From that signing forward, Meester’s career was a series of such judgments, made by other people on the basis of her appearance, her range, her age, her availability, and her fit with whatever a given commercial or production needed at a given time. She was, from ten years old, a commodity in the specific sense that the entertainment industry applies to talent: something with a market value, something that could be deployed, something whose worth was external to herself and determined by forces she had no control over.
This is not a unique experience in the entertainment industry — it is, in fact, the structural experience of a very large percentage of the people who enter it as children. What varies is how much the children themselves are protected from understanding what this structure means, and how the parents or guardians who bring them into the industry navigate the tension between the financial returns and the psychological costs. Meester’s situation was unusual in that the financial returns were genuinely necessary rather than supplementary to a comfortable household income. The modeling income wasn’t a college savings fund. It was part of the economic structure that kept the household functioning.
She has described her mother as supportive of her working — as the partner who moved to New York, and then to Los Angeles, in support of the career. The geography of Leighton’s professional life was to a considerable degree the geography of her mother’s post-prison life: the New York apartments, the Los Angeles apartment near Hollywood and La Brea, the moves that followed the professional opportunity. This is worth noting not as a criticism but as a descriptive fact: the working child’s career organized the family’s physical life in ways that reversed the conventional arrangement, in which the parent’s employment determines where the family lives.