Ellen Barkin: Born to Be Bad

This reputation thing really sticks in Barkin's craw. "It started when I was a young, beginning actress who didn't lay down and play dead. When I recently did a small part in a Miramax movie, Into the West, that my husband produced and starred in, [the film company's co-chairman] Harvey Weinstein said to me, 'Everyone used to ask, "Gee, was Ellen difficult? Was she?"' Harvey said he told people, 'Ellen spends so much time arguing with her husband that she didn't have time for anyone else.' Which I thought was great, because Gabriel is, like, the least difficult person in the world."

So, if making Man Trouble wasn't Gunfight at the Barkin Corral, was it a breeze? "Look, I was so delighted reading that script--it's like some Carole Lombard or Thin Man movie--that that alone could have kept me happy for three months. When they sent it, I thought they were sending it for me to play Beverly D'Angelo's part, the sister," she says, of the role of a sexy, madcap writer of Kitty Kelley-type exposés, "and I would have been delighted by that." Mining a similarly upbeat vein, she says, "working with Bob Rafelson and [screenwriter] Carole Eastman was actually great." Then, after more gush, she notices my eyes have glazed over and drops another tidbit. "One night, Jack sat on a car window and smashed it because I really couldn't work anymore. I'd had it. I wasn't good in the scenes and I really needed to be sent home. And he did. It was a very generous thing."

And, one might guess, a very Nicholson thing. On the record, Barkin strews nothing but rose petals across her co-star's path, calling acting opposite him "a career high point, like working with someone who's just been given his first lead in a movie. He's a real innocent, a very vulnerable actor. I had a great time and when that's happened before, with Dennis [Quaid in The Big Easy], and Al [Pacino in Sea of Love], or with Gabriel [Byrne in Siesta and Into the West], it's worked."

Barkin doesn't say as much, but something cannot have escaped her: She's done some of her sharpest turns opposite some of the most hellacious actors in the business, yet you don't catch many journalists reading their beads. "The more powerful you become, some people especially don't like it that you're a woman," she observes. "I stick up for myself. They don't mind if a man doesn't play the game, but if you're a woman, people say, 'Who the fuck is she?' They can't do stuff, not right to your face, or they feel they can't, so it comes out in other ways. It's not expected of you to put your ass up in the air--" she interrupts herself and, comically, asks me to excuse her language. "Tell me what actress you really respect who doesn't have a bad reputation. Name her? Anjelica Huston? Debra Winger? And so stories start, like your lipstick story or the Los Angeles story. Certain directors, producers and executives feel that all actresses do is put on their hair and makeup and come out and read lines. Al Pacino acts. What do we do? I used to go to work just waiting to be offended in some way. If you're waiting to be offended and you're an actress in the movies, you don't have to wait very long."

Whether she's more likely to be the offender or the offended, Barkin stands apart from the current screen crop of vapid, smiling, big-haired girls. Who could possibly be neutral about someone who's played put-upon girlfriends from the wrong side of the tracks, sexual freewheelers, unapologetic molls? She brings out stuff in people. She could frame most of her notices, like the Pauline Kael review of Tender Mercies that downplayed Robert Duvall and called Barkin's scenes "the high points of the movie." Interviews are something else.

At the mention of a now-infamous Vanity Fair piece, in which she let fly on English actors who high-hat their American counterparts, she grimaces, and declares: "I hated it. Every time Vanity Fair does that spotlight piece, they dress up a girl to the nines, get a very expensive photographer to take a beautiful picture of her, then write terrible things about her. Doesn't that make them look like a bunch of fuckin' morons? What I resented specifically about the story on me--and, by the way, James Wolcott is highly amoral and should be forbidden to write on women, 'cause he's like a schoolboy writing about girls he can't have--was that there were certain actors I talked about in response to very specific things that he left out. And then, to see their [editor in chief] Tina Brown on '60 Minutes' insulting everybody in her magazine, to hear a woman who has gained a position of power in a predominantly male field refer to another woman as a bimbo--I mean, is she stupid Or does she just want to be dishy, catty and hip? It's beyond me why anyone would have anything to do with that magazine after that."

