well be speaking Mandarin. But if you're in, you're crazy in - wearing out your exclamation key live-blogging episodes, creating syrupy song tributes on YouTuve, and wasting hours ruminating on Chuck and Blair, and what if total psychobitch Georgina Sparks returns at the ends of this season and terrorizes Serena... The drama goes on and on. The mania for Gossip Girl isn't measurable by ratings - it's more like a hypoxic obsession.


No one appreciates this more than its stars, most of whom moved to New York en masse in the summer of 2009, and, according to Lively, "live whithing a five-block radius of one another" in downtown Manhattan. They have become part of a meta social experiment: beautiful young people living in New York, playing beautiful young people living in New York on TV. "Where the show ends and reality beings can be very blurry," admits Schwartz.
"I remember going to the set one day, and this really big guy, about six feet fice, comes up to me, and I thought, 'I don't remember a character like that in the script,'" says Jessica Szohr, 24, a former deparment-store model from Wisconsin who plays Nate's on-off hipster girlfriend, Vanessa Abrams, on the show. "And he says, 'I'm your security guard.' I'm like, "What?' And we turned the corner, and there were hundreds of little girls."
"I was so shocked by it," says Lively. "These 12-year-old girls hitting on our cast members. I remember one walked up to Penn and was like, 'Hey, you wanna come over to my house later?' That was before they were in any of these teen magazines. The guys were like, 'What. Is. Happening?' It was really instant, a whirlwind."


Those real-life, breathless New York gossip girls crash the set every day Gossip Girl films outdoors. They travel in giggly packs, poking their heads out from behind cameras like meerkats, desperate for a glimpse of Blair or Serena and the ultimate validation: their own teenage lives, glamorized for TV.
Not that they consider Gossip Girl a literal rendering. "Parents think, 'Oh, my God, this is what my daughter's life is like?'" one young private-schooler, Anne, says at location shoot of Madison Avenue one morning. "But no one goes out partying like that." One of Anna's friends puts it better: "No one's that tall."
Just a few yards away, Meester stands on 73rd Street, in a maroon hat, checkered jacket, red Isabella Adams handbag and snappy pair of Pout La Victoire wingtip heels. The girls whiplash around to look.
"That's not her."
"That's the body double."
"No, that's her."
A gasp fills the cold air. The Queen B herself. Seen in her curls and stylish couture, Meester looks born to play an Upper East Side socialite-to-be. But her ascension from unknow to Gossip Girl reads like and edgy, improbable fairy tale.
"It's a pretty cool story," Meester says during an interview at lunch. In person, she is casual and upretentious, far more downtown and droll than the highstrung Blair ("Leighton's a guy's girl," says Crawford. "She can really hang out"). The only trace of her privileged character is a heart-shaped ring she wears that belongs to Blair; she keeps it on, she says, because she's terrified of losing it.


As child, Meester had suspected there was something unusual about her birth. She's heard stray whispers of conversations from relatives over the years, but no one had ever said anything explicitly until one say at Meester's elementary school in the Gulf Coast resort town of Marco Island, Florida.
"We were all talking, and this girl is like, 'I know something about you,'" Meester recalls. "So she takes me into the bathroom, and she says it: 'You were born in jail.'"
"I looked at the girl, and I literally was like, 'Fuck you!" Meester says, laughing. "I didn't even know what it mean. 'Fuck you!' The next time I saw my mom, I was like, 'Was I born in jail?'"
Technically, she was not. Meester's mother, as well as her aunt and grandfather, were arrested as part of a marijuana smuggling ring in the carly 1980s. Federal prosecutors charged that the group conspired to smuggle 1,200-pound shipments of marijuana into the country from Jamaica. Meester's father also served time for possession. Her mother, Connie, was sentenced to 10 years at a federal prison in Texas - at the time, she was pregnant with Leighton.


"She did serve part of her sentence while pregnant with me," Meester says. But when Connie was ready to give birth, she was moved to a halfway house and delivered Leighton at a hospital in April 1986. After three months, Connie returned to prison, and Leighton went to live with her grandmother. Connie would later be released after serving a total of 16 months.
"It's exciting stuff that should be in a movie," Meester says. "And she was like, my age when she was doing it." Meester and her mother remain close. "She's a very stron woman. She was able to be there for me, and she shaped me into the person I am. She's been honest with me about everything.
"It makes me not judge people, especially not for their past," Meester continues. "Or their parents' pasts. A lot of people assume that their parents don't have pasts, but I know a great deal about mine."


