The Secret Life of Laura Dern

One of the persistent rumors, reported in magazines during the shooting of Rambling Rose, concerned director Harlin, with whom Dern had been involved. According to these stories, Harlin arranged with his lawyer to withhold monies owed to Dern. To make matters thornier, Harlin fired his lawyer who, married to Dern's agent, apprised his wife of the deal. "Unfair," Dern declares of the rumors. "We were all trying to make this sweet film, trying to work together. Even if it were true, I wouldn't want to know at that point. God, I hate that kind of stuff. Renny and I are fortunate, because our relationship is based on friendship more than anything. Our relationship has always remained very loving and kind. When I won the Golden Globe recently [for Afterburn], he was the first to call and send a telegram. We went through a movie together where the basic relationship was professional and friend-oriented. But I hear this and read this kind of stuff all the time. I mean, did you read how David Lynch left Isabella for me? That we were best friends and how devastated she was? Isabella is one of my three best girlfriends in the world and David and I are great friends. But some people actually thought it was true."

How would she say that the press has treated her? "I have an ego, I admit it," she says, toying with a lemon wedge on her teacup saucer. "I love to win awards, to get a good review. Overall, I feel lucky that the press has been very gracious and respectful to me. As far as reviews, if people review movies earnestly, great, although, I'll admit it's difficult because it's me that one is critiquing. To the critic who says, 'I hate the way she looks and I don't want to see her on the screen,' I say, 'First of all, you're not talking about my work. Secondly, how will I ever be different?' It brings up issues of men not liking you, childhood stuff. It's hard not to be vulnerable to it."

Are there any qualities that the men in her life have shared? "They're creative. Artistic. Bright. Funny--that's a big one for me," she says. "Tall, too. Almost everyone I've been with had very open eyes. Exposing eyes. I'm affected by people's sensitivity in their eyes." So, how am I doing, I ask her? "Very well," she shoots back, giggling. "You have an open, warm quality in your eyes--kind, loving. Very important. You meet some people and you can't see them when you look in their eyes. I could never be with a man like that. Something very important for me is someone who embraces who I am. What my body is. Embraces my strength, my creativity. Someone once said to me that we stay in a negative relationship until we learn what abuse feels like and you can say, I don't want this anymore.'"

She utters this with such palpable sincerity, with such a sense of been-there-done-that, that I ask whether any of her relationships have been particularly messy. "Oh, I've suffered terribly," she says, hammily clamping her hand to her forehead, feigning a swoon. Then, turning serious, she explains, "I've never been in a relationship where someone was abusive, physically. I'm not into beating. But emotional abuse can be so subtle, you don't even know it's coming. There was a time when I was feeling that someone was being unkind to me. It took me a long time to realize it, because it came in the tiny comments where my stomach would turn so subtly, then, days later I would realize that, although he was being loving and kind on the surface, he was being inappropriate. A definite issue of mine is having trouble realizing that your needs must be allowed to come before the other person's. Emotional abuse is the place where we deal with parental issues that come up for us, too."

Dern comes by her introspection honestly. Her family tree includes a former governor of Utah (her paternal great-grandfather), poet Archibald MacLeish (her paternal grand-uncle) and playwright Tennessee Williams (her mother's cousin). Her parents met and sparked in New York during a successful 1959 off-Broadway revival production of Orpheus Descending. Bruce Dern, with his aristocratic, East Coast prep-school background, and Diane Ladd, an earthy Southerner who had worked as a model and dancer before her stage success, deeply wanted a child. Their first born, a daughter, drowned tragically in a swimming pool at 18 months. Doctors told the grief-stricken parents that Ladd could not bear any more children.

While Ladd, who promptly prescribed herself herbs and vitamins, was pregnant with "miracle baby" Laura, as doctors called her, she and Dern were shooting the biker flick Rebel Rousers, co-starring Jack Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton. The couple parted ways shortly after Laura's birth and, while Ladd traveled to work, her mother would stay with Laura in Santa Monica, California. Dern stayed away. Ladd remarried five years later to a stock-broker, moving Laura to New York, where she lived with two stepbrothers and a nanny on 95th Street. When that marriage ended, they returned to California. "I'm sure I have made choices in my life that are from my upbringing," Dern says diplomatically. "Things that my parents have done, I wouldn't do. Just intellectually, they're not my cup of tea."

