Jamie Lee Curtis: Controlled Substance

LG: John Huston used to call Kathleen Turner "the girl" when they first started shooting Prizzi's Honor. Until she told him "Nobody calls me 'the girl,' Mr. Huston."

JLC: She's one of those women who can come up with great lines. Kathleen Turner represents that perfect haunting woman. She's got that great look, that voice, she's almost from another time. I've never been anybody who's got great timing or lines. I've had some great insults laid on me over the years and I just haven't had the good comebacks.

LG: What are the worst things people have said to you?

JLC: I can't tell you, because if I do they'll become pullquotes from hell.

LG: You seem to have come full circle and you're only 31. You began with a TV series, and you're back doing one now. Any difference?

JLC: Then I just didn't know anything. Now I know a lot. Then I was asking a lot of questions. Now I know the answers.

LG: Your parents were friends with Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis--do you have any memories of them?

JLC: Got to tell you: I have no impressions of those people. I wish I did, I really wish that element of my life was stronger to me, but it's not at all. I don't have any real impressions of Hollywood. I remember Dean Martin a little. Kirk and Ann Douglas, Sammy and May Davis. But I was a little kid, I wouldn't understand that they were bigger-than-life people. And by the time I was old enough to realize they were bigger-than-life, they weren't in my life anymore. I didn't grow up with famous peoples' kids. Carrie Fisher and I weren't best friends. I mean, we now, as adults, have acknowledged our commonality to each other. She acknowledged that if there was anybody who could possibly understand her life it might be me. And I think that that's accurate. And she could probably understand mine on some level. But James Garner's daughter was the most famous person's kid I was close to. She and I were very good friends, in fact.

LG: Do you run into a lot of people today who say they knew you when you were a child?

JLC: I meet many, many people who tell me they know me, that they knew me in high school. And I don't remember them from Adam. A lot of people say they know you, but don't forget, you're the only person that knows who really knows you and that's something that you own. Knowing you is something that you control. You give that as a gift to people. You choose the relationships you choose.

LG: You were only three when your parents divorced. Your mother remarried within six months, your father within a year. Was it traumatic for you at the time?

JLC: I don't know. Annie is three and a half now and if I took her away from Chris--it's shocking how much she loves him. Little girls love their daddies. So to say it was not traumatic for me...Holy shit, I don't know what to think what I must have been like.

LG: You were raised by your mother. How often did you see your father?

JLC: Very rarely. He's a ghost. He's not a father, on any level. He was a stranger to me. I have yet to feel the pain.

LG: How did you feel when he married a 22-year-old model?

JLC: I couldn't care. I don't have any relationship with the guy. He never meant anything to me. Bob [Brandt] has been my dad since I was three years old.

LG: Your mother called you her "little ham" when you were a child.

JLC: I was a little ham. I was a show-off. In high school I was the most likely to steal the show. It was impossible for me not to perform.

LG: Yet you've said that high school was "a f*cking killer."

JLC: Because high school is the first real chance for people to establish themselves, and it's done very early, in ninth or tenth grade. And it becomes very competitive. Puberty is flipping you out and flipping everybody else out. There are very few people that I know now who were achievers in high school. If you were just a kinky kind of girl who wanted a lot of attention and had no discernible talent, except that she did good interviews, it was just not a fun thing. Because it was tremendously competitive. I see that with little children--they're just so mean to each other.

LG: Did you have many friends by the time you went to Choate for your senior year?

JLC: In Choate my dear friend was one of the few Jewish girls in this very preppy Eastern prep school. And an Iranian exchange student named Ali. That was it. I was singled out as much as the Iranian and the Jewish girl. I was the girl from Hollywood.

LG: Did people whisper behind your back and point you out?

JLC: My first day at Choate I was walking with this girl and two guys came up to us and said, "Hey, Jamie Lee Curtis is here. She's Tony Curtis's daughter." I said, "Oh, really? I haven't seen her." "Oh yeah, she's here, and they say she's hot." Stupid.

LG: At the very least, weird--if what you wrote in your high school yearbook was accurate.

JLC: You mean: "Weirdness is a virtue that only some can project successfully. My bosoms aren't big, but they're mine."

LG: Why'd you write that?

JLC: Who fucking knows? It was my way of saying I was lonely, I was within myself, so I was saying only a few of us grand people can be weird.

LG: Were you also afraid? You said somewhere that you spent a long time being afraid.

JLC: I always used to lie in interviews too, because for a time if you don't feel like you have anything to talk about you kind of lie your way through them. I was afraid. Afraid of not being. Of not having a mark, not making a specific contribution. There are so many people who just "be" in this world.

LG: Sounds like you went through an identity crisis.

JLC: A huge identity crisis. Monster identity crisis. Who am I? How can I make a mark? What do I like? What don't I like? A lot of it had to do with growing up in the '70s--a very nonspecific generation. The "Me" generation. We had no goal. My 20s were very hard; very, very hard. And I never thought I'd make 30. I didn't think I was going to live that long. I really think that's why now I'm, like, blossoming.

LG: Was your belief in an early death an obsession from a dream or premonition?

JLC: No. But I was obsessed with it pretty much. This is psychological stuff, but I always connected good happenings with bad happenings. So anything good meant something bad. I've now come to understand that as being life. At the time I took it very personally. I thought it had something to do with me. So I was convinced that anything good meant something horrible was going to happen.

LG: Are you a woman of frequent mood swings?

JLC: Well, I've never been able to live in the middle. I was once diagnosed as having M.S. when I was 20. I had double vision a couple of times and I had a real bad diagnosis. I had a guy who said, "Oh, she's a woman, she's having unexplained neurological problems, bingo! She probably has M.S. and will never be able to live the fullness of life." So what they tell you to do is live life in the middle. There's no way I can do that! Anybody who knows me, I fly full tilt until I totally stop. And once I knew the first guy's diagnosis was bad I didn't pay attention to it.

LG: Did your mother give you any advice on how to make the right contacts?

JLC: Mom has always been supportive and has been a big supporter of her philosophy of the business with me. Very social-- responsibility for being aggressive, going places, to parties, where I might have an opportunity in a more private arena to meet the right people--an old-fashioned kind of hustle.

LG: And did you follow her advice?

JLC: I was a very good schmoozer in my early days. I never slept around, I never abused myself physically like that. But when I was with [agent] Sue Mengers I was often asked to her famous dinner parties as the single girl. If I had a boyfriend at the time Sue would say, "No, don't bring him." And I would go. Now if somebody said that to me I'd say, "Fuck you. Fuck you very much."

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