Meester's parents, who went into real estate after their incarcerations, divorces when she was six. She shuttled between living with her mom and her dad, and began acting at a local playhouse in Marco Island. A break came when Meester was 10, when her mother arranged a visit with a talent agent scouting for modeling and acting productions in New York. "It's so weird. If I see a 10-year-old now, I'm like, 'Baby!'" Meester says. "But I guess I was ready in a weird way." Soon after, she and her mother and two brothers moved to New York.
"We moved to a place called Park Terrace," Meester says. "We imagined it was going to be fancy - a park, and a terrace, you know? But it was really scary, There were dead mice. You'd open a closet and you'd be afraid there was a body in there."


The Meesters would move to a string of New York apartments, ranging from the Upper West Side to downtown Manhattan to a one-room studio they all shared in the West Village. ("We didn't know how long we were going to stay, or what we were going to do," says Meester.) Connie, by then trying her hand at writing screenplays, made money waitressing. Even then, Meester was acutely aware of class differences. "I remember having my friends from school over to out little apartment, and my mom made it all nice, and got all this nice food," Meester says. One of the girls who came invited Meester to her family's house in Connecticul. "I go there, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God.' It was, like a 40 bedroom estate."


After a brief attempt at parochila education ("Me and Catholic school did not mix. I had to wear a bra and loafers - I just hated it"), Meester enrolled in the Profesional Children's School, which specializes in teaching show-business kids, and won parts in commercials and made a brief appearance as a murder victim's friend on Law & Order.
When Meester was ready for high school, the clan placked up again - this time to L.A., where Leighton attended Hollywood High, and later, Beverly Hills High (When asked where she lived, Meester says, "You know, the slums"). By now, parts were coming - TV shows like 7th Heaven and 24. Later, she'd make a horror-movie spoof, Dirve Thry, with her future co-star Badgley. "We playes stoner friends," Meester says.
When Meester auditioned for the part of Blair on Gossip Girl in early 2006, the casting directors were unconvinced. "They said I was too kind and sweet to play this character," she says. There was another problem, Meester was blond. "They were like, 'Be bitchy and nice, ugly and pretty, young and old, stupid and smart, innocent and slutty, blond and brunette. Can you be all those things?' she recalls. When the producers asked her to read the part of Serena, she refused.
"Leighton said, 'I am Blair - I know this girl,'" says Savage.
"Sometimes, no matter how much energy you put in to get a part, you're not going to get it," says Meester. "But this was mine. It felt like mine. So much of me was ready to get this part and move to New York. I'd passed through any bullshit that had happened in my life."


Meester won the role, and while Lively's Serena grabbed much of the early hype, Blair Waldorf has emerged as the show's sharp-edged sould. Huffing around in her curls and pumps, Blair is flurry of privileged energy, but Meester has infused her with a vulnerability that elevates her beyond the usual TV shrew. Blair takes pleasure in hazing underclassmen wanna-be's (her scenes on the school steps with her skirt-weearing acolytes are some of Gossip Girl's best), but behind the steel is a fragile young woman who covets the things most girls want: attentive parents, a good college and a boyfriend who returns her texts. (Meester's own boyfriend, actor Sebastian Stan, has recurring role on Gossip Girl as troublemaker named Carter Baizen, and pals around with Crawford and Westwick.)


Meester appreciates the irony of her playing an Upper East Site princess - it's a transformation so Capra-esque, Frank Capra might have turned it down.
"It's shaped me," Meester says of her back stoyr. "I don't want to do drugs, I don't want to have to start over a million times. I want to have an abundance of good things in my life, and I want it to spread out evenly I don't want it to just come and go.
"It could come off as very corny, but I just feel every day is a blessing," she continues. "I could have turned out to be a completely different person. Miracles happend all the time. It might not be your destiny right in front of you, but it could be your children's destiny, and that's how my mom feels."


Unlike Meester, Blake Lively comes from a Burbank, California, family with deep roots in show business. Her father, Ernie, is a working actor with the face of a cop, who's been in everything from the Dukes of Hazzar TV show to Turner & Hooch; her mother, Elaine, manages and teaches child actors - and her four siblings all act. Still, Blake resisted the trade. "It would have been so obvious," she says. Her life was hardly glitzy. "Burbank is a small town in a big city," she says. "I was never friends with young celebrities or celebrities' kids or anything like that." A highlight of her early adolescence, she says, was sneaking into a birthday party for Aaron Carter, the kid brother of Backstreet Boy Nick Carter. "There was a point when she became Baby Spice," recalls Lively's brother Eric, 27. "She'd only take off the Baby Spice outfit to wash it."


