What Michelle Pfeiffer Needs...
Is Absolutely Nothing
MICHELLE PFEIFFER
AS A WORK IN PROGRESS
By Hal Hinson
Between the first interview with Michelle
Pfeiffer and the second, a message came from her via her
publicist. It said: "I'm a changed woman.
Forget everything I said before. We'll start again at square one."
The first meeting, in Manhattan, took place as she was about to
leave for Moscow to make The Russia House
with Sean Connery, and the conversation,
it would be fair to say, was intense. On the verge of being tortured,
to be more accurate. Remember, during the preceding year she had
emerged at the very pinnacle of her profession. She had been nominated
for an Oscar for her work in Dangerous
Liaisons; shown a galvanizing flair for comedy in Jonathan
Demme's Married to the Mob;
solidified her box-office stature by appearing opposite Mel
Gibson in Tequila Sunrise; and
was about to win every major critic's award, plus another Oscar
nomination, for her tough, intoxicating performance in The
Fabulous Baker Boys. So what could be wrong?
We'll allow only one quote from that conversation: "I
can see how someone could just walk away from it, give it all up,"
she despaired. "Your life doesn't belong
to you anymore. Every minute of every day, you feel as if a million
eyes are on you. You're never allowed to just be yourself. And,
for me, it's not worth it I hate it I don't know how long I can
take it. I don't even know if I want to." And so on.
IT'S ROUGHLY NINE MONTHS, two movies-The
Russia House and Jonathan Kaplan's
interracial love story, Love Field-and
a trip to the Soviet Union and Italy later. Her dog meets me at
the kitchen door of Pfeiffer's West Los Angeles house. Michelle
follows close behind.
"Sorry," she says, giggling.
"Sasha, down. She's one of the mongrels
who run this place."
Michelle does seem, well, changed. Sunnier.
The house, a sprawling Spanish hacienda-style place built in 1917,
is crawling with workmen. Out in the garage, a power saw chews up
the afternoon quiet. "The men are installing
a security system," she says, walking first in one direction,
then another. She's in loose black trousers, a patterned double-breasted
vest, and black Chinese slippers-all very casual. The four tiny
silver earrings in her left ear are the only traces of ornamentation.
No rings. No makeup.
"They have to cut into the walls and it just
kills me. They're real adobe. And it pisses me off."
Maybe just a little sunnier.
Pulling on her blazer, she grabs her Filofax and heads out to her
hunter-green Range Rover.
"I know, I've become a complete cliche''
For lunch, she's picked out a ramshackle little fish place on the
Pacific Coast Highway. We settle in at a picnic table outside, and
after a few minutes a waitress comes over with one of the restaurant's
pink baseball caps.
"The owner's a big fan of your movies. He'd
like you to have one of these."
"I hope it's big enough,"
Michelle says, pulling it down halfway over her eyes. "I
have a huge head."
"It looks incredibly goofy,"
I say.
From underneath the brim, she beams.
Figuring that she's now sufficiently off guard, I ask, "So
what's all this about your being a new woman?"
She explains, but the explanation, like most things with Pfeiffer,
isn't simple. All we can say with any certainty is that this new-woman
stuff has something to do with the time she spent filming in the
Soviet Union.
"I understood for the first time in my life
how people could just give up. I've hit some lows in my life. But
I never gave up hope. I was only in Russia for six weeks. But just
getting from point A to point B was such an ordeal. Just to get
home, you had to negotiate with the cabdriver. Just the feeling
of not having any control."
For a while, Pfeiffer says, she struggled against the privations
and anomalies of Soviet society. She complained about the black
market, about the bureaucracy, about the ban against smoking in
some jazz clubs. "Jazz. Cigarettes. I
mean, the two are synonymous. And at that time I still smoked, and
I felt that I had been deprived of so much, that I was furious."
The weather, too, was getting to her. One day on the set, they kept
shooting the same scene over and over, and it just wasn't working.
"I thought it was an acting problem,"
she remembers, laughing, "until I realized
that my face was frozen."
Her epiphany arrived in response to a rule forbidding Western film
companies from feeding the Soviet extras they hire. When Pfeiffer
discovered this, she was furious and refused to work.
"In a country where you can't get food, where you can't get
soap, here they were watching us shoveling down these platefuls
of hot, steamy spaghetti." So she stomped off, very
dramatic, and refused to come back unless they were fed.
