Drew Barrymore: The Return of Drew

Warming to her theme of fellow actors, and still sticking with the surreal, she tells me about doing her Showtime movie, Sketch Artist, co-starring Sean Young, whom she describes as "fucking honest and brutal." Within minutes, she will use the exact words to describe her own mother. "I hadn't even met Sean when I heard that she gave the director her pantyhose," says Barrymore, whose boyfriend of six months that director happened to be. "I was like, 'What? How dare this woman give my boyfriend her fucking pantyhose.' It's her tradition to do that on the first day shooting all her movies. But it didn't bother me 'cause she was so whacko, so fucking honest and brutal, that she should wear a suit of armor. She's bitchy, totally arrogant, full of herself, but you know what? Those are her true colors and she lets them shine through."

Perhaps Barrymore recognized in Young some of the best qualities of her mother, Ildiko, a striking actress-painter better known as "Jaid," who raised her reading Lolita instead of Where the Red Fern Grows, and grooving on Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and James Taylor instead of "Sesame Street," and who once acted as her manager. "Kids I knew from school had little white bedspreads and Holly Hobby pictures on their walls," she says. "I had up a picture of Jim Morrison naked with love beads. I grew up thinking, 'I'm totally retarded. I don't relate to anybody.' Now, I appreciate my incredibly different upbringing. Nothing was exciting to me and I was always out for excitement. I still am. And it's gotten me into trouble."

And how. Barrymore is no more anxious to dredge up the details of her wild past than I am to hear them. You could, as they say, look it up, because she's written about them in her autobiography. Still I wonder, in the aftermath of all that, how she feels the press has treated her mother, who let her dress like a model when she was in prepuberty, who took her dancing at Helena's and the China Club, who left her at the homes of friends who offered her dope. The damning headlines said it all: "Drew Barrymore Dancing at Two A.M. Shouldn't She Be in Bed?" "Drew Barrymore Cocaine Addict at Twelve Years Old." "Barrymore Burns Out in Teens." And worse.

"My mother is an incredible, powerful woman," she asserts, assuming, as if on cue, a more parentally-approved posture, and not firing up another cigarette. "From what I put her through, any other woman would be totally grey and senile in a fucking wheelchair. I would have liked one of those reporters who gave her shit to have had to deal with me for a month, let alone 16 years. Most of them don't even have kids, so they don't know what it's like when a kid keeps asking her mother, who is also her manager, 'Do you love me or do you just want to make a buck off me or live your life through me?' Or a kid who literally walks over her mother to get out the door? What would they do if their 12-year-old had come home on cocaine or their 13-year-old tried to kill herself? There was no way my mother could have stopped me. The more she tried to, the more I rebelled. She handled it in the best way she knew how. Those ways might not have always been right in the eyes of some people, but they didn't have to be there with me. It's pathetic when someone stands outside and judges."

Her indignation practically rattles a roomful of cappuccino cups. "Hollywood is a town where bullshit walks and money talks," she snaps when I ask how she would characterize the industry's response to drug problems.

"You know what pisses me off? This bullshit facade of the 'I'm not on drugs' stance in the industry. Being a sober person, I can very easily get resentful of adults--whose names I will not say, but we all know who we're talking about--being excused from a film and being put through rehab, with somebody there to cover up their shit by saying they were 'exhausted,' 'sick,' or had a 'nervous breakdown.' It's very irritating for me when I know certain actors are totally fucked up on drugs and are working in movies back to back, yet it gets covered up. Why the fuck wasn't I excused for 'exhaustion' or 'the flu'? Why didn't somebody or some company put me through rehab?"

For today, she seems to keep her demons at arm's length. "I live in the program just like everybody else," she says, referring to the AA-based counseling sessions at which she regularly checks in. "When I'm 80 years old, after 60 years sober," she says, shrugging, "people are probably going to say: Drew Barrymore, ex-drug addict. It doesn't bother me because I know I am an incredibly simple person with an amazing capacity to love. I enjoy simple things: bowling, going to the swings at parks at night with my friends, talking to myself, seeing my breath on a cold night, hugging, kissing, laughing over nothing for an hour straight, like when I ponder questions in my head like: How do those goddamn 'M's' get on the M & Ms?" So how do they? "Gotcha," she says, giggling. "No one could tell me until I found someone who had been to the factory: They spray-paint them on."

