GOLDEN LADY
With three films in the next twelve months-including
'Married to the Mob' -Michelle Pfeiffer is more than the movies'
prettiest face.
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO? FOR EIGHTEEN-YEARS_OLD MICHELLE
Pfeiffer, tan and pretty and bored out of her skull, that
was no easy question. Her Orange County, California, high school
had been so mind-numbing that she'd taken course credit for her
after-school jobs and grabbed a diploma at the end of her junior
year. Since then, she'd dabbled in psychology courses at a junior
college (dull), worked some odd jobs (duller), and spent a year
at court-reporting school (imagine a Bill
Moyers special on the steam engine). Now it was 1975, and
Pfeiffer was a checkout girl at Vons
supermarket number 50 in El Toro, California, and going absolutely
nowhere. In her life, there was the beach, her boyfriend, the supermarket-zzzzzzzz.
And so Michelle Pfeiffer stood there at her cash register and thought
to herself: What do you want to do?
"I can see me standing in the check
stand in my little red smock and my black polyester pants and my
white nurse shoes," she says, her mind spinning out
the details. "My black pants that had
faded to gray, so that my boss was taking up a collection to get
me a new pair. And I guess I just asked myself, 'If you could have
anything, somebody could just hand it over to you, what would you
want to do?' And it was acting."
It is now thirteen years since that epiphany, and Pfeiffer, wearing
dark sunglasses and a distressed-leather-jacket and carrying her
own garment bag, strides into the first-class section of a 747,
where she is promptly snubbed by a flight attendant. Finally, and
not without difficulty, her bag gets stowed. "My
timing's bad today," Pfeiffer says as she sits down.
She looks amazing, of course, and maybe the frazzled attendant could've
used a little less amazing.
As for Pfeiffer, she's in a complicated, contemplative mood, perhaps
even a little frazzled herself. She is jetting back to Los Angeles
for two final weeks of work on Tequila Sunrise,
written and directed by Robert Towne
and costarring Mel Gibson and
Kurt Russell. After wrapping
Tequila, Pfeiffer will fly to Paris to start work on Les
Liaisons Dangereuses, with director Stephen
Frears and Glenn Close
and John Malkovich. Adding to
her concern is some personal turbulence: a divorce from her husband
of eight years, actor Peter Horton,
is apparently in the works, and future reports will have her paired
with Michael Keaton.
But foremost on Pfeiffer's mind is what may prove to be the breakthrough
role of her ten-year acting career, in Jonathan
Demme's hilarious, polychrome farce-with-a-heart, Married
to the Mob. Pfeiffer plays Angela, a mafioso's widow who
falls in love with her FBI tail, played by Matthew
Modine. Pfeiffer, the essence of the California girl, simply
nails the Long Island mob princess part, accent and all. It's Angela's
movie, and even with Modine and Dean
Stockwell doing letter-perfect work as Fed and don, Pfeiffer
walks off with the picture on her miniskirted hips.
Pfeiffer herself isn't so sure. "I like
Married to the Mob a lot," she says. "But
I don't think I'm funny. I never think I'm funny, and I'm always
in these comedies. See, I don't know how this happens, or why this
happens, but I always end up playing the heart of the piece. Like,
in a comedy, I always end up playing the anchor, the person whose
job is to be believable. And not necessarily funny. Happens to me
all the time."
To learn why that happens, Pfeiffer need only look in the mirror.
It's been no unmixed blessing, that face. "I
think," Jonathan Demme
says, "that more than any other quote-unquote
beautiful actress, Michelle has been handicapped by her appearance.
She has such an overwhelming face that people have tended to cast
her because of the way she looks."
"Michelle's a terrific comedienne,"
says Patricia Birch, who directed
Pfeiffer in the ill-fated Grease 2.
"She's like a little racehorse. She has
both a delicacy and a strong will."
"Her wit drew me to her,"
says Robert Towne. "In
Sweet Liberty, I loved the way she was able to create this movie
actress who was sweet and genteel one minute and screaming on the
phone the next. In Tequila, she plays a restaurateur whose calm
exterior is a kind of mask; you're constantly wondering what's underneath
this almost [Grace] Kelly-like cool."
True enough, only it wasn't so long ago that it was Pfeiffer who
was doing most of the wondering. Now she seems poised to savor the
movie stardom that seemed so far away thirteen years ago. "I
have a feeling she's been in touch with her gift all along,"
says Demme, "and that she's exhibited
enormous patience with those of us who tend to focus first on how
gorgeous she is."
Midway City, in Orange County, California, is as plain-vanilla
as its name, a blip on the map between Huntington Beach and Westminster,
Seal Beach and Santa Ana. Highway 39 runs through town on its way
to better things. The land is flat, and the houses are old-for California-and
boxy and small. All in all, a good place to get out of. Michelle
Pfeiffer stayed there for twenty years.
