Is Ellen Barkin the hottest hot property in town, or just its wildest card? With three new movies in the can and a fast, funny way with a quip, maybe she's both.
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Ellen Barkin bristles, just as memorably as Daniel Stern bristled at her in Diner for misfiling his record collection. Then she narrows her eyes into Cruella De Vil slits. Secretly I'm delighted. I had come to this interview amply warned that the scene-stealer of Tender Mercies, The Big Easy, and Sea of Love could be, would be, a handful. As in someone who eats up and spits out the intellectually halt and lame. As in someone once dubbed "Mad Dog Barkin" by a publicist paid to keep her and the press on speaking terms.
As in someone who, making her new movie Man Trouble, was reputedly given to such pranks as grabbing male crew members and faking loud orgasms. And to belting out obscene lyrics to show tunes between takes. And to taking on director Bob Rafelson, with whom co-stars Jack Nicholson and Beverly D'Angelo also supposedly clashed, in an all-day-long, epic battle of wills that climaxed with Barkin's yanking down her costume to moon the filmmaker before the entire company. You know, Actress From Hell rumors.
Figuring that this looked to be one breakneck rollercoaster ride with a one-woman colossus, I decided, why not just take the Big Plunge? It's the Monday morning after Barkin lost her Golden Globe nomination for Switch, so I jump in and ask about a rumor I had heard about the making of that movie: "Is it true that you fought with director Blake Edwards and, among other things, smeared your costumes with lipstick?" That's when Ellen Barkin bristles. Then she snaps at me, "That is a horrible question I cannot answer without making an asshole of myself."
Just in case her contempt might have missed its intended target--me--she growls, "Pathetic." So, while I'm guessing I've got--what?--five, 10 seconds tops before she hauls off and crowns me, or splits altogether, I admit it--I'm delighted. And relieved. She's exactly the way she comes off on-screen. Ornery. Smart. Mercurial. Roughed-up. Take-it-or-take-a-hike. City. I like these things. In fact, I've liked Ellen Barkin from the minute I set eyes on her in Diner, and not just because she reminds me of all those wild, fine, mill city she-cats I grew up with in Massachusetts. Girls too straight-up to smear Cover Girl over a hickey. Girls who might shoot hoops with you, then, just because they could, shred your heart. Girls who got fast reps for doing a slow, grinding Dirty Boogie while the rest of us did a spastic Frug.
In Hollywood, just like back in high school, reputations are quirky things. You hear the talk, wild talk, all the time, but you can never be certain. There's loads of other stuff I want to get to besides how Barkin earned such a spikey reputation. Like what she thinks of the hype--now that she's replaced Meryl Streep in Man Trouble, due out any minute, and replaced Debra Winger opposite Robert De Niro in the movie of Tobias Wolff's autobiographical novel This Boy's Life: A Memoir, which she's now shooting--that says: This Year Could Be Hers. Like why she uprooted herself, her husband, actor Gabriel Byrne, and their two-year-old from lower Fifth Avenue Manhattan to an 11-acre farm in upstate New York. Okay, so I do want to know about how she got that spikey reputation, too, but I won't get down on all fours and play Arsenio Hall, so I say: "Hey, Ellen, these are my questions. Why should this interview be different from any of my others?" She doesn't split, she doesn't conk me. In fact, she raises her glass and grins lopsidedly at me. So, I repeat: "Did you clash with director Blake Edwards and smear your costumes with lipstick?"
"Part of me just wants to stare at you and not address this because," she says huskily, "by addressing it, I'm giving credence to this crap. I hear stuff like this all the time. We should all just laugh at this stuff and say, 'Right. I know I'm a bitch. I smeared lipstick on my costume.' I'd like to look the person in the eye who told you that and say, 'You worked on the movie? Tell me the day I put lipstick on a costume. What did the dress look like?' The wardrobe designer on Switch is still a very close friend and I would never have destroyed a costume in that movie. That was one of my favorite things about the film. Oh, the nerve. It's fucked."