Growing up, Lively dreamed of attending Stanford University. She describes a rigoruous academic life that resembles that of Tracy Flick, the Type-A student Reese Whiterspoon played in Election: student governmet, AP classes, chori, cheerleading. (She's later turn down a role in Mean Girls because of a commitment to cheerleading camp, Eric says.) When Lively was 15, Eric absconded with his sister for a monthlong European vacation. "We went to London, Paris, Rome, Florence, Cologne, Brussels," she says. Every day, Eric would nudge Blake her future. "He'd say to me, 'What do you want to do for a living='" Lively says, "I would dread lunch every day because I knew he was going to ask me that."


Within a year, Lively was out on auditions, and not long after, she landed the part of the soccer-playing, soccer-coach-tempting Bridget in the tween hit The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ernie Lively played Bridget's father). In addition to a Pants sequel, Lively has recently starred in smaller films like Elvis & Anabelle (with Mary Steenburgen) and the upcoming Private Lives of Pippa Lee (with Alan Arkin), in which she plays a young woman on a path to a nervous breakdown.


At first, Lively didn't want to be a Gossip Girl. "I was skeptical," Lively says of Schwartz and Savage's intial pitch. "I thought, 'I don't want to do a TV show, because you have to commit six years of your life to one character.'"


But the Pants sisterhood had been pushing Lively for the job. Schwartz and Savage noticed on Web message borad that teenage girls thought Lively would be perfect for Serena. The producers did the hard sell, assuring her that Gossip Girl wouldn't devolve into a ridiculous sopa opera. "Then Stephanie told her what her wardrobe would be," Schwartz says, "and she was in."


Lively knows that Serena is her defining character. "Serena's a lot lot like me," she admits. In the books, Serena is an uptown It girl, but Lively's franted her melloweb, California vibe (Schwartz admits one of his early concerns was whether Lively "couldn't get her New York on"). In her relentless showdowns with Blair, her on-off relationship with Dan Humphrey and even at the end of the first season, when revealed that she'd left a young man dying after a drug-fueled romp (#Really tolling," Lively recalls of shooting the scene), Serena's relatable, or as relatable as you can be with a billionaire stepbrother and winter breaks dancing in Argentina. Says Lively, "I make Serena a little more goofy, just because that's how I am." (She also wears more Chanel," says Meester.)


"I used to try to get Blake to drink with me - when I was 22 and she was 16. I was like, 'If you ever want to drink, you should do it with me,'" says Eric Lively. "But she's always been a good girl. I keep waiting for her to get a big ego or not call back, and it hasn't happened yet."


The rise of Gossip Girl has made Lively a shiny target for the supermarket tabloids, the wavering veracity of which she doesn't yet seem to mind. "I'd much rather have them make up lies than tell them the truth, because that's the one thing I have," she says, though the truth about Lively is that she's been seeing co-star Badgley for more than a year. Meanwhile, Gossip Girl has elevated lively to a style-icon status unseen since Sarah Jessica Parker strapped on her Manolo Blahniks for Sex and the City. "I'm shocked when I get a handwritten note from Giorgio Armani," she says, before adding that her recent Vogue cover "feels fake." "When I look at it, it's like. "That's not a real Vogue." Lively flashes her Southern California smile. "I feel like I'm fooling everyone."


"Can I get another monkey, please?"


It's creeping past 10 p.m. on a Monday, and the Gossip Girl testosterone pack - Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford and Ed Westwick - is buddled amid the ruins of three turkey burgers at the Half Kind, a cozy literary-crowd pub in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. ("We could have met at Rawhide," Badgley cracks, referring to the fabled gay dive bar down the street.)


The drink of choice is Golden Monkey, a grassy Belgian-style beer with a not unnoticeable alcohol volume.
"Don't disrespect the Golden Monkey," Crawford says.
"Nine point five percent, man." Westwick says, holding the beer aloft.


A male customer at the bar begins to walk around the Gossip Guys' table silently, as if circling prey. He hovers for half a minute before speaking up.
"Sorry to interrupt, but I actually watch your guys' show a lot," he says. "My girlfriend turned me on to the show. I just wanted to say congrats on everything, You guys do a great job."
Crawford stands up to shake the guy's hand. A round of "Thank yous" follows. When the dude leaves, the Gossip Guys say this sort of encounter is typical.
"Yeah, I don't think he was talking about his girlfriend," Westwick says.
"That's the way most guys are," says Badgley, "Oh, yeah, my girlfriend..."
"It's a big cover," says Crawford.