She was the second of four children (and the first daughter) of
a heating and air-conditioning contractor and his wife. Dick and
Donna Pfeiffer inculcated their children with the value of work.
When Michelle was small, her father would pay her 50 cents apiece
to clean old refrigerators that he reconditioned and sold. From
the age of fourteen on, she had a variety of jobs: in clothing stores,
with an optometrist, at a jewelry manufacturer, in a preschool,
and, for the longest stint, in a series of local Vons supermarkets.
Pfeiffer was, it seemed, thoroughly unexceptional: a pretty blond
in an ocean of other pretty blonds. "I
had her as a sophomore in my world history class," says
John Bovberg, who still teaches
at Fountain Valley High School. "She
was a little cutie. My class includes quite a lot of participation-we
do skits. One was the Truman Trial: What if we had lost World War
II, and Harry Truman was being tried for war crimes for dropping
the bomb on Hiroshima? I remember Michelle dressed up as one of
the victims of the bomb."
Was she bright? "Very,"
Bovberg says. "An A to B student. Oh,
she was a little sweetie. She came every day."
But the little sweetie started to grow up. Fountain Valley High
was sharply divided into cliques-the surfers, the jocks, the low-riders,
the nerds-and Pfeiffer, as an attractive blond, bright or not, gravitated
in a predictable direction. Her relationships with Danny
Jackson, a football player, and then with Mickey
Swenson, a handsome, funny athlete, placed her squarely in
cool territory. But her academic performance began to decline as
her beach attendance increased.
"I did a lot of lying to keep out of
trouble with my parents," Pfeiffer recalls.
"I once got caught doing something so radical-you know, I'd
ditched school, I had spend the weekend with all these kids in this
unchaperoned house-and I knew I was busted. And I came in, and I
forget what kind of lie I told my father, but I actually burst into
tears. I was so shocked at myself!" She laughs at the
memory.
When Pfeiffer found out she cold get English credits by taking
theater courses, she jumped at the chance. "I'd
always thought that theater people were really weird,"
she says. "And I got into this class,
and I just fell in love with the people there. They were funny,
witty; they were really interesting. It was the only class that
I made an effort to go to."
But if she had any ambitions, she did a good job of hiding them.
"She didn't try out for any of the major
productions," says Carole
Cooney, who taught Pfeiffer's theater class. "I
saw her as this sunshine surfer beach girl. She was more out of
the class than in."
The only high school production Pfeiffer ever acted in was a daylong
Christmas skit written by her theater classmates and performed at
Fountain Valley. "She and I were twins
waiting up for Santa Claus," classmate Tony Vrab remembers.
Was she talented? "She was okay, I guess,
but I wouldn't say I thought she'd go out and do anything big."
Pfeiffer took the extra credits she had gotten from working outside
jobs and graduated a year early. She was living at home, but her
spirit drifted. She worked at Vons for a year. She went to the beach.
She went to court-reporting school in Garden Grove the following
year. She was bored out of her mind. She dropped in and out of Golden
West College. She went back to Vons. Then she had her revelation.
"I just made the decision to try [acting],"
she says. "I didn't know then, you know,
where do I go from here."
She didn't know, but she knew. Her hairdresser had been bugging
her for a while about modeling. But the idea of exhibiting herself
had always embarrassed Pfeiffer. Now she swallowed her embarrassment
and called the hairdresser. She had some pictures taken.
Soon she was Miss Orange County. She
lost in the Miss L.A. contest-"Thank
God," Pfeiffer says-but met a commercial agent and began
auditioning for commercials. She hated it. "In
order to be a good commercial actor, you have to learn how to do
a specific kind of bad acting well," she says. "If
you walk out of an audition feeling like you made a complete asshole
out of yourself, chances are you got the job."
She got a couple of commercials but didn't quit her standby job.
Not that she was languishing unnoticed at Vons. "She
was real pretty; she had kind of unique looks," says
Bob Heimstra, then a clerk at store number 45, in Santa Ana. "I
went out with her a couple of times, in group situations, to Angels
games. Once I asked her for a date, a one-on-one thing, but she
said she made it a rule not to go out with anyone from the store."
She could do the more subtle forms of acting, too. Before long
there were results. "One day I was in
Vons in El Toro," John Bovberg remembers,
"and Michelle came running across the store. 'Mr. B.!' she
said. 'I got an agent!' She said she was trying out for some TV
show. And I took her aside, and I said, 'Now, Michelle. Not too
many people make it in the movies.' I recommended she give junior
college [another] try. But she seemed driven; she seemed to have
a lot of confidence."
The agent's name was John LaRocca. "She
was working at Vons down in Orange County," he says.