She starts to say something, swats it away. "The other day I read an interview with an actress," she observes, after a moment, "where they took a subtle dig at her for having her two children on the set. I mean, fuck. Fuck them! How dare they? It was just that she was walking around with her two children and her nanny. They didn't say she was holding up production because of her children. I'm sure she wasn't. I know her. I mean, give me a break! She's a mother trying to do her job and keep her family together. Do they say that about a million male actors who walk around with bodyguards or an entourage? It fuckin' sickens me."
Point taken. But what about the lipstick-smeared costume? "Total fabrication," she says, crossing her heart, "I swear it." Taking a deep breath, she continues, "I'll tell you a little story about how a woman--you know, not a lie-down type of girl, not a rollover--gets treated in Hollywood. 'Smeared lipstick on a costume,' somebody told you? The truth is, there was a scene where I was in my underwear and we had a disagreement about how revealing the underwear would be. Just having had a baby, I did not want to wear such revealing underwear. That was it. I adored Blake Edwards, who gave me the best comedic role to come out of Hollywood since Lucy. Every day, I'd say to him, 'I'm not Peter Sellers,' but I had to be, for Blake. I never fought with him. We had an argument over underwear. It lasted for, like, half an hour. I mean, it's an outrage. An outrage. The day I take lipstick and draw it on a costume I should never be hired for another movie again."
Fat chance. Switch shorted at the box office but Barkin's clowning was such a hoot that she was hired--at a hefty salary hike, she'll happily tell you--for Man Trouble, joining the star, director and screenwriter of the esteemed Five Easy Pieces. If she was jazzed about working with Nicholson and inheriting (from the pregnant Meryl Streep) the Miss Prim role of a Bach cantata choir soloist (Diane Keaton and Jessica Lange had been contenders before Streep), some say she had odd ways of showing it. I try out the rumors I've heard, about the faux orgasms, the dirty ditties, the mooning incident.
"Where do you get this stuff?" she says, looking at once bemused and steamed. "Here's a little Man Trouble story for you. Some clothes just weren't made properly, you know? There was an exposed zipper and the pants were really big. So we had to wait and have them sewn, 'cause I obviously couldn't get in front of the camera like that. It had nothing to do with me not liking the clothes. Then, when the shooting was over, my assistant went to the accountant to pick up my final per diem, and the accountant, who was very nice to me the entire movie--to my face, anyway--says, 'I'm glad to see her go. They paid her a lot more money than she was worth.' Granted, I don't pull in as many moviegoers, but do you think this guy said that to Jack Nicholson's assistant? I called [the accountant], who says, of course, 'Oh, hiiiiii, Ellen, how's the baaaaby?'
And I said: 'Next time you have a problem with an actor, Larry, why don't you discuss it with the producer of the film and not that actor's assistant?' Now, I'm not necessarily linking the two, but an anonymous item is printed a week or so later in Los Angeles magazine--and I do condemn the press for not following up on whether it was true--saying that I was so difficult on the movie I held up a day's shooting because I felt my pants were too tight."
Barkin declares she has "a very big problem" with people who misread her on-set behavior. "Once you're in," she explains, "they create a little bubble for you to live in and then blame you. It's a small incident, but when I was a support actor or working on lower-budget movies, everyone would come up and say, 'Cameras ready.' All of a sudden, I noticed no one would say that. Now, if they're ready, I'm not going to go sit in my trailer, smoke cigarettes and drink coffee. But if I don't think everybody's ready, I'll sit in the makeup chair for another 20 minutes or close my trailer door and work on the script. All of a sudden I poke my head out and say, 'What's going on?' And they go, 'We're ready,' and they've been ready for, like, 20 minutes, but they're told in some way: 'Don't offend the star.' It took me a couple of movies to realize that, so now I say, 'Please tell me when you're ready.' Or, if I'm not ready, I'll say, 'I need another 10 minutes.'"
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."