Tonight's, there's some nostalgia for the early days of Gossip Girl, before anyone cared who they were daiting or Perez Hilton mocked them for "gayface". It's bee almost two years since the cast arrived in New York, moving into the Gramercy Park Hotel ("It was kind of summer camp." says Savage) with little hint of the phenomenon to come.
"I feel a deep love for each of these people," Westwick annonunces. "Almost as if we were orpahns who ended up at an orphanage. There's something Dickensian about it. If I'm drunk and I'm about to fall asleep in the street, I can knock on Penn's door and he'll let me in."
"Actually," Badgley says. "I'll just spoon hin in the gutter."
Westwick howls. "Exactly!" he says. "Throw a rug over me. With a straw for a rainwater!"


The British-borh Westwick almost didn't get cast in Gossip Girl. Schwartz and Savage loved the relative unknown, who had parts in films like Breaking and Entering and Children of Men - "We'd never seen a guy with that kind of energy," says Schwartz - but as the pilot was about to being shooting. Westwick couldn't secure a work visa in time. The CW asked the producers to consider other actors: they held out. Eventually Westwick got his visa, and became Gossip Girl's irresistible antihero - a peacock hedonist who can steal any scene with three whisperes words: "I'm Chuck Bass." His Chuks is far more prominent in the TV show than he was in the book series, in which Chuck was rakish bisexual who prowled around with a monkey on his shoulder named Sweetie. "He's almost a caricature in the books," admits Cecily von Ziegesar, the author. "But I love Chuck on the show. I think Ed's a great actor."


Westwick, who had claimed he partly stole Chuck Bass' flat WASP accent from Alfonso Ribeiro's character, Carlton Banks, on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, says it wasn't an easy transistion. "When I came to America, I felt like a dimwit," he confesses. "There were so many things I'd never done. I'd never eaten sushi. I didn't know what calamari was."
"You didn't know how to do laundry." interjects Crawford. A gentlemanly Texan with a background that would have made Andy Warhol faint - former mode, dermatologist father, sister who was Miss Missouri 2008 - Crawford was Gossip Girl's breakout hunk, with a blue-eyed face built for Myspace pages.
"I didn't know how to do fucking laundry!" Westwick says. "Lights and darks, man! Your fucking taught me that!"


Westwick and Crawford live together, in a messy apartment not far from the Half King. At least the rumor was it was messy. Crawford claims that the bachelor pad is currently "very pristine." Westwick, clearly the Oscar Madison of the pair, brags that he recently painted his bedroom and says his photo shrine to Jim Morrison just came down.


As Gossip Girl took off, rumors started going around that Westwick and Crawford were more than just rommates. "Fucking ridiculous," Westiwck says.
"It's funny because I love this fucking dude dearly," he says, nodding to Crawford. "I would die for this fucking dude. He's my brother. But, by God, we are so into out fucking women it's ridiculous. "But what are you going to do about it?" Westwick continues. "Get pissed off and stay home and cry about it?" "We went to the pool hall, had a beer and never talked about it again," Crawford says.
"Made out with a girl in public," Westiwck says. Crawford and Badgley burst into laughter. It's not-too*veiled reference to a very public tonsil-lashing Westwick enjoyed with Drew Barrymore after a Kings of Leon concert last fall.


"Fuck it, I'll have sex in public," Westwick says. "That one's still on the list. Still haven't ticked that one off. Well, I have, but they haven't seen me. Not George Michael public."
"You need to stop drinking right now," Crawford says.
"Oh please," Westwick says. He holds up his bottle. "Golden Monkey, don't leave me on my own."


Badgley laughs. Of all the Gossip Guys, he was the hardened veteran, after stings on short-lived series like The Bedford Diaries, Do Over and The Mountain (Durind Beford, he says, he roomed in New York with Heroes' Milo Ventimiglia, and used Ventimiglia's ID to get into bars.) Like Lively, Badgley needed some ar-twisting to sign on. "I was very cynical about television," he says. He was about to turn Gossip Girl down on a Friday, before whiping around on a Monday and jumping on. "Stephanie and Josh know how to walk the line between creative integrity and commercial sensibility."


Badgley's character, Dan Humphrey, is as close to a plebe as Gossip Girl gets - an angsty wanna-be writer from Brooklyn who's alternately repelled and fascinated by his upper-crus classmates. While another actor may have playes Dan as a blah straight man, Badgley imbued him with an occasionally obnoxious know-it-all-ness. Mocked online as "Lonely Boy" by his classmates, Dan is shameless striver, pining for literary fame and briefly interning under a boozy authour played by novelist Jay McInerney. "Dan was supposed to be the goofy, nerdy guy who felt like he never measured up to other people, but Penn decided to play it a little more arrogant." says Lively, "Like he's smarter than these spoiled little brats." She says Badgley is sometimes agravated by this turn. "He'll be like, 'Why's Dan so pretentious?' And it's like, 'Because you did it to him! It's your fault!?"


