Everyone, at some point, has a “first” job—one that gives you real money in exchange for your labor. And celebrities are no exception: Dwayne“The Rock” Johnson started developing those biceps at age 13 as a dishwasher at Emilio’s Pizza in Honolulu (where he made $3.45 an hour). Ashton Kutcher was 19 when he earned $12 an hour sweeping Cheerios dust off the floor at the General Mills plant in his hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Whoopi Goldberg worked as a bricklayer and a morgue beautician in the 1970s in California while awaiting her big acting break. Sometimes, the lessons learned from those early jobs are the ones that stick with you the longest. “I learned a great appreciation for hard work,” Johnson has said. “And it sounds crazy, but still, to this day, I never use a dishwasher. I wash every dish by hand.” Enjoy Parade’s collection of first forays into the world of work, from rock stars and comedians to best-selling authors and CEOs.
Celebrities first jobs
Bill Hemmer’s first job
Bill Hemmer washed dishes at Skyline Chili in Cincinnati. “I had several jobs between the age of 16 and 21. Had to make a buck. Cleaned floors at my high school, produce department at a grocery store, nursery department at an outdoor store. I washed dishes, tended bar on an Ohio River boat (under the legal age), delivered refurbished motors. I was a busboy, a waiter, a disc jockey. My first job, at the age of 16, was cleaning dishes at a Skyline Chili restaurant in Cincinnati until 2 a.m. Lasted three weeks.”
Melinda Gates’ first job
Melinda Gates taught computer codingin high school in Dallas. “My father didn’t want me to waitress or be in the service industry. I was already tutoring kids in math, and I realized that it would be an amazing opportunity if I could tutor kids in computer programming because I could charge a lot more money for that. You do have to know something deeply if you’re going to teach it to somebody else. I also realized that I like to get the best out of people.”
Beyoncé’s first job
Beyoncé swept floors at Headliners, the hair salon in Houston owned by her mother, Tina Knowles. “From 6 to 9 years old, I would sing and put on little shows by myself for the women who wanted a hot press and curl and some good conversation. I helped sweep hair off the floor for tips to pay for my season pass to Six Flags. (I still love a good roller-coaster ride.)”
Megan Fox’s first job
Megan Fox was a giant banana for a smoothie shop in Florida. “Once a week, usually on Fridays, someone had to dress up as a piece of fruit and go out and stand by the highway. I was a banana, a giant banana. It was weird. And what was bad about it was that your face wasn’t hidden; there was a thing cut out for your face.”
Taylor Swift’s first job
Taylor Swift picked praying mantis pods off the treeson her family’s Pennsylvania Christmas tree farm from the time she was 5 to 10 years old. “We collected them so the bugs wouldn’t hatch inside people’s houses.”
Amy Poehler’s first job
Seventeen-year-old Amy Poehler scooped ice cream at Chadwick’s in Waltham, Massachusetts. “Summer jobs are often romantic; the time frame creates a perfect parenthesis. Chadwick’s was not. Hard and physical, the job consisted of stacking and wiping and scooping and lifting.” Other famous ice cream scoopers include Barack Obama, Julia Roberts and Kate McKinnon.
Nicki Minaj’s first job
Nicki Minaj was a customer service repin New York City. “I like dealing with people, but I don’t really like a lot of bull—-, so maybe customer service wasn’t the best job for me.”
Jennifer Aniston’s first job
Jennifer Aniston was a haircutter in New York City. “I cut hair for 10 bucks a head in junior high. I cut my dad’s hair, and he was on a soap opera [Days of Our Lives]. But then he admitted to me 15 years ago that he would go in and have the hairdresser on set clean it up.” Aniston’s other early jobs included waitressing and working as a telemarketer. “I was a telemarketer selling time-shares in the Poconos. I didn’t make one sale. I was terrible at it. I was like, ‘Why do we have to call people at dinnertime?’”
John Grisham’s first job
John Grisham made $1 an hour watering rosebushes in Mississippi. “I earned my first steady paycheck watering rosebushes at a nursery for $1 an hour. I was in my early teens, but the man who owned the nursery saw potential, and he promoted me to his fence crew. For $1.50 an hour, I labored like a grown man as we laid mile after mile of chain-link fence. There was no future in this.”
Margaret Atwood’s first job
Before she was the famous author of The Handmaid’s Tale, a 23-year-old Margaret Atwood worked a coffee shop counter in Boston. “I was surprised when I got it, underpaid while doing it and frustrated in the performance of it—and these qualities have remained linked, for me, to the ominous word ‘job.’ The coffee was easy enough—I just had to keep the Bunn filled—and the milkshakes were possible; few people wanted them anyway. But the cash register was perverse. Its drawers would pop open for no reason, or it would ring eerily when I swore I was nowhere near it; or it would lock itself shut, and the queue of customers waiting to pay would lengthen and scowl as I wrestled and sweated.”