"And she came into my office, and I said,
'Michelle, excuse me for saying this, but you're in the wrong business.'"
Asked about Michelle Pfeiffer today, LaRocca exhales heavily.
"It's a difficult subject to talk about," he says.
"To have represented her during the most
difficult years in her career, and then to have her leave and go
on…" He sighs. "It
wasn't just that she was beautiful," LaRocca says. "She
had a sense of character, a sense of family, a sense of love. She
was a deep person. I got her her SAG card."
Pfeiffer began going to acting school in Los Angeles. She commuted
for a while, then moved to the city. And LaRocca finally got her
the big break: a line on Fantasy Island.
"I'll never forget it." Pfeiffer
says. " 'Who is he, Naomi?' I practiced
and practiced that line. I remember being so discombobulated, because
I had to find my mark-you know, you don't learn that in acting class.
And the lights were so bright I couldn't keep my eyes open. I remember
showing up for work and having my name on the dressing room."
"And then," Pfeiffer says,
"I got a series."
The year was 1979, and the series was Delta
House, a spin-off of You Know What. Bruce
McGill, who had played D-Day in Animal
House, reprised his film role and starred in the sitcom.
"Michelle was absolutely unschooled
as an actress, but she was always asking the right questions,"
McGill says. "I developed a kind of paternal
interest in her. She was drop-dead gorgeous, of course, and the
producers put here in this tight red dress, with a padded bra. She
particularly hated that, I remember. Her character was called Bombshell.
She almost never got to speak a line. She was a very good sport
about the whole thing, but I know it was hard on her."
"I used to call up my agent, crying
on the phone: 'They're putting me in hot pants again.'"
Pfeiffer says. "I had two sets of falsies
on. Here they were presenting me like I'm this sexy thing, and I
was thinking, 'What if people don't think I'm sexy? I'm gonna look
like an asshole.'"
At the same time, LaRocca had landed Pfeiffer a small role as the
younger version of a character played by Susannah
York in an independently produced picture called Falling
in Love Again. By day, she shot Delta
House; at night and on weekends, she got her start in movies.
She kept going to acting class, and LaRocca got her more parts,
with a nod to the Bombshell: she showed
up in The Hollywood Knights, in Charlie
Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen. It wasn't much of
a career, but Pfeiffer was working, and working hard. "Even
though the films that I was doing weren't exactly what I ideally
wanted," Pfeiffer says, "each
time I made a choice, I made sure it was something a little better
than the last one."
Then she made a big choice: she fired her agent. "It
wasn't my decision, and it wasn't because of a lack of work,"
says LaRocca, who was left with only his memories of Pfeiffer and
an autographed picture: "To John, who
has taken me from crayons to perfume. Thank you for your hard work,
never-ending faith & love. I love you, Michelle."
The new Michelle Pfeiffer knew what she wanted, and it wasn't Charlie
Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen. She signed with Gary
Lucchesi and Alan Iezman
at William Morris, and they promptly
got her big audition: Grease 2.
"She sort of wandered in very late in
the day," recalls director Pat
Birch. "And she was just kind
of delectable. I liked her right away. I remember there was this
humongous dance audition a few days later, and she was hanging around
in the background, very shy, and the only way I was able to pick
her out was because she was wearing these purple boots. She didn't
think she could dance, but she moved beautifully. And she could
act."
Pfeiffer won her first lead: the singin', dancin' Stephanie Zinone,
leader of the Pink Ladies. All right, it was Grease
2, but it was a lead. And Pfeiffer was delectable in the
movie, both beautiful and magnetic. Grease
2 coproducer Allan Carr
felt the same way. He thought both his movie and Pfeiffer were going
to be huge.
But Grease 2 went nowhere, and Pfeiffer
didn't work for more than a year afterward. She says there were
plenty of offers, but they all had something to do with Stephanie
Zinone. John LaRocca tells a
different story. "She couldn't get any
jobs," he says. "Nobody wanted
to hire her."
Take both stories with a grain of salt, and look for the truth
somewhere in between. Meanwhile, Pfeiffer's acting teacher,
Peggy Feury, and Pfeiffer's own instincts had told her to
raise her sights. And time passed, and people forgot Grease
2, and her agents looked for possibilities. Then one arose.
Pfeiffer auditioned-and auditioned again-for the role of Al
Pacino's ice-queen wife, Elvira, in Scarface.
The casting director, Alixe Gordin,
thanked her and said she was looking elsewhere. A month later, Pfeiffer
was called back.
Pfeiffer aced her performance in Scarface.
But it was a Pyrrhic victory: Elvira's eyes were as dead and cold
as everything else around her. "After
Scarface," Pfeiffer says, "I
got offered every bitch that has ever been." Instead,
she took Ladyhawke.