Still, after many television misfires, Badgley is awed by the trajectory of Gossip Girl, even mong jaded New Yorkers. He tells of going with Lively to the restaurant at the Palace Hote and noticing that the menu contained an item called the "Gossip Girl Grilled Cheese." "And I was like, 'You should call it the Gossip Girll," "and they went and reprinted the menu and gave it back to me. They changed the fucking name right there on the spot. That was a moment when I was like, 'OK'"


All of the Gossip Guys know this feeling. The attention to their private lives can be intense: Crawford dated the country singer Carrie Underwood, and Westwick was caught smooching co-star Szohr at a Knighs game. Teen idolhood has a fixed life, and taking the next step forward as an actor is a complicated maneuver. Only a few people out there can apprecioate their position.
"I talked to Jason Priestley once," Crawford says of the 90210 icon. "He's, like, the coolest guy ever. You know he used to date Blake's sister? Blake was so young, and she used to come up and try to kiss him."
"I'm gonna kill her," Badgley jokes. "Jason said, "You know what? At the end of the day, you're going to look back and realize what those years were, and you're always going to have nostalgia for them.'"
-"Exactly," Badgley says. "Ideally, we want out careers to continue to the stars. But regardless of where they go, we're never going to be int this position again."
"Until next season," Westwick corrects.


There will be a season three of Gossip Girl, the CW recently announced with fanfare (what were they going to do, cancel it and bring back Reba?). In May, Schwartz and Savage will air the first episode of a still-unnamed spinoff, a prequel series based on the Eighties Hollywood adolescence of Serena's mother, Lily van der Woodsen (featuring ex-Brat Parker Andrew McCarthy).


"The idea is, 'if you thought the kids were bad, wait until you meet the parents,'" says Savage.
Wayward parents, of course, are part of the Gossip Girl formula too - so far, we've seen moms and dads range from coldly dissonant and cougars to cokehead swindlers and arsonists. "And they have sex - hello," says Kelly Rutherford, the former Melrose Place actress who plays Lily on Gossip Girl. But the Gossip parents and kids haven't intercaroused much. Says Matthew Settle, who plays Rufus Humphrey, Dan and Jenny's rocker dad, and who recently became a dad in real life. "I sometimes go hang around with the boys at a pub, but as far as late nights, I wish I could."


With spring arriving, the cast members are ready for a break. Their schedule is a beast - endless location scenes and late nights on the Queens set where they shoot in a studio that previously housed The Sopranos. Filming wraps in April, and vacations are being planned, movie roles are under consideration and handful of the actors are eager to launch music careers. Meester's near done with an electro-pop record. Westwick (who has a U.K. band called the Filthy Youth) is desperate to start rocking again and Taylor Momsen is finishing an album for Interscope Records. "It's a badass rock & roll record," says Momsen, who sounds 15 going 25. "It's not waht people are going to be expectiing"


How long can Gossip Girl last? The Gossip Guys say they are effectively bound to seven-year contracts, though there's an opportunity before Season Three to renegotiate their deals. Savage doesn't sound wishful for a Bonansa-style run, joking that her motto-with Schwartz for TV excellence is "Live fast, die young, leave beautiful corpse."
"Seven's a long time," say's Badgley.
"Four is a good number," says Crawford.
Of course, the gilded real world around Gossip Girl is crumbling, Will Chuck be buying ascots at Target? Will Serena be forced to survive on Gossip Grilled Cheeses?
"Well, due to budget cuts. Blair's going to leaving us," Lively jokes. "She's going to be shooting all her scenes in Ohio."
"She's going to carry the brown bag that the Hermes bag goes in," says Meester.


Schwartz and Savage belive that Gossip Girl can hold its place as a modern fantasy. "Romeo and Juliet weren't starcrossed lovers because of a subprime-mortgage crisis." Savage says. But maybe Gossip Girl should bow to the New Austerity, just for appearances. What if Serena and Chuck moved into a nice suite at the Holiday Inn Express?
"That would be really good!" Meester says. "Just for one episode."
Lively isn't sure. "I don't think people would watch Gossip Girl," she says, "if we lived in a Holiday Inn Express."