As a five-year-old, Dern debuted in an episode of her mother's soap opera, "The Secret Storm"; by seven, she was getting noticed on the big screen, slurping ice cream for Martin Scorsese in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. By nine, against her mother's best advice, she was studying with the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and by 11, her agent--whom she sought out and pursued--was sending her out for such roles as the 19-year-old centerpiece of Foxes, which Jodie Foster, her senior by four years, won. Dern landed a smaller role in that film. A year later, anxious to have with her father something of the closeness she and her mother enjoy, she confronted him, saying, "I need a dad." Since then, their relationship has slowly grown closer.

At 13, she played the role of a skunk-haired punk-rock groupie in a Lou Adler movie, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains. By 16, she was studying at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Back in America, during what she calls "that whole John Hughes period," in which she tested for The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles (yet apparently turned down St. Elmo's Fire), she struck people as out of the mold. She prepared for her role in Teachers, as a 16-year-old impregnated by a teacher, by checking herself into an Ohio abortion clinic pretending to be pregnant. She walked into director Peter Bogdanovich's office to audition for Mask with a cane and dark glasses and, having boned up for the gig by studying with a blind girl at the Braille Institute, stayed "blind" until she won the role. She was on her way to study child psychology at UCLA when Joyce Chopra thought she was ideal to play Smooth Talk's hot-to-trot teenager to whom insinuating drifter Treat Williams croons, "I'm your love... I know all about you." She quit school, but got encouragement by winning for Smooth Talk and Mask the Los Angeles Film Critics New Generation Award.

She made her next big impression in her fateful connection with David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan on Blue Velvet, and later played the atypically sexy, strange siren in Lynch's Wild at Heart. Wild, indeed. As if her history weren't wild enough, her first roommate was Marianne Williamson, best-selling author and chief mouthpiece for her doctrine A Course in Miracles. "The thing that Marianne, as a friend, has continued to help me with," she says, "is trying to learn that mistakes don't exist. You make choices and some hurt, some don't, but you always grow. I've never looked back on a relation ship and said, 'Why did I ever get involved with that person?'"

Dern sounds so studiously self-scrutinizing, so enchanted with discovering herself as she goes along that it must have been particularly galling for her when Spy magazine busted her for giving out suspiciously identical quotes during publicity interviews for Wild at Heart. Specifically, the numerous quotes that compared the experience of working with David Lynch and Nicolas Cage to taking trips to Jupiter and Pluto. "I've had dinners with directors who saw that, too, and made jokes about it," she admits, laughing. "I thought it was hilarious. I didn't take it as an insult. Everything I did during the movie was in character. I answered as Lula."

Is she telling me she's a Method interviewee? "No, no, I'm spontaneous," she protests, looking bruised. "In other interviews, I am obviously myself. I know people who are represented by either agents or managers who talk about how their representation helps them prepare for things. I've never prepared. I wasn't raised by people who did that. My parents, as you've pointed out, are very much just who they are."

Dern doesn't reveal secrets easily. She warms slowly, constantly appraising. "I caught a very successful actress whom I really respect on Jay Leno," she says. "And I could tell she was very nervous and came across as really resentful and bitchy. I thought, 'Her fear is so great that she's playing "Hey, I'm better than you" as her defense mechanism.' I've made a commitment to be honest, like, if I'm on a talk show to just say, 'Hey, you know what, I'm really nervous,' rather than to hide something. As actors, we try so hard to be authentic. I like to be somewhat authentic, hopefully, in interviews and in life."