Brad Pitt’s first job
When he first arrived in L.A., 23-year-old Brad Pitt did odd jobs. “I did all sorts of odd jobs, like dressing up as a chicken and being a delivery boy. I was driving strippers around on weekends to make extra money. I’d take them to bachelor parties. I did that for about two months and then I couldn’t hang with it. But then on the last night I drove, one of the new strippers told me about an acting class that her friend Charlie Sheen went to. I figured, If it’s good enough for Charlie, it’s good enough for me.”
Francine Prose’s first job
Francine Prose was a morgue intern at Bellevue Hospital in New York City when she was 15. “When the doctors and dieners [assistants who do the manual labor of the autopsies] were overwhelmed, a heart or brain or liver would be sent to us, to be weighed on scales like a butcher’s. I began the summer washing glassware and was soon promoted, assigned to conduct an experiment (test tubes, hemoglobin) that I imagine was invented mostly to please my father [who was a pathologist at the hospital].”
Rachel McAdams’ first job
Rachel McAdams worked at McDonald’s in Ontario for three years. “My sister and brother worked there. My sister was my manager! It was a great place to work, but I had a little bit of an OCD thing with hand washing and just didn’t have time. They were like, ‘Hey, the drive-thru’s backing up. Stop washing your hands!’ I was not a great employee; I broke the orange juice machine one day.”
Reba McEntire’s first job
A youngReba helped castrate bulls in Oklahoma. “I would stand behind the bull and hold his tail while Daddy sliced the sack and cut the cord that let the testicles fall,” McEntire explains. “Daddy would pass the testicles to me, and I’d put them in a bucket.”
Alonzo Mourning’s first job
Basketball pro Alonzo Mourning did odd jobsin Virginia. “Growing up, I had so many different jobs. I had my own grass-cutting business. I used to work on my lawnmower and keep it primed and everything. I had a job at a drapery shop, and the height helped there, hanging draperies. I worked at a factory packing kale. My best summer job I ever had: My junior year in high school, I worked at this place called Parkway Pontiac prepping cars. If you go to any car dealership, you see how straight the cars are on the lot. That was my job—to keep all the cars straight and to keep them clean.”
Donald Trump’s first job
Donald Trump was a New York rent collector. “I accompanied my father to his sites and would collect soda bottles with my brother for the deposit money. That was my first income,” Trump told Forbes in a 2006 interview. “Later, I went around with the rent collectors to see how that worked. I learned to stand out of the doorway to avoid the possibility of being shot.” His salary? “Not much. It was probably equal to a below-average allowance.” What he learned: “Collecting soda bottles was safer than collecting rent."
Isiah Thomas’ first job
Basketball legend Isiah Thomas shined shoes in Chicago when he was 10. “I used to charge 25 cents a shine, 35 cents a spit shine and 50 cents for a wax. If I made $10, that was a really, really good day. I learned to be humble and that if I had to be on my hands and knees shining shoes to earn money, then that’s what I had to do.”
Nicole Kidman’s first job
Nicole Kidman was a massage therapist in Sydney when she was 17. “Well, my mother had breast cancer, and when you go through radiation you get terrible seizure of the muscles, so I took a massage course, and then I liked doing it, so I started to go around to people’s houses and do massages—not those sort of massages, just regular massages. I still love giving people massages.”
Cal Ripken Jr.’s first job
Cal Ripken Jr. cleaned the baseball clubhouse when he was 11.“I worked for a minor league team in Asheville [North Carolina], where my dad played. I worked in the visiting clubhouse—shining shoes, folding towels, doing laundry, sweeping up. Each player paid 50 cents in dues per game. So for a three-game series, 25 players chipped in $1.50 each, a cut of which I got. I typically got five to 10 bucks a game, plus tips. Teams that came in with more veteran players usually treated you better. They valued what you did.”
Those (Sometimes Embarrassing) First Jobs
Before they earned $26.5 million a year (like The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons did in 2018), many actors were doing what they had to do just to earn a living. Some acted in bank commercials (Parsons); others were devoured by a bloodthirsty grizzly bear (the fate that befell George Clooney, Laura Dern and Charlie Sheen in 1983’s Grizzly II: Revenge). Bradley Cooper’s screen debut came in 1999 in a Sex and the City episode in which he played one of Carrie’s almost-lovers, while Leonardo DiCaprio collected a paycheck at 14 for a TV commercial for Matchbox cars. Here are some other famous first screen appearances.