To resolve the crisis, officials from the Soviet film commission
had to be called in. Begging her to return to work, they explained
that this was just the way things were done. "I
didn't sleep that night," she recalls now, with some
amusement. "It was very traumatic. Then
I realized, You know, this is so typically American of you. This
is what, as a country, we're accused of all the time. Now, whether
I was right or wrong isn't the issue. The issue was, Do I have the
right, as an outsider, to come in and force my sensibilities on
this culture?"
The next morning she went back to work. "At
a certain point, I decided to leave my identity at the border. I
thought to myself, Okay, you have no identity. And at that point
I was able to experience the country as it was, on a purer level,
and finally to even embrace it."
It turned out, too, that the event provided the key to understanding
her character, Katya, the young editor at a Moscow publishing house
who smuggles out Soviet military secrets. "What
I learned was that a Soviet woman is still much more passive than
an American woman. It's still a very patriarchal culture."
She also discovered that the personal changes brought on by the
experience were even deeper than the professional breakthroughs.
"I don't usually choose my projects for
personal reasons," she explains, pushing her granny
sunglasses down on her nose. "But this
time I did. I wanted to shock myself onto a higher plane. Or some
plane other than the one I was on, because I was really in a rut.
I had done the play in New York, Twelfth Night, for that reason,
too, but it didn't quite take' me there. Almost, but not quite.
Russia House did it, though. When you give up your identity, it
changes you. It came back, but in a simpler and much clearer form.
When you put yourself in a situation that is so contrary to who
you are, it challenges you moment by moment, your identity. I got
to a point where I didn't know who the fuck I was anymore. I got
rid of all the bullshit, and when I came out of it, all that was
left was what was substance."
She pauses briefly. She smiles.
"Then, of course, after I was home for
two days, I lost it. It all came back. All the bullshit."
So much for the new Michelle Pfeiffer.
OVER THE CURSE of lunch, the journeys
of the old Michelle Pfeiffer are a little easier to chart. She was
born thirty-two years ago in Midway City, on a strip of nowhere
towns near Santa Ana in Orange County, California-places that are,
for a young girl with ambition and talent, best seen through a rearview
mirror. Her father, Dick, was a heating and air-conditioning contractor,
and his wife, Donna, raised their four kids. "We
used to play Gilligan's Island and we used to fight over who would
be Ginger. My life's ambition was to be Tina Louise."
She was known by a variety of nicknames. "Michelle
Mudturtle" is the only one she chooses to share.
"I was a rotten kid, just rotten. I was always in trouble.
I tried so hard to be good, but I was incapable. just incapable.
With the greatest of effort, I would manage to get a C in citizenship.
I was a bully. I was a tomboy. I used to beat up all the boys. Whenever
there was a problem, they would come to me. I was like the Mafia
don of my elementary school. I spent a lot of time alone too. I
still have a really hard time... socializing. I become paralyzed
when I have to make small talk. I'm really horrible at it. All I
can do is hope that I won't run out of questions to ask the other
person, so I can keep the conversation off myself. Which is why
I'm not good at interviews. I tend to go right into the heart of
things, and get really personal. Then afterward I read them and
I think, Aw, shit. Why the fuck can't you just shut your mouth?"
She worked a lot of odd jobs, skipped school, surfed, tormented
the lifeguards at Station 17 on Huntington Beach. She discovered
that she could earn English credits, and thereby hasten her departure
from high school, by taking theater classes. Carole Cooney, her
theater teacher at Fountain Valley High, remembers very little about
her except, of course, that she was "very
attractive."
"She didn't go out for any plays,"
the teacher recalls. "She was more the
surfer chick than the academic or the thespian. She got a B in the
class, though."
Did Cooney have any sense that Michelle might become what she,
is today? "Absolutely none."
After high school her only ambition was to become a court reporter,
but she dropped out of stenography school. "My
mother always stressed the importance of a career. And that was
kinda the only career I knew about. But once I knew I could be really
good at it, I lost all interest."
While slipping in and out of psychology courses at Golden West
College, she worked as a checkout girl at a Vons supermarket in
El Toro. It was there, at eighteen, standing in her little red smock
and nursing shoes, that she had her moment of destiny.
"I was frustrated and aimless and asked myself,
What are you going to do with your life? And the answer I came up
with, the only thing I really wanted to do, was acting."
Pfeiffer talks about this part of her life-in fact, any part of
her life-seemingly only with great reluctance. Leaving her after
lunch I could tell that the session had been traumatic. And so after
scheduling a time to talk the next day, I left. As soon as I walked
into my hotel room, the phone rang.
"Hi. It's Michelle. Listen, don't you
think you've gotten enough? I mean, this is so painful for me. I
don't know if I can bear it anymore." I reminded her
that we had yet to talk about her early years in L.A. gonna have
my tits raised
"Oh, great," she moaned.