That story, and a similarly quotable piece in Esquire, were sufficient to make Barkin's publicists try to muzzle her, right? "Oh, yeah," she says. "This is it, this is my lifetime gag order. I'm doing it, I can't mention names." She breaks up laughing and she drains her glass of Evian as though it were good Scotch, drawling: "So much for James Wolcott and Tina Brown."

Left to her own devices, Barkin says she might never have made it to the movies at all, let alone to the point of her memorable screen debut for Barry Levinson in Diner. Born in the Bronx, raised in Queens, she attended New York City's High School of Performing Arts and studied with estimable theater director Lloyd Richards at Hunter College.

Living in New York, she "loved being a waitress and taking acting classes." Barkin's Jewish working-class family--salesman father, hospital administrator mother, brainy older brother--never expected her to go full tilt for acting, but she puzzled even them when, after having studied full-time for several years, she had still never gone for a single audition. "I just would never go audition," she says, grinning, "and yet I was in very visible places where people would come looking for actors. I say I'm lazy, though I'm sure if I were in therapy for a lot of years, it would turn out to be a lot more than laziness. After awhile, it was, like, too embarrassing for me not to go on auditions. I had to be humiliated into it."

I tell Barkin I once met someone who knew her during those days and to whom she had apparently confided her ambition: to be a star. "Another lie," she insists. "Somebody would have to, like, force my mouth to form those words. I don't come from a background where, you know, I expected to be doing any of this for a living." That jibes with another story I'd heard about the Barkin of those days--that there was a long stretch of time in which she never even left her apartment. What was she doing? "In the beginning, I was reading in bed a lot," she explains, "then I didn't even do that so much. Mainly, I was sitting in this Memphis-style chair, staring at a wall that was covered with this beautiful fabric. I was thinking--William Burroughs, I'm not--just having my little thoughts. I had friends who felt, like, it was time for me to come to the phone: 'Ellen, could you come out, please?' But, you know, even now I won't go out unless I have something to do. I would never go outside just to, you know, be outside."

In spite of herself, Barkin began to land stage work and a short stint on "Search for Tomorrow." Just when she was tickled at having won a role in her first Broadway play, about Warsaw ghetto kids, Barry Levinson came across with Diner. Barkin wanted no part of it. "My agent, David Gus, forced me, thank God, kicking and screaming, to do it. I said, 'You're ruining me. I wanna be in this play. I'm so happy the way things are. Why are you making me do this?????'" But doing Diner led to her doing other movies--and nearly always to platinum reviews--for such eclectic directors as Jim Jarmusch, Paul Newman, Alan Rudolph, Sidney Lumet and Bruce Beresford. Critics cited her "force," her "power." Although she isn't big on clueing in the world about the twists and turns in her family tree, she does tell a family story that suggests how she may have come by some of her character convolutions.

"My agent's assistant called me last year just after I'd been on TV and said, 'Some lunatic woman keeps calling "The Today Show" saying that she's your mother and she wants your phone number and copies of the tape. They're getting a little freaked.' So, I called 'The Today Show' and said to the guy, 'This woman who said she was my mother, did she leave her number?' He said, 'Yes,' and I said, 'Will you tell me it?' And it was my mother. I called her and said, 'Mom, they thought you were a nut. If you were really my mother, why wouldn't you just call me?' And it's not like I don't talk to her all the time." She adds, in deadpan sotto voce: "Occasionally, they do odd things."

Much has been made from the start of Barkin's particular brand of va-voom. Which, especially sitting up close, is undeniable. She's too canny to talk seriously on the matter--"Again, how can I address this without sounding like an asshole?" she says, only chummily this time. So, I mention how her last few movies have turned her into a bona fide icon not only among males but also--especially after playing Switch's sexist pig reincarnated in a sex kitten's bod--among lesbians. She's off and running.

"It's great, GREAT," she enthuses, "because it means whoever I am on-screen is really saying something right about men and women. And let's say that I was not shocked that Blake asked me to do that movie. I thought, 'Perfect, like I'm the obvious choice, aren't I?'" And, I point out, androgyny sure didn't crunch the careers of Marilyn Monroe, Garbo, Dietrich, Gary Cooper or James Dean. "Isn't that what we all want? It's nothing I try to do. It's who I am. I know that and, at the same time, I don't. I mean, I could probably tell you psychologically why. But I wouldn't. Who says you must only appeal to these sort of base interests of men? I think it really makes me a much stronger woman."

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