Drew and I meet again one weekend at a hip neighborhood restaurant where patrons at nearby tables pretend not to notice perhaps the most controversial member of a Hollywood family so renowned they've appeared on commemorative stamps. Drew describes herself as a "total old movie freak," ticking off such favorites as Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and Breakfast at Tiffany's--from which she reenacts scenes and imitates actors to a fare-thee-well--and letting drop that the thought of one day meeting her idol, Audrey Hepburn, might make her "start crying and bowing at her feet." In the past weeks, when some half-dozen people have remarked on her resemblance to the young Bette Davis, another Barrymore idol, she had a dream, perhaps incited by seeing Davis win so many awards in her decline while looking like holy hell. "I had this dream that I was getting my Life Achievement Award at the Oscars," she says, without a trace of modesty.

"I'm sitting behind the curtain watching the scenes from my movies that the audience is watching, thinking how, once, I was a sex symbol at one point in my life, and knowing that I could never be that again. I kept hearing the audience whisper 'used to be,' 'used to be'--like about how pretty I was once. It terrified me. In the dream, I started crying behind the curtain and I walked out and said to the audience, 'I'm an old woman and I'll never be like that again.' I woke up crying." Although she has an early shooting call on Guncrazy the next day, she admits she's in no hurry to leave. I ask her whether she'd like to ask me anything, and she says, laughing raucously: "Have you interviewed any cute guys recently?" I haven't, and tell her so. She looks crestfallen. Why, I ask? It seems that things appear to be over with her boyfriend. She's been crashing at the home of Tamra Davis, her Guncrazy director. And?

"Whenever I go out, it's slim pickings," she says, still hedging. Finally, she drives home her point. "See, I've really been in love with the same guy--an actor--for eight years. We've only really met twice, both times he was with other girls. I had such butterflies that I didn't want to be like, 'Hi, I'm in love with you. Fuck--marry me,' so I went, 'Hi nice to meet you,' and walked away." She scrunches her face and sighs out exquisite teen angst. While she's busy doing Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, I'm guessing that the object of her obsession might be a certain dreamboat whose name was linked, until recently, with one of Barrymore's fiercest competitors. I name him. Her eyes widen.

"How did you know?" she asks, squealing, hiding her face, nakedly, delightfully 17--every heartsick high schooler who ever carried a torch for the dishiest guy in class. "A lucky guess," I say, meaning it, even though this guy's name did crop up in one of her past interviews. "Six years ago, I was dumbfounded by a picture of him the size of a postage stamp in a magazine. He'd only done a small movie at the time and I was in New York, and said to my friends: 'That's him.' And my friends said, 'What? Pass the popcorn.' And I'm like: 'He's gonna be so famous.' And they go, 'He's not that cute. Pass the fuckin' Jujubes,' and I said: 'You don't understand. That's the guy I'm going to marry.'"

Hearing recently that her obsession's highly-publicized romance had gone kaput, Barrymore took matters into her own hands. "I knew he was on location for a movie, so I called every hotel in the state," she says, adding, dispiritedly: "I never found him. But I would have taken the risk to say, 'Hi, this is Drew. You remember me, right? Great. Good. I'm just calling to see if you wanna go out on a date.' I would have fucking embarrassed myself, swallowed my pride just to take the chance that he wouldn't have said, 'Are you fucking kidding me?' Click. I have all these feelings for him and I don't really know him. I ask my friends all the time if they've seen him around. I read every interview on him and he's so sweet, so nice. I was even bugging the Movieline photographer today, 'Are you shooting him soon?' Oh, I am soooooooo crazy about him."

In the end, she shrugs it off and reapplies a fresh coat of lipstick. "So far, the only thing that's been compatible between me and every actor I have met is a fucking mirror." After a moment, she confides, "You see, I have a problem with men. I'm obsessed with them, completely wrapped up in them, and six months later, I want nothing to do with them. And I just sit there in my shit, crying and talking to God: 'Why have I lost this feeling?' It's devastating to me."

With her career train back on track, Barrymore may yet build up the momentum she'll need to realize her pet project, I'm With the Band, that '60s rock groupie memoir written by her pal, Pamela Des Barres. She also wants to direct a movie in Europe. What'll it be like? "Controversial," she says, shutting her eyes, smiling, as if envisioning new ways to shock the shit out of America, then adding: "Not because I try to be, but because whatever I end up doing becomes controversial." And, as an actress, she longs to play "a real bad girl, but one that you idolize--like Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success, who was powerful and just made people swallow it." But it isn't career moves that will truly make, and keep, little Drew happy at last.

"There's this house I dream of owning in Brentwood that I've loved ever since I was little. It's a cottage, not a mansion, with a big grassy area for a lamb, a horse, and ducks. Big things have never interested me. I'm a little person; I like little things. One night, it'll be raining at that house on my field of daisies, and my loved one will be kissing me and I'll feel the warmth of his hands on my face. Then, I'll know that I have lived."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Sharon Stone for last month's cover story.

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