Michelle Pfeiffer: Out of the Past

Men want her. Women love her. Thoroughly modern Michelle Pfeiffer is the one contemporary screen actress who's really got the old movie star magic.

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I used to go to the movies to find out who to be. This was 30 years ago, when I had not the dimmest notion of who I was, and so assumed the persona of whatever fantastically appealing movie star struck my fancy. There was always someone. Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn--actresses whose feminine personae were as distinct and inviolable as fingerprints.

These were women who possessed larger-than-life personalities that not only made them ideal role models for adolescents in identity crises, but also made them every bit as spectacular as movie stars are supposed to be. It is one of the few regrettable legacies of the egalitarian-minded '60s that stars of today insist on trying to prove that, despite their retinues and salaries, they are, when all is said and done, precisely like us.

Only in such a world could the hours actresses invest in exercise and collagen injections be rivalled by the hours they squander on trying to make themselves less glamorous. Once upon a time, Irene Dunne wore feathers and Lombard wore satin. These days, a scraggly Sigourney Weaver comports with gorillas, while Jessica Lange dyes her hair brown, and Meryl Streep hollers in the Outback with yet another accent. Presumably, if Bette Davis were making Now, Voyager today, she would start out glamorous and turn into a frump, and the picture could be called Moral Victory. Contemporary movie stars demand to be paid like movie stars, loved like movie stars, and treated like movie stars, but simultaneously insist on being viewed as serious human beings. This is understandable. What's unfortunate is that Hollywood's beautiful women seem unable to believe that it is possible to be gorgeous and serious at the same time. That is, except for Michelle Pfeiffer.

Somehow Pfeiffer manages to be radiantly beautiful and to project gravity as well. And in the moment that confirmed her as a major star--that slow, show-stopping spin atop Jeff Bridges's piano when she sang "Makin' Whoopee" in The Fabulous Baker Boys--it was apparent that she does so by magically grafting the sensibility of a modern woman onto the glamour of a '30s icon. The Fabulous Baker Boys wasn't a big hit. But then, none of Pfeiffer's films has been huge at the box office, with the exception of The Witches of Eastwick, an especially fine picture for those who enjoy seeing glamorous women look unattractive, and one in which Pfeiffer was upstaged by a cold sore. Still, Witches was an ensemble piece. Pfeiffer has never "carried" a blockbuster. But this has not kept her from becoming a major star. Nor has the fact that she doesn't appear in gossip columns with regularity, or that the handful of interviews she has granted confirm the worst fear of assigning editors: that the best talent makes for the worst copy. Thus far, though Pfeiffer's been known to carry a portable, computerized dictionary, she hasn't yet restrained herself from delivering real-life lines that should not be assayed even by a gorgeous blonde. "I mean, you know," she told the interviewer from Vanity Fair, "...it's like this is not a dress rehearsal. It's life."

Of course, the salient points of Pfeiffer's life have repeatedly been made available. Thus, it is known that she was married for seven years to Peter Horton. "I had a great marriage with a great man," is her word on that subject. Equally, it is assumed that she had a doomed and difficult affair with her Dangerous Liaisons co-star John Malkovich, which nearly ended his marriage to actress Glenne Headly. More recently, the public has been apprised of her relationship with Fisher Stevens, an actor several years her junior, who appeared in Short Circuit and Reversal of Fortune, and joined her in Moscow while she was shooting The Russia House with Sean Connery.

As such track records go, Pfeiffer's history with men is not uninteresting, for it suggests a personality in transit and a woman not entirely certain of who she is or wants to be. And indeed, once the Valley Girl language is set aside, there is something genuinely mysterious about Pfeiffer--a quality that feeds the aura necessary to a real star, whose sparkle should, after all, be transmitted from a vast distance.

Mysteriousness can be artifice, but Pfeiffer's appears not to be. She tends to baffle even those closest to her. "I wouldn't be surprised," her friend Cher once told her, "if one day you said you have a 10-year-old child growing up someplace." And part of Pfeiffer's "mystery" takes place inside the movie camera: rarely do her co-workers see a hint of the power that shows up later in the dailies--as if her onscreen work were an exercise less in acting than in alchemy.

Judging from her pronouncements, perhaps no one is more baffled by Pfeiffer than Pfeiffer herself. "I don't know if I'll ever really have that sense of arrival," she has said. She appears to view her current life with the bemused air of one who has spent hours standing in line to purchase lottery tickets, and now cannot figure out where all the money came from.

Though Pfeiffer has stated (invoking yet another cliche), "I think I knew where I wanted to go from the beginning," it certainly seemed at first that she would simply settle for the comfortable faux Midwest life that can accrue naturally to a beautiful young woman raised in Southern California. A small house, all the major appliances bought on time--the usual bounty for the daughter of a heating and air conditioning contractor, a girl who hung out at Life Guard Station 17 in Huntington Beach, did a brief stint at junior college, spent a year studying to be a courtroom stenographer, and ended up as a checkout girl at the Vons Supermarket in El Toro. But naturally--as it must ever be in Hollywood tales that begin with a middle-class existence--there was another part of her, and it was steeped in determination. So she entered the Miss Orange County beauty pageant because one of the judges was an agent, and the rest, as Pfeiffer herself might say, is history. There were roles in "B.A.D. Cats" and Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen and a few other ventures she could happily forget, but nonetheless, so few years later, she gets a million plus per picture and her agent receives a dozen scripts for her each week.