Justin Hartley
“My first paid acting gig was this commercial where they wanted me to ad-lib this guy who was trying to pick this girl up. It was, ‘Just keep ad-libbing, dude.’ We must have done 100 takes. I ad-libbed the hell out of that thing. In between takes I’m like, How can I be funny in the next one? I did it a hundred different ways, and probably 30 of them were really funny. And then I watched the commercial and I was so proud—it made it to air—and they played music over the entire thing. It was very humbling.”
Brian Tyree Henry
“I was doing Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare in the Park, where Oscar Isaac was Romeo and I was Tybalt, so we had a huge, huge fight scene and [there was] this reflecting pool of water. And I got to flip Oscar Isaac every night over my shoulder, and now Oscar Isaac is a Jedi. I think I made like $300 a week for that, maybe less.”
Rita Wilson
“It was [a 1972 episode of] The Brady Bunch. That’s how I got my Screen Actors Guild [SAG] card. I played Pat Conway, the cheerleader who Greg chose to become head cheerleader. It was so much fun.”
Kerry Washington
A [1994] episode of the ABC Afterschool Special titled Magical Makeover “is what earned me my SAG card. I think I was a cheerleader in it.”
Jennifer Lawrence
At age 14, “I did an MTV promo for My Super Sweet 16. I remember getting [my SAG card] in the mail and it being the best day of my entire life because it officially made me a professional actor.”
Disappearing First Jobs
Paper “Boy”
As goes the print news business, so goes the news delivery business; weekday circulation of print newspapers has dropped by more than 33 percent since 1990. Famous newspaper delivery people: Walt Disney, Warren Buffett, Martin Luther King Jr., Tom Brokaw, Kathy Ireland and Joe Biden. Eight-year-old Tom Cruise delivered newspapers. “The better I got at delivering newspapers, the more clients I got. And if I missed delivering the paper to a certain house one day, it was, Wow. This guy’s pissed. Then it becomes, What do I do here? And I realized, Oh, I gotta talk to this guy.Handle it. Then you see, Oh, I can fix this. By taking responsibility, I can fix this. I was lost in so many other areas that a kid couldn’t possibly figure out. But I could deliver that paper route. Even with everything else whirling around you, you can have little wins.” At 13, Gene Simmons (of KISS) was a paperboy in Queens. “I delivered the Long Island Star Journal in Jackson Heights, Queens, known as the Long Island Press on Sundays. Later, I picked up a second route, since I could put those papers in the same shopping cart. I had discovered you could make almost twice the money without putting in twice the time.” His salary: $37.50 a week for the first route; $28 a week for the second.
Mail Carrier
Thank automated sorting systems—as well as electronic bill pay and our love of email—for contributing to the projected 20 percent decline in mail carrier jobs by 2028. Famous former postal workers: Steve Carell, John Prine.
Cashier
Those ubiquitous self-service checkout stands are one reason cashier jobs are expected to drop by 4 percent over the next eight years. But so many people work as cashiers that the drop means the loss of almost 140,000 jobs. Famous former cashiers: Cardi B, Carrie Underwood.
Retail Salesperson
Online sales and the decline of brick-and-mortar stores are factors in the projected 2 percent decline in retail sales jobs, or 102,500 lost jobs. Famous former retail salespeople: Kanye West, Daisy Fuentes.
Secretary
Estimates say more than 212,000 secretarial jobs will dry up by 2028, putting administrative assistants at the top of the list of jobs with the largest anticipated declines over the next decade. Famous former secretaries: J.K. Rowling, Barbara Walters.
Bank Teller
Online banking and automation will continue to replace jobs tellers used to do, which means bank teller positions likely will decline by 12 percent by 2028. Famous former bank tellers: Whoopi Goldberg, Ray Romano.
Everybody Starts Somewhere
Even many CEOs toiled away in more basic gigs before moving up the ladder. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon started out as a warehouse worker in the company’s Arkansas warehouse. Indra Nooyi, who stepped down in 2018 after 12 years as CEO of PepsiCo, worked the graveyard shift as the receptionist in her dorm at Yale. Netflix cofounder and CEO Reed Hastingssold vacuum cleaners door to door, a summer job he loved so much he deferred going to college for a year so he could continue selling vacuums. General Motors CEO Mary Barra started out at age 18 inspecting fender and hood panels at a Pontiac plant. Marillyn Hewson, CEO of Lockheed Martin, cleaned, painted and did odd jobs in the apartment building where her family of six lived after her father died of a heart attack when Hewson was 9. “I was in charge of groceries; [my mother] used to hand me a $5 bill and a $7 shopping list and say, ‘I know you’ll make the right decisions.’ Taking on those responsibilities made me stronger, wiser and more self-reliant.” Next, Here’s the History of Minimum Wage