"Everything that I would want most to
hide."
NEXT MORNING, SHE CALLS early to report
that we are still on, but not until after she informs me that she
felt like vomiting after I left and hasn't slept. Still, when I
arrive again at her house, she is, if anything, even more relaxed
and gregarious than the day before. She is ... a changed woman.
"I'm going to make us lunch. Do you like
pesto?"
Nine months before, I remind her, she was quoted as saying that
she acts for free but demands a huge salary as compensation for
all the annoyance of being a public personality. That sentiment,
she says, still goes. "And you know what?
I earn every fucking dime I make. I can afford to go anywhere in
the world I want to go. On the other hand, I have no idea who's
going to be there waiting for me when I get off the plane. Am I
going to have to be self-conscious of how I look because I've been
drooling or something and my eyes are all puffy and red?"
"Fame is something that Michelle has
never even been very curious about," says Peter
Horton, who is now Gary on thirtysomething,
and to whom she was married for seven years. "I
know that some actors are more in love with the idea of being an
actor than in actually being an actor. Michelle is the opposite."
Pfeiffer met Horton in 1980, in an L.A. acting class with Milton
Katselas. She had already entered show business through a
southern California beauty contest, with the mission of meeting
an agent who was one of the pageant's judges. The panel proclaimed
her Miss Orange County. She failed
to win the title of Miss Los Angeles-"Thank
God, I didn't have to go to all those supermarket openings"-but
she got the agent.
While still working as a checkout girl, she did commercials, including
a Ford spot in which she sang from
the back of a pickup truck in cutoff shorts.
"I was terrible at it," she says. "There's
an exuberance needed for commercial work that I don't have. It's
not my nature. Whenever I would leave an interview feeling like
a complete asshole, I knew that I had a really good chance of getting
the job." Her first real acting role was on Fantasy
Island. She had one line: "Who
is he, Naomi?"
PREDICTABLY, PFEIFFER PAID her show-biz
dues with bimbo parts-a shot on the television series Delta
House, and movies like Charlie Chan
and the Curse of the Dragon Queen and The
Hollywood Knights. Routinely, she would call her agent, crying,
"They're putting me in hot pants again."
Most often a year or so would pass between roles. "I
remember that I used to get on the phone with Ellen Barkin. We were
both unemployed. Nobody would hire us. Every part that we wanted,
Debra Winger would steal. We could not get a job and we'd be hysterical
for hours on the phone, bitching and moaning and kvetching."
When Michelle was twenty-two, she and Horton were married in their
backyard. On their honeymoon the big news came that she had gotten
the part of tough-girl Stephanie Zinone in Grease
2. "It was the first big step
for either of us," Horton remembers. "The
notion of people pursuing and giving her that much attention has
always been scary for Michelle. I know it scared me. I didn't know
where it was going to lead."
But Grease 2, in which she spends
most of her time popping her gum, wasn't the breakthrough role she
hoped it would be. Her real emergence wouldn't come until a year
later, when she landed the part of cokehead Elvira in Brian
De Palma's Scarface. Even then,
the film's producer, Martin Bregman,
remembers, she had to be shoehorned into the movie. "I
forced that to happen against strenuous objections from almost everyone.
But when she read the part onstage with Al Pacino, it was magic.
There was such an intensity."
The critics agreed, but the parts that were offered after the film
came out were more of the same-bitches. And she wasn't interested.
Ladyhawke took her in a different direction;
again, her role was a relatively small one, but she gave this slight
medieval fantasy the quality of crystalline enchantment that it
needed. She followed this with a larger and vastly different role
opposite Jeff Goldblum in John
Landis's comedy Into the Night.
Both movies were bombs, but audiences and people in the business
were starting to notice her. After Into the
Night, Pfeiffer made Sweet Liberty,
performed with touching candor as the title character in the PBS
production of John O'Hara's Natica Jackson,
and costarred with Cher, Susan
Sarandon, and Jack Nicholson
in The Witches of Eastwick.
The same year that Pfeiffer appeared as Angela, the hit man's wife
in Married to the Mob, she played Jo
Ann, the silky restaurateuse, in Robert
Towne's Tequila Sunrise. While
her performance in the latter was almost unanimously praised, she
remembers the experience only bitterly, deflecting for her work
by saying that she hasn't seen the film and has no plans to. "What
I look for in a director is freedom, and that's not what I got from
Bob. It was a matter of chemistry."