Pfeiffer is now reputed to be wary of celebrity's pitfalls, fearful that she is changing into the character she played in Sweet Liberty--an actress with an angel's face and a tough-talking mouth. "You know," she says, "it's, like, no more Mrs. Nice Guy."

Why Pfeiffer? Though the male audience may covet her, I suspect that Michelle Pfeiffer's success has occurred in direct ratio to the degree to which she exhibits a persona that holds special appeal for women. It is a persona first glimpsed, curiously enough, more than five years before she became a star, at the close of her final scene in Brian De Palma's 1983 remake of Scarface.

The scene was set in an upscale restaurant, where Pfeiffer--as the gangster's moll Elvira--graced a table, her toothpick of a body barely clad in one of those skintight satin gowns that turn sitting into a major feat, a dress of the sort that required Jean Harlow to recline against upright wooden boards between takes. Glittery and gorgeous, Pfeiffer's Elvira is equally stoned and remote, and therefore a seemingly ideal victim for Al Pacino's hostile, drunken Tony Montana, the drug-dealing husband who berates her for failing to bear children or even to bear sex, or to do anything more sociable than shove coke up her nose. Stirred by his tirade against her, Elvira rallies, and as she does, her exquisite-- albeit bloodshot--eyes narrow into menacing slits. "I'm leaving," she tells him flatly. "I don't need this shit."

It's a wonderful moment, played--as is Pfeiffer's wont-- at the lowest conceivable pitch. Its impact is lessened an instant later when art imitates life: For just like the critics and audiences who would soon note Pfeiffer's extraordinary radiance in Ladyhawke and Into the Night and deem her much too pretty to be regarded seriously, Tony fails to read beyond what Elvira's appearance suggests. "One Quaalude and she'll love me again," he mutters. But he's wrong. Elvira, like a lot of other characters Pfeiffer has played, may not be a paragon of feminist idealism, but she is constructed around a modern core. "I like women who take control over their lives," Pfeiffer once said of her roles. "I like women characters when there's no bullshit about them."

Like many contemporary women, Pfeiffer's characters are less independent than they may have hoped to be. Though the professional life they coveted and feared has turned out to be easier than they expected, their personal lives are far more complicated than they counted on. In the face of this reversal, they may feel afraid, but they summon courage. The one thing that can be said emphatically about Pfeiffer's screen characters is that they are women whose masochism has limits. When Pfeiffer veered from this profile by playing Madame de Tourvel, the virtuous beauty who expires from love in Dangerous Liaisons, she was taking the opportunity to prove her acting skills in the most time-honored way: by playing against type. (And the Oscar nomination she won validated the wisdom of her doing so.) Madame de Tourvel may not have been able to survive without love, but Pfeiffer's modern women can. No matter how unhappy they might be, each has a streak of competence broad enough to keep them from being the self-styled tragediennes that Garbo, Joan Crawford, or Bette Davis often played.

That the persona Pfeiffer projects strikes a note with contemporary women is hardly surprising, since women are still attempting to reconcile their notions of what they should be with the reality of who they, in fact, are. Women these days do not live in the brave new world envisioned in the early feminist days. The kind of woman "liberated" female audiences will accept has changed in the last 15 years-- so radically, in fact, that a filmmaker today could not raise a nickel for 1978's An Unmarried Woman, in which Jill Clayburgh turned down a summer in Vermont with artist Alan Bates in favor of a solitary season of self-discovery in the torpor of New York City.

The women Pfeiffer plays can, as in The Fabulous Baker Boys, Tequila Sunrise, and Married to the Mob, choose to be with a man, simply because they are sure enough of their strength that they no longer need to prove it. This is an enlivening message at a time when those who once stood at the barricades are too tired or too chastened to put much energy into the notion that life without a man somehow "ennobles" a woman. Pfeiffer's women are a triumph of being over seeming: they have character while lacking the rhetoric that too often substitutes for it. "You're kind and honest and principled," Pfeiffer's character is told in Tequila Sunrise, and this is equally true of every contemporary woman she plays.

And yet, the world that hailed Pfeiffer as a star in the late 1980s is not all that different from the old days, especially in Hollywood. This is still a world in which a woman as beautiful as Pfeiffer is rarely viewed as serious, and is thereby subjected to the same shopworn, degrading assumptions about blonde beauties that sent Marilyn Monroe running to Arthur Miller and Lee Strasberg (for all the good that did her).

Monroe's fortune and misery were culled from the fact that she was the personification of what men want women to be. Certain current female stars carry on the legacy, among them Kathleen Turner, Melanie Griffith and Kim Basinger. Others, like Jessica Lange and Meryl Streep, unwilling to play a vamp or bimbo, style themselves in terms of what women believe they ought to be--they could get by on their looks, but they resolutely set their beauty and sexuality on a back burner while they go about the business of being upstanding.

Pfeiffer inhabits neither of these categories, and that's what wins over men and women. She manages to be sexy and upstanding at once, and so she dents the Madonna/whore fixation that's dominated Hollywood since the days of silent movie queens like Theda Bara.

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