Rebecca DeMornay: My Lunch With Rebecca

Rebecca motions for my hand. When I oblige, it comes down too willingly, on a fork which does a triple half gainer in the air. I am able to catch it before it does any harm to either of us. She runs a tiny, pious-looking finger (she has the little hands of the Maid of Orleans) over the wedding band.

"Maybe that's the only way to stay married--if you have a ribbon that thin."

Rebecca's only marriage--to screenwriter/director Bruce (Force Majeure) Wagner--lasted 10 months. Now she lives alone, up in the Hollywood Hills. "I like men, I like men very much. A lot of women who are intelligent, feminist, maybe have some kind of ax to grind against men. I'm very much into women--the journey--and at the same time I love men, I really do. And I think that's really great to know for sure. Even though there's a rape every nine fucking, you know, seconds." There are dates--in this business you can't help meeting people, she observes--but nothing serious. And if you're looking for her bittersweet smile at the usual Hollywood sparkling waterholes, forget it. DeMornay sightings are as rare as Cesar Romero without a tuxedo. "That's what Bruce said to me. He said, you know, I've lived in this town my entire life. And I've gone to a number of parties and a number of things and there probably isn't anyone who I haven't seen. But I never saw you. Ever. Anywhere."

Rebecca considers a few good friends to be the closest thing she's got to a family. She rhapsodizes over a longstanding relationship with Harry Dean Stanton. "The very first thing I did was as an apprentice in a Francis Ford Coppola movie--I was on the set every day and was paid a small salary. Harry Dean Stanton was in the film and we became very good friends and he helped me immensely--he really championed me. Harry Dean's got the most incredible soul." There was a two-and-a-half year romance some time ago with Tom Cruise. ("Stand up," she says to me when Tom's name comes up. I do. "He's exactly your height." I am practically eye-to-eye with Michael J. Fox.)

Although she claims not to have seen him for almost five years, Rebecca has kind words for her Risky Business co-star:

"I don't know how he got that way, but he has an incredible, innate sense of ethics that was unassailable, true, not hokey--very unusual in a young guy. Tom and I would sit around and read certain scripts and plays together. I saw him do some things in our living room that I've never seen him do on screen, ever. Acting. I hope he takes a chance, to sort of detour a little from his present persona to do the kinds of things he had in him that I saw."

"We have the whole Chariot to ourselves now. The fry cook has relinquished his spatula and is idly stirring a cup of coffee. I learn that Rebecca's mother died five years ago. There is a brother somewhere. And, of course, there's her father, Wally George, master of ceremonies of one of America's more unconscionable examples of talk show television. If David Cronenberg could reanimate Joe McCarthy, this is how he might turn out--Wally George in his Beatle haircut, marshaling a studio audience of Orange County right-wingers through an orgy of flag-waving, lancing civil rights and human decency like a pair of cocktail onions.

"My mother is alive," says Rebecca. "My mother's body has been cremated but she's very much alive inside of me. But hearing about Wally George is like hearing about a stranger. I didn't grow up with him-- he's my biological father, but to be a father, well, it's a difficult role to really hang in there and be there when your kids need you. And, well, my dad didn't do it at all. There was no real connection between us. There became an artificial one because we both ended up working in this town."

The charges against Joan of Arc ranged from a dozen counts of witchcraft and blasphemy to cutting her hair short and wearing men's clothing. Loneliness sometimes just leads to behavior that invites judgment. If acting no longer appealed to her, Rebecca would choose to write. "Believe it or not, I'm writing a novel. I really enjoy writing and the older I get the more I can tolerate the long stretches of being alone with writing. Last year, before I worked on Backdraft, I didn't work as an actress for six months and I put a lot of work on the computer. But the more acting I do, the less time it gives me to write." She pauses. "Look, your life is your work, your hardest work. Your work-work, your vocation, plays a big part. Your love life too, obviously. But your life is your real work of art, as far as I'm concerned."

I tell Rebecca that my work-work this afternoon has me going to a movie set. She commiserates: "Movies are incredibly boring to make. You're holed up in your trailer for eight hours sometimes and usually you have this incredible, emotional scene left that you're revving up for. You're keeping yourself aroused and it's hard, but whatever you do, you hang on because you don't want to blow it in your trailer. It's kind of like--it's kind of like making love, you know?"

The thing I notice about La Brea Avenue, as we're leaving the vinyl warmth of The Chariot, is that no matter how much traffic it has, it still manages to look bleak and panoramically barren. But, as a matter of fact, there is a lot of traffic, and it reminds me of what a friend told me when I said I was going to interview Rebecca.

"You know," I tell her, "a friend of mine told me that the thing I should do to make this interview more interesting than the usual celebrity interview was to see if you could stop traffic."

Rebecca thinks this is funny. "So why didn't you ask me?"

"Well, I wasn't sure you could do it."

She laughs again. "Will you come visit me in the hospital if I can't?"

And then she strides right out into the middle of La Brea, and not in a crosswalk. And, by God, she stops traffic. Not only that, these drivers are happy about it. She pauses and turns to smile at me. Then, when she gets to the other side, she yells, "There's my car," and points. There are two cars where she is motioning. One is that trophy of motoring kitsch, the Excalibur, and the other's an old Mustang like the one Steve McQueen drives in Bullitt. I know before she gets to it that hers is the Mustang. Bullitt had to be one of the loneliest men to ever sleep with Jacqueline Bisset and then borrow her car.

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