Too strong, some say. Twice in movies, she's had to tone it down. Preview audiences watching a Switch seduction scene found the heat generated between her and Lorraine Bracco so palpable that the director cut it from the release version. "Audiences got very uncomfortable," she allows, "the way the scene was supposed to make them feel. But their reaction cards said they didn't want to feel uncomfortable. Blake made [Warner Bros.] keep testing the movie, but when he finally cut the scene, it broke his heart and ours." The distributors of Siesta, Mary Lambert's unsung 1987 quirkfest co-starring Gabriel Byrne and Jodie Foster, "thought I was too aggressive, unsympathetic, so I came back and revoiced my dialogue any time there was, like, an 'edge' in it."
Although Barkin rages against "moviemaking by consensus, " she is well aware of the power of the bottom line and of the concessions one sometimes makes to toe it. It was not until she pressed the bedsheets with Dennis Quaid in the French Quarter and frisked Al Pacino against a wall that audiences really started to pick up on her. Does she respect herself the morning after? "The biggest lure for me is my co-star," Barkin says, when I ask her about the slashy thriller Sea of Love. "To tell you the truth, I didn't even feel the need to read the script. That's not to say I didn't think it was real well written. But as soon as I heard it was an Al Pacino movie, I said, 'I really want this job.'" And what did she make of the end result? "Don't ask me. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. I saw it and thought, 'Smart girl.' It made me a star. What am I, an idiot?"
Anything but. "Huge," she calls her rise in salary between The Big Easy and Man Trouble, although she's got a way to go before she sees a payday like Jack Nicholson's. "The problem isn't 'pay me as much money as Tom Cruise,'" she asserts. "Until I pull in audiences like the biggest male stars, I don't want those salaries. What pisses me off isn't that women don't make as much money as their male counterparts, but that we don't bring 'em into the theater because we're not given the arena to do it in. None of us women do, no matter how big a star we are. Period. Hollywood tells you from Jump Street: We pay you in terms of what you bring back. But the attack should be on the people who make movies. 'Why don't you make vehicles where women can bring in $80 million?'" I interject: "How about Thelma & Louise?."
Barkin pats my arm, advising, "Get real. It garnered the most attention in the press of any movie last year, but in Hollywood terms what'd that mean? $48 million? That's not a big hit. When they make a woman's picture, they treat it like a 'woman's picture.' In the '40s, they didn't treat Joan Crawford movies like that, but as the big movies of their year. I'm upset that there's no Terminator with a woman in Arnold Schwarzenegger's role. Because that would make just as much money."
Well, Renee Soutendijk did play a cutting-edge cyborg in Eve of Destruction. "Nah, you have to really do it, pump it like Terminator," she says, riled. "I'm not for movies costing a lot of money, but you can't fudge on action and special effects. You can't make it as a $30 million movie, 'cause you're going to drop the ball. They've already got the man thing going and they don't want to really give women the arena to do it in. But you've got to spend the money and cast someone who's right for it, ya know, Arnold Schwarzenegger in a skirt. Someone who's gonna, like, clean up the universe." Such as, like, Ellen Barkin? "Well, I spoke to [director] Walter Hill, who's a good friend of mine, about really trying to get a movie like this going. But maybe it shouldn't be me in the part. Maybe Sharon Stone should be the Terminator girl. She's a great comedienne and real talented."
Barkin, hotter than a pistol just now, declined not only the role Stone won as the homicidal bisexual in Basic Instinct ("I wasn't prepared to do that kind of graphic movie," she explains), but also Catwoman in Batman Returns.
"Are you surprised that I would ever even consider it?" she asks, kiddingly, since it's the slinky part she seems born to play. "I could have done it, I might have--I mean, Jack was a great 'Joker'--but that's not my personal agenda." But she doesn't always best her competition. She lost to Geena Davis the Oscar-winning role of the dog trainer in The Accidental Tourist, which, she recalls, "I totally auditioned myself right out of. During the reading, I was thinking, 'Oh, bummer, I'm really letting William Hurt and Lawrence Kasdan down.'" And to her close friend, Lorraine Bracco, she lost GoodFellas, another shot at an Oscar. "I'd rather see a friend like Lorraine benefit from it," she says, "because she's like in my family."
