Celebrity Entourage Odd Jobs

By Colleen Kane, CNBC.com

The less than down-to-earth celebrities out there have been known to surround themselves with helpers, minions, a posse, and/or "yes men." These can be official employees, friends, or a combination of both.

Some obvious entourage functions include personal assistant, bodyguard, driver, child-care provider, chef, and trainer. A newer task for aspiring hangers-on is social media specialist - someone to ghost-tweet the superstar's comings and goings.

As you'll see in the following examples, members of an entourage can be essential, or they can be exploitative. The 10 entourage examples start with a king's relatively reasonable gang of associates and work up into the celebrity stratosphere with a lady, a prince, a queen, and concluding with one celebrity who is said to act like the biggest diva of them all. Where possible, we've provided an idea of these special crew members' earnings or compensation.

See the full list of 10 Odd Celebrity Entourage Jobs

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Lady Gaga

It was only a handful of years ago that the superstar known as Lady Gaga was the aspiring young singer Stefani Germanotta, but she lost no time assembling a creative team of stylists and designers known as the Haus of Gaga. Modeled after Andy Warhol's Factory, the Haus of Gaga dreams up and makes costumes, props, sets, and dance routines. It sounds like a fun gig, to hear Gaga describe it to MTV: "I called all my coolest art friends and we sat in a room and I said that I wanted to make my face light up. Or that I wanted to make my cane light up. Or that I wanted to make a pair of dope sunglasses. Or that I want to make video glasses, or whatever it was that I wanted to do. It's a whole amazing creative process that's completely separate from the label." Haus of Gaga has become its own brand, selling T-shirts and a software app.
As for her non-Haus entourage members, their tasks, much like Lady Gaga's hairdos, depend on the day. They may be called to duty to carry her when she's in an egg costume, or 80 of her best friends may accompany her to her appearance on the Graham Norton show and devour all the bacon in the studio cafeterias.

Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth II

The Prince of Wales has never undressed himself, nor picked up those clothes after undressing, because there are three valets to do that, according to a book by a former staffer titled "Not in Front of the Corgis," as detailed in the Daily Mail . One duty of the valets is to iron his shoelaces whenever his shoes are removed (which is rather not a green tradition for such an ecologically minded figure). In all, the royals have 1,200 servants, including ladies in waiting (unpaid with expenses), a fender mender, and a maid for the coffee room. A daily task of one servant is to place a sheet of black blotter paper in the Queen's pad so that no one can read what she wrote by analyzing the indentations in the pad.
Royal staff do not draw high salaries - less than a dozen earn more than £100,000 a year (about $160,000), the article says, with the highest paid being the Keeper of the Privy Purse (the royal accountant) who earns about $290,000. They do however have certain perks: The Queen's dressers sometimes get to keep her castoff clothing (once labels are removed) and they can use the Queen's pool at Buckingham palace (when a royal isn't present), or use any of seven sports and social clubs.


Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey has earned a reputation for being unwilling to perform basic everyday tasks for herself, which works out fine since she travels with a huge entourage. After her appearance on the British morning show GMTV, they dished on her diva ways: "She had two people to lower her on to the GMTV sofa, in case her dress got crushed, one person to walk in front of her backwards at all times in case she fell over, and several people behind the camera making sure she was going to be filmed from the right angle!" Carey also brought her own toilet paper, according to the Daily Mail, and even her dogs have an entourage.
According to the book "Unusually Stupid Celebrities: A Compendium of All-Star Stupidity," Carey employs a "petite Columbian woman" to keep her long skirts from touching the floor. The New York Daily News reported on one Mariah minion dedicated solely to applying breast tape. Many, many more examples of her rider requests and preferences are just a Google search by a gossip-research assistant away.


Elvis Presley

Let's begin with the King, since he more or less introduced the entourage tradition in the past century. Elvis' crew of longtime friends, cousins, and confidantes was known as the Memphis Mafia - a name given to them by the press around 1960, as they often dressed in dark suits and sunglasses.
Some of the crew were employees with specific roles, such as security or logistics planners who helped, to use their favorite term, "TCB" (take care of business). None were paid more than $500 a week, according to the book "Elvis, The #1 Hits: The Secret History of the Classics." Unsalaried others helped TC of other B, acting as yes men, drug connections, and finders of women for Elvis (not such a difficult task). In return, they received cars and other goods as gifts, in addition to basking in the appreciation of Elvis.


Ludacris

A 2007 Cindy Adams column in the New York Post highlighted her favorite discoveries from the then-new book "Unusually Stupid Celebrities: A Compendium of All-Star Stupidity," and it's one of the most specific gigs in this slideshow. According to the book, when a member of rapper Ludacris' entourage was asked what his job was in the group, he said, "I do the Game Boy batteries."





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