"I almost didn't do the movie,"
Pfeiffer says. "I didn't want to play
this little princess running around in the woods. Then I spoke with
[director] Dick Donner, and he said that wasn't how he saw the character.
He wanted to cut my hair off real short, like Joan of Arc, and I
thought that was interesting; and I just loved the script so much.
It was one of the most charming, sweet scripts I had ever read."
It was a shrewd move. The role wasn't exactly a lead, but it was
a terrific showcase, Grease 2 had bombed;
Scarface had covered her in a frozen
shell. And now, all at once, here were stills and TV spots for Ladyhawke
revealing, almost casually, this face: perfect white skin; a wide,
slightly smirking, thin but sensual mouth; and eyes to die for.
Here was a woman around whom a myth might credibly be constructed.
Next, as Diana in John Landis's
Into the Night, Pfeiffer's blue-jeaned,
gum-cracking fugitive-waif (opposite a deadpan Jeff
Goldblum) brought a badly needed emotional core to a comedy-thriller
that was intriguing but mostly too hip for anyone to care. Pfeiffer's
work looked effortless and utterly natural, which was the first
clue that something major was up.
Bruce McGill played a small
role as Pfeiffer's brother, an Elvis impersonator, in Into
the Night. "She'd changed,"
McGill says. "For the better. Without
being a prima donna, she now had as much faith in her opinion of
a scene as in anyone else's." Next came Alan
Alda's saccharine Sweet Liberty,
in which Pfeiffer was nevertheless able to pull of a small comic
coup as the Hollywood actress who's all sunshine and cheekbones
when she needs to be, and tougher than the rest when it comes to
business.
And then Pfeiffer took on an unusual project: Natica
Jackson, a television film for PBS,
based on a John O'Hara short
story. Set in the Hollywood of the mid-'30s, it's about a movie
queen who falls in love with a commoner-a married chemist-when she
accidentally rear-ends his car. With her looks, Pfeiffer was perfect
for the role, but she took it far beyond beauty; she inhabited Natica
Jackson to eerie perfection. "Michelle
was the first person we thought of," says Paul
Bogart, who directed the film. "She
identified very strongly with Natica, who could be bartered and
exchanged like a piece of merchandise. Michelle felt she understood
what it was like to be a kind of commodity."
Next came The Witches of Eastwick,
which made Pfeiffer more of a household name than she'd been before,
but which she regarded with some ambivalence. "The
first time I saw it, I hated it," she says. "It
was so different than the way I had envisioned it. The original
script was more of a dark comedy, as opposed to… there were
no special effects; there wasn't all of that flying in the air.
For me, what was interesting about it was how it played on a psychological
level: the power play between men and women."
It was the success of that film that made her a logical choice
for the lead in Married to the Mob.
To capture Angela, Pfeiffer eagerly sought out her character's peers.
"I met some great gals out in Long Island,"
Pfeiffer says. "They're fantastic. The
Press-On Queens." She shifts into her Angela voice.
"Cawla and Anna Maria. They were sistuhs.
And Cawla was a hairdresser, and she was going to be getting her
own chair. We talked about nails, we talked about hair, we talked
about makeup." She goes back to her own voice. "They
were great. I wanted to be more like them after I'd met them. There's
a certain art in really enjoying life that's in everything they
do."
Regardless of her acting skills, conversations about Pfeiffer tend
to double back to her beauty. Surely her looks opened the doors
of the movie business to her-but has her beauty ever held her back?
Indeed, how conscious of her looks has she been? "I
have to be really honest, and I don't know how this is gonna sound.
I don't know that I've ever felt that I was extraordinary-looking.
In fact, I know that I'm not. If anything, I've always felt that
I was conventionally pretty, which is an asset in some ways, and
in some ways now. It's a really hard subject to talk about,"
she says. "You know, it's like one of
those things where you're fucked either way."
She pauses for a moment. "I think,"
she says, "that, if anything, I am in
touch with my passion about acting. I'm not necessarily in touch
with my talent. When I see my work, I never feel like I reach where
my talent is. I must say that torments me." Then she
brightens. "But I remember Mrs. Cooney
saying to me that I had talent."
These days, Mrs. Cooney isn't the only one singing her praises.
"I showed Stephen Frears a couple of
reels of Married when he was considering Michelle for Liaisons,"
says Jonathan Demme. "And he was clearly
under her spell. But maybe he hesitated for an instant. He said,
'You know, she's gonna be out there with John Malkovich and Glenn
Close.'" Demme laughs. "And
I thought, but didn't say, 'They better watch out.'"
And what of Pfeiffer's future? "Michelle's
growth has been astonishing," says Robert Towne.
"I think she'll keep on amazing us." If that's
so, this may be the year that Hollywood starts asking Michelle
Pfeiffer an old question: What do you
want to do?
|