Although Barkin is a big Debra Winger fan, she chafed at missing the lead in Bernardo Bertolucci's movie of The Sheltering Sky, the Paul Bowles book of which she is a self-professed "scholar." Through Jim McBride, who directed her in The Big Easy, she met Bertolucci. "We sat next to each other at a Madonna concert then, later, wound up eating pizza at somebody's house ... The Sheltering Sky was one of those rare occasions where I said, 'I'm gonna do everything I can to convince this guy to give me this part.' Obviously, it didn't work. He was totally unimpressed and I never heard from him again." Barkin won This Boy's Life when Winger dropped out, just as she won Man Trouble when Meryl Streep got preggers. Did she feel anybody on the shoot comparing her to Streep? "Well, the director and the star knew she was going to be in it, but who else? Do you think the grips knew it was supposed to be her and went around plaintively going, 'Meryl? Meryl! She got pregnant, they rethought it, recast it, and they just went on from there. There was certainly no attempt to have me play it the way Meryl Streep might've played it. Peter O'Toole was, like, the tenth choice to be Lawrence of Arabia--do you think once he got on the set anybody cared?"
These days, Barkin is clearly inching closer to the front ranks. One sure sign? A gleaming stretch limo waits curbside after our first meeting to whisk her to her dubbing session. Total distance from the restaurant to the sound studio: three blocks. But power isn't just about perks, and I ask Barkin, "What do you want out of your career?" It's the first time she seems thrown. "Yeah ... ummmm," she mumbles, looking around the room and stalling for time, "...wow...yeah, well, I like my work--I mean, I love my work. I would like not to play bad roles ever or, at least, to disperse them with stuff that interests me." Sure, but what about creating Ellen Barkin movies, stuff in which she's not a satellite, a victim, the male star's blue-collar bombshell? "It's no stretch to picture me standing next to Al Pacino or Robert De Niro," she concedes. "Those are ethnic New York men. I'm an ethnic New York girl. Everybody has their limitations. I mean, I should never be cast as Queen Elizabeth." What about her Sophie's Choice? Her Frances? Okay, her Terminator? "I really think I'm an actor and that's it," she declares, shrugging.
Then, after a moment, she says quietly, "It's only every three to four years where I read a script and say, I want to act that.' I mean, I cannot read another 'feminist backlash' script--and this is a pattern that's going to crop up in movies in 1992 and 1993--about women killing women, women hating women, women not trusting other women. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is just the beginning of loathsome movies about turning women against each other. But ask me to come up with an idea for a movie or a screenplay? I could never do it. Ever. But why can't I just be an actor? Why do I have to be a producer? But, you know, for a week I worked in a movie my friend John Turturro just directed and I thought, 'I would have loved to produce this movie.' I thought that, too, when I worked for Gabriel in Ireland on his movie. I like doing business. My lawyer says that I'm never so excited as when I'm negotiating a deal. Maybe I'd rather come up with some great film for an actress I go to the movies to see: Debra Winger or Anjelica Huston."
Some say that Byrne, the man Barkin describes as the "world's least difficult person," has done wonders to help one of the world's more difficult persons become, well, less so. "My dukes are so much lower than they used to be," she declares, staring off. And then her face lights up as Byrne strolls into the dining room, almost on cue, en route to a chat-up at a nearby table with Last Exit to Brooklyn director Uli Edel about co-starring with Madonna in a thriller. Byrne comes over and introduces himself. The Dublin-born actor, best known in America for Defence of the Realm and Miller's Crossing, watches his wife shimmy out of the booth to make huggy-pie with Christopher Lloyd, with whom she did The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, and observes of her thorny reputation, "A lot of resentment comes up because she's independent, she thinks for herself, she doesn't take bullshit. But, you know, she's a total pussycat." Just then, the pussycat breaks away from Lloyd, nudges her husband's attention toward my tape recorder and says, "Turn that thing off." Not to worry, Byrne has revealed no secrets and is already clearing out for his meeting. Barkin snuggles him and purrs, "Button your shirt, Gabriel." He does.
