My Date With Adele

In preparation for her appearance at the 51st annual Grammy Awards a few years ago, the 20-year-old Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was busy being ministered to in the black-curtained hair and makeup area set apart from Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium. She was being transformed into a back-combed diva with what she called her “ginger biscuit” hair swept into a side pony, and her Cleopatra-winged eyes framed by lashes like crows’ wings. Her black-on-white nails (“ghetto fabulous,” she called them) had already been glued on at a little place on Sunset Boulevard: She’d broken a nail a few days earlier, and you would have thought from the fuss that it was a leg or an arm instead. At the time, Adele cited her style influences as equal parts Dusty Springfield and Lady Bunny, and she was wickedly self-knowing, entirely unprocessed, and delirious, foul-mouthed fun to spend time with. I was madly in love.

Adele was representing “curvy” in Vogue’s April 2009 Shape issue, and I had hung out with her in London, where she’d shown me her bijou Notting Hill apartment, introduced me to her mum and her doting manager Jonathan Dickins, and treated me to an ice cream at her favorite parlor. The cherry on the fondant was the opportunity to escort her on the red carpet for the Grammys, where she would be performing “Chasing Pavements.” We had put her in a custom black satin cocktail frock by Barbara Tfank. “I’ve got three bums, and this just sort of glides over them,” she said as she twirled in its full skirt.

During the fitting in Tfank’s Koreatown studios, we had collectively decided to make the dress a little shorter, but Adele had called in panic mode the evening before the show, worried that it now fell at an unflattering point on her leg. She was absolutely right, and Tfank and her team worked miraculously through the night to add a deep bias band at the hem that not only gave the dress more dignity but also more shape and presence. “I’ll go proper glam,” Adele had promised, and there was a pistachio-green opera coat if she needed it, along with antique diamonds in her hair and in a daisy brooch nestling in the V of her cleavage (“I’m gonna wear a big balcony bra and get me boobs up!”). The diamond buckles on her Manolos matched, and a sparking minaudière completed the ensemble.

The backstage transformation complete, we piled into the limo to drive the short distance from the hair and makeup facility to the auditorium. We had just set off when Adele’s manager called to tell her that she had won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in the pre-televised segment of the awards. She was ecstatic. I was ecstatic. Adele rolled down the window and screamed her joy to the world: “I’ve just won a fucking Grammy!” she boomed. Random onlookers in the car park cheered her on.

News hadn’t traveled too fast: On the red carpet, the photographers asked the relative unknown to step aside, love, so that they could get an unblocked shot of Kate Beckinsale in her frothily trained black McQueen “Barbie in the spotlight” frock. Adele, awkward enough on the red carpet and nervous about her upcoming performance, had the determined look of a ballsy girl from the London projects. It was a look that said: By the end of this evening, you will know who I am.

My squiring duties over, I took my seat in the crowd, admiring Katy Perry, descending from the sky in a giant golden banana dressed in Carmen Miranda camp-ery to sing “I Kissed a Girl,” and holding my breath while M.I.A. performed, nine months pregnant, on her due date.

Adele had been nominated for Song of the Year and Album of the Year, but she hadn’t won those, and when Kanye West, in a silver bedazzled tux, and Estelle, in a silvery bedazzled raindrop, announced the nominees for Best New Artist, it was the Jonas Brothers who got the crowd’s loudest roar. Kanye, in short black leather gloves, struggled to open the fiddly scarlet envelope but eventually tore it asunder, confirming that a momentarily bemused Adele, who had long since kicked off her crippling Manolos under the seat and was chewing on a mouthful of gum, had won her second Grammy of the evening. By this point I was bawling, and by the end of her delightfully unfiltered acceptance speech Adele was America’s sweetheart.

Adele disdained the Woodstock-themed official Grammys after-party, and even passed on the achingly cool after-after-party in Santa Monica that Coldplay had told her about. Instead, she instructed the driver to take us to an In-N-Out Burger on Venice Boulevard, rightly promising that I would never have tasted anything like it. “Maybe I should get two milkshakes?” she pondered as we drove up to the kiosk. “To match me Grammys!”