Autograph Hounds Dish on the Celebs They Love and Dread
It was 9 a.m. on a Monday and Teresa Ojalvo was whizzing below Manhattan on a downtown 2 train, trying to catch a celebrity. Her long black cane balanced on the seat next to her, the 65-year-old expertly peeled signed photos of actor Jeff Bridges off a piece of cardboard and replaced them with fresh ones from a large, plastic binder. Above her, the real Bridges was cruising along the streets of Manhattan in a black Escalade, making his way from the set of Good Morning America to The View. And Ojalvo desperately needed to beat him.
Ojalvo is a “grapher”—a professional autograph hound who hunts down and sells celebrity signatures. We’d met outside the set of GMA the week before, when Ojalvo was staking out Jensen Ackles and Christy Carlson Romano, and she’d agreed to let me shadow her for a day.
At 7 a.m. the next Monday, I found Ojalvo deep in a crowd of about 20 graphers, her bleach blond ponytail sticking out through a sea of men in baseball caps. She was easily the oldest person there by 20 years, and had already slipped into the role of grandma, scolding a younger grapher who was making too much noise. “No more Red Bull for you,” she chided, and then, when he persisted: “Come here so I can smack you around!”