My Celebrity College Roommate

From Barack Obama's air-conditioning quirks to John Kerry's odd sleeping habits to Madonna's penchant for risk-taking, the memories of people whose college roommates went on to become stars say a lot about navigating your freshman-year living situation.

Know Your Climates (Barack Obama)

Phil Boerner met Barry Obama in the fall of 1979 when the two were freshmen at Occidental College, but they didn’t live together until after they’d both transferred to Columbia University two years later—by then they were already good friends. That said, Boerner, now the public-relations manager for the California Veterinary Medical Association, tells The Daily Beast there is one question he’d like revised on the roommate questionnaire: “One of the questions concerned whether you liked the dorm room hot or cold; that is, with the windows open or not on a mild evening.  Well, it turns out that a student from, say, Hawaii, has a different standard of what's cold than a student from, say, New York, where there's snow in winter.  So, it would have been nice if the administration had asked students to specify if they were using East Coast or West Coast standard.”

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Take Chances (Madonna)

It was Madonna who "loosened me up in so many ways and got me to take some risks," says  Whitley Hill, the Material Girl's former college roommate from the University of Michigan. According to Hill, who kept detailed journals during that time, Madonna took her to a nude swimming hole outside Ann Arbor that could only be reached by descending a severely steep concrete embankment. "She just took off walking down that thing," says Hill. "She was just courageous like that, she was very driven and very direct." Direct enough to tell Hill about her mother's death from cancer the very first time they met. "I normally have something appropriate to say for just about any occasion," writes Hill about that moment in an unpublished memoir that she shared with The Daily Beast, "but I sure don’t have anything at this particular moment." Hill says Madonna even took her to her first gay bar in 1977. The two women were both members of the school’s prestigious dance department, and even then Madonna was a showstopper, says Hill. “Madonna's got her thigh between my legs and it's not just occupying negative space, it's really cramming in there," she writes of Madonna's dance moves. As for what they listened to? "Stevie Wonder," says Hill, "and Earth, Wind, and Fire was the primo dance record."

Watch Your Bedtimes (John Kerry)

"He was much the same as he is now," says Senator John Kerry's former roommate, Daniel Barbiero, who now works in financial services in New York. According to Barbiero, the onetime presidential hopeful was always "driven, politically active, competitive and with so much energy that he tired out anyone with him"—not necessarily the attributes you want in a roommate early on a Saturday morning. "We were three roommates with a two-bedroom suite and it was hands down that no one wanted to share [Kerry's] room," says Barbiero, "he was up a 5 a.m. and out late every day." Even back then, he says Kerry was an overachiever. "He was intensely interested in government and when JFK was assassinated, [Kerry] knew the name and job of every Cabinet member and leading legislator that we saw on TV during the funeral ceremonies."

Believe In Him (Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson)

Long before they made Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums together, screenwriting partners Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson were roommates at the University of Texas. Artistically, the actor and director clicked and remain close friends. But that was only after they learned to trust one another. "When I met Wes, he had just finished his first year at Texas and he told me he was going to be transferring to Yale soon,” Wilson once told the Los Angeles Daily News. “And I remember thinking, `What kind of fantasy world are you living in?' Because I knew he was a terrible student. But he said it with such conviction, I almost wanted to believe him."