"We travel en famille," she reports, smiling after him, pursing her lips mockingly at her own French. "We're usually not apart for more than five weeks. That long we can sustain without the relationship seeming to take steps backward. But once a child is involved... I mean, I took the baby to Ireland to be with Gabriel on his movie and now they'll both come with me to shoot This Boy's Life in Vancouver. We just moved into our new house in Pound Ridge and kept our loft in Manhattan so I don't have a nervous breakdown. I'm a very urban girl. I like seeing a tree, but if you took it away from me, I wouldn't miss it. But we're both sad because now we're working and can't be there. And Jack Daniel is ... the best." Does little Jack (named, she says, because "we like one-syllable names; the Daniel comes from Gabriel's family") favor his dolefully handsome father or spectacularly carnal mother? She collapses into herself, beaming, her features doing a manic little tap dance as she thumps her chest. "I spent nine months praying, 'Just Gabriel's eyes, please,'" she says, "and asking, 'How recessive is the gene for blue eyes?'"
Barkin is so immediate, and has such impact, I ask how she thinks she might have fared in the days when tough, scrappy dames like Joan Blondell and Gloria Grahame sold tickets right alongside James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. "I probably would have been one of those bad girls like Bette Davis--you know, straining within her straight jacket. But I cannot imagine anything better than how Hollywood nurtured actors then, especially women, compared to how we're treated today. Of course, there was a lot of shit to deal with then. I mean, Bette Davis didn't just get to make The Letter." But as much as Barkin loves her "Late, Late Show" heroes, she gets positively fan-like when she conjures up a more contemporary name: Faye Dunaway. "The week Bonnie and Clyde opened, I saw it, like, 12 times," she recalls, beaming. "I just sat there and watched this woman and I didn't know anyone else was in it. And, when I met her years later, she didn't disappoint."
Sure, you can glimpse something of Dunaway's anger and ferocity in Barkin, but more and more, lately, she reminds me of Angie Dickinson, circa late-1950s when she played in Sam Fuller's China Gate and in Rio Bravo for Howard Hawks. "Don't say this to me now," Barkin cries, mooshing her face, shading her eyes. "Whyyyyyyyy are you saying this? You know, Angie Dickinson is a very beautiful woman, but, looking at Man Trouble footage yesterday, I sat there saying, 'I just am Angie Dickinson.' It's wild--wild! I mean, I look exactly like her. It's also that my hair is up and it's a kind of sophisticated look. Cab drivers have told me this--I mean, it's not something that hasn't been said to me--but the older I get, the more I seem to look like her, which I like a lot."
For the moment, Barkin hasn't much time for nostalgia. After her movie with De Niro, she and Byrne may do Sweet Lorraine, set in the jazz scene of the '50s, for director Ralph Bakshi, who directed Byrne and Kim Basinger in Cool World. Then, there's the possibility of working with Joel and Ethan Coen, for whom Byrne made Miller's Crossing. She admits to calling the brothers "at least five times a day, begging them" to put her in an upcoming movie. As I walk her those few blocks to her looping session--"I knew you'd ride me about that limo yesterday," she says, laughing, "but it was just because I didn't know where the place was"--she says she's suffering from guilt pangs about that big, rambling farm she and her husband bought. "Gabriel wakes up in the morning and takes our son out for walks around the property," she says, sounding touched, almost mystified, "when I don't even have a clue where our second acre starts. Why don't I want to go out and take a walk? Why don't I want to see what property we own?" She rolls her eyes and grabs my arm, "Jeeeeeeez, Steve, don't write this. It makes me sound so nice and boring." As her heels clack down the hallway of the recording studio, I think: Not a snowball's chance in hell, Ellen.
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Sharon Stone for our January/February cover story.