(Towne says only that "of all the actresses
I've worked with in Hollywood, going back a lot of years, to my
earliest days, Michelle was the most difficult. Perhaps it was because
she didn't really want to play the character.")
Steve Kloves, who directed her
as Suzie Diamond, the lounge singer and former call girl in The
Fabulous Baker Boys, says he would be surprised to hear that
Pfeiffer pulled away from playing a tough character really tough.
"If anything, Michelle wanted to make
Suzie tougher. The studio was always looking for ways to soften
the character. They weren't comfortable, really, with the fact that
she was, basically, a hooker. Michelle loved to appear on camera
without makeup, to show the circles under the eyes."
During a discussion with Pfeiffer on beauty, talk turns to the
photographer Diane Arbus, who
wanted to do a series of pictures of beautiful women, because, she
said, of all her subjects, they were the most tortured, the most
freakish. "I'm becoming enlightened,
I think, on the subject," Michelle says. "I'm
beginning to realize that it plays a much more important role in
how people react to me-both men and women-than I ever realized."
She recently heard about a woman who went to a plastic surgeon
asking for Michelle Pfeiffer's lips. "Now,
that's pretty scary. I don't get it. I really don't. I mean, my
face is completely crooked. People accuse me of having a nose job.
They accuse me of having my lips injected. First off, I would have
gotten a straight nose instead of this thing. My lips are lopsided.
It's very strange. I was thinking the other day how everything is
cyclical. When I was in school, I was so ruthlessly teased about
my lips. I used to run home weeping. I used to tell people that
the reason my lips were so big is that I fell off my bicycle facefirst,
and they swole up and they never went down. And I so convinced myself
that this was true that when I was about twelve my mother had to
say, 'No, Michelle. That's not what happened."'
She, admits, however, that one of her greatest fears is that she
won't age gracefully. "You know, I said
my whole life, I'll never have a face-lift. Oh, how horrible, I
always thought. But I understand the desire. I mean, when I'm sixty
years old, are they going to let me do Russia House- With a thirty-two-year-old
leading man? I don't think so. So when I hear an actress say, 'You
know what, I'm gonna have my face done, get my tits raised, and
I'm going to get another ten years out of this business,' I say,
'More power to you. Go do it.' Even though for myself-well, I say,
'Never say never.' Otherwise you're sure to wind up on that table."
SHE'S DISHING OUT the last of the
pasta. "The last three and a half, four
years have been a real whirlwind for me," she says.
"Personally and professionally, I've
been more familiar in the past with chaos than with order, and I
think that's changing now."
"The problem is that I'm really impatient
with myself. I've always been this way. I've always wanted everything
yesterday. My basic nature is dark. My essence. That doesn't mean
that I'm that way all the time, but that's where I work from most
often in my life. I always believe that I can do everything, and
handle everything, and keep all these balls in the air, and then
I don't understand why I'm hysterically crying at the end of the
day and why I feel overloaded and can't sleep. It's my greatest
asset and my greatest curse-that I'm so fucking self-sufficient."
How self-sufficient- Her friend Kate tells about the time Michelle
single-handedly built an adobe fireplace in her house.
"Do you have any idea how hard that is to do?"
But is Michelle Pfeiffer about to become a changed woman?
"I've been working since I was fourteen years old. I've never
not worked. And I want a life now."
After declaring that this was probably going to be her last interview-a
proclamation she makes with some degree of regularity-she picks
up the exploration of her squeamishness about interviews. At the
root of it, she thinks, is the fear that she is going to be found
out.
As what? I ask.
"You think I'm going to tell you that?"
she says, laughing.
A fraud? I suggest.
"I think, probably," she
ventures. "I'm sure after every movie
that this is the one where everyone finds out that I really can't
act. I know that everybody goes through some version of that, but
I wonder if everyone goes through it as extremely as I do."
The portrait she sketches of herself, in this and all things, is
that of someone who takes everything to extremes. "Nothing,"
she says, "is halfway with me. If I were
Sean Penn, I would have killed some.one by now. If I had the male
instinct, the male aggression, I would be in jail. I have shoved
these people-the paparazzi. Really shoved them."
I left her house thinking that the only problem with Michelle Pfeiffer
is Michelle Pfeiffer. Right now she's too contradictory, too rough
and unfinished, to be anything but an eternal work in progress.
Like her roles, she's varied. She alternates, she admits, between
openness and paranoia, candor and distrust. She has the self-confidence
to take on challenging roles, then can't bring herself to assess
her work with any generosity. And what does she think of this evaluation?
"What can I say, I'm a mess." |