Can she be somewhat authentic on the subject of her ambitions, particularly those related to the possibility that she might finally land a Julia Roberts- or Demi Moore-sized hit? "I have a negative connotation about ambition," she admits. "If ambition is something manipulative, stepping over whomever or doing whatever it takes to get fame and fortune, I hope I don't have much of it. The only thing I never wanted was an overnight hit, but to keep developing myself, as a person and an actor. If one movie made my career, how do you move away from it? Do I want the ability to do what I want? Absolutely. Do certain actresses, if they're huge box-office successes, get the pick of the litter? No question. So, sure I want success so I can make movies that mean something to me, that mean I can stretch myself as an actor, a writer, a director. I'm writing and directing a short film, The Gift, and I think that's ambitious. But will I be devastated if I don't get a good review? No. I try to be healthy about that. Do I want to win an Academy Award? Yes. I'm human."

Human enough to plan an acceptance speech for the night the cameras kept cutting to two-shots of her and her mother, sitting side by side, both Oscar nominees for Rambling Rose? "The Golden Globes came first and I thought Jodie Foster would win for The Silence of the Lambs," she recalls of the award Foster snaked. "About a week before the Academy Awards, I got to thinking again, 'Jodie was in a huge film, Susan Sarandon was in Thelma & Louise, another huge film,' and I knew my movie was not seen by a lot of people so I thought: don't worry about it. Then, I showed up as the dark horse in the picks of the oddsmakers in Vegas, then in TV Guide and, when the L.A. Times did their thing, I thought, 'My God.' My press agent advised me not to waste the opportunity, through nervousness or whatever, to thank all the people involved so I wrote down all the names. But, there I was sitting with my mother and Jonathan Demme was sitting behind us. Later, we went to one of the parties, then went home and talked about who said and wore what."

Odds are it won't be Dern's last trip to the Oscars. Still, it can't be fun doing critically applauded work in movies few have seen. "Let's say that my agents were very glad when Steven decided on me to do Jurassic Park and I decided to do it," she responds. "For whatever reason, I'm usually hired because a film director really likes my work, not because I'm the choice of a studio executive or because of an agent pushing me. Catch me on a good day and I may be tortured because I'm not reading any good scripts. Catch me on another and I've gotten five offers and I just don't know what to do. In the last couple of years, when the choice has come down to me and other actresses, they're people mostly in their late thirties. I really love that."

Among the movies with which Dern's name has been briefly associated are At Play in the Fields of the Lord, a role about which she felt uncomfortable and which Daryl Hannah got instead, and Robert Altman's Short Cuts. "I see the faults of Wild at Heart, say, which I never expected to be a huge movie. Yet, as I travel around the world, I've met more people who consider it one of their favorite movies. I adore Judy Davis and think of her as this artist who reads Kafka and watches obscure, fascinating movies like 8½. A friend met her and passed on to me that she is a great fan of Wild at Heart and I thought, 'Wow.' When I ran into Mel Gibson, he started quoting me Wild at Heart dialogue. Some of the same people who said to me when I did Blue Velvet, 'Why did you do that horrible film?' later told me, 'Oh, it's my favorite.' I think those movies will be around for a long time."

And so, we think, will Dern, although this instant, she's got to run. There's work to do on her 30-minute short cowritten by Emily Haas, mother of her Rambling Rose co-star Lukas, a project she says is "about a woman's struggle through a breakup." She's also due for a meeting with her agent on several roles for which she's being considered while Jonathan Demme completes his project to work with her on theirs. Should she ever manage to get a few weeks or months off, she plans on "making myself a better person, whether it's through yoga or kick boxing or emotional work, dream work, therapy, dealing with my heritage. Things that went on with my grandmother are things I'm still dealing with."

But, if Dern gets her way, don't expect too many Jurassic Parks to turn up on her resume. "Even the comedies I want to do are out of the norm. The projects I'm pursuing most have harsh realities that have to be explored. I want to show people's complexities because, by reducing each other to stereotypes and assumptions, we limit ourselves as a culture. Too many people are bruised. Too many people are dying. Maybe if we become aware of these things as a culture, the planet can start shifting a bit. I'm proud of anybody who takes on themes, ideas, feelings that aren't necessarily the norm." After a moment, she adds, "You know, our secrets."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Johnny Depp for the April issue of Movieline.

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