Between movies, Jeff Bridges goes off his workout regime, fends off his admiring public, and spends time with father Lloyd and brother Beau making home movies that will no doubt help launch the acting dynasty's next generation of stars.
___________________________
I don't mince words. "I'm really mad at you," I tell Jeff Bridges as I slide into my seat at a cafe in Santa Monica.
"Why?" he asks innocently.
"Because the last time I interviewed you, during Texasville, you told me that it was the best movie you ever made. You swore to me. And you seduced me into believing it."
He's blushing.
"And I'm telling you right now, I'm not letting that happen again." I'm lying: if Jeff Bridges tried to seduce me to do anything, I'd fall for it in a minute.
"Oh, that's too bad," he says, totally unabashed, "because Fearless is really a fabulous movie and--"
"Give me a break here, Jeff. I know all your little tricks."
"No, really," he continues, "it's a great story. It's about a guy who survives a plane crash, and how that affects his life. I don't think he knows what he learns from it until the end of the movie. It's not the kind of movie you can put in a nutshell; it's more that it affects you like an instrumental piece of music. It's got a great cast: Isabella Rossellini, Rosie Perez, Tom Hulce, John Turturro..."
"I don't care," I say, sticking my fingers in my ears. "Don't bother telling me. I know it's gonna be great, I know Peter Weir is a genius, I've heard that it's among the best work you've done in years. But I don't give a shit about Fearless."
"So what are we doing here?" he asks, genuinely confused.
For once in my life, I can't think of a snappy comeback.
"In my own defense," he says, even though I'm humming and not listening, "movies are very subjective. For me, Texasville had a lot of spin on it. It was the same character I played 20 years ago [in The Last Picture Show]. And the same cast. So I'd have to say that it had a lot more meaning for me than it did for you."
To put it mildly.
"They were going to rerelease Picture Show and show it back to back with Texasville," he says. "That would have been great. Picture Show stands alone, it's just so fantastic."
"My point exactly," I say. "Picture Show was a magnificent film; Texasville was not. I'll tell you what did surprise me, though: when I saw Picture Show again, I was amazed at how bleak the landscape was. I had remembered it being so much more lush."
"Lush, Martha? All I can say is... drugs! Everything looked so lush in those days."
"Yeah, I probably thought it was in color, too."
"Well, it wasn't my intention to... what did you call it? seduce you? It wasn't my intention to seduce you into liking Texasville. Although I wouldn't have minded if you did. But I'll tell you, Fearless has something you don't often see on the screen. It's a husband-and-wife love story. Between me and Isabella Rossellini. She's so gorgeous. Better than gorgeous... her face is so interesting that you just want to see what she's gonna do next. When she laughs, oh God, forget it, she's just great."
"Hmmm," I say, talking about Fearless even though I swore I wouldn't, "it seems like no one ever falls in love with their wife or husband on-screen."
"Are you married?" he asks.
"More or less," I say. "I've lived with the same guy for 18 years."
"So you're married."
"Yeah. And we're wild about each other."
"I'm constantly falling deeper in love with my wife," he says, referring to Sue Bridges, who was a waitress in Montana when they first met, and who is the mother of his three daughters. I try not to look disappointed. "I love marriage," Bridges adds.
"That's good," I say, "because the '90s are definitely the right decade for marriage."
"Yessiree. We've been married for 16 years, been together about 19. It's great."
"I interviewed your father a few months ago," I say, referring to my hero, Lloyd Bridges.
"And I loved what he had to say about your mother. Actually, I loved everything about your father. But when I commented on how amazing it was that they were still together after, what? over 50 years? he said, 'When you've got a family like mine, you don't want to make waves.' Even if it was a line, I loved it."
"No, no," he insists, "it's true. You learn that stuff."
"But hey, Jeff, this is Hollywood."
"Well, you go through some tough times, and if you safely navigate that area, then you don't want to give up that experience. It's precious. If you change partners every time it gets tough or you get a little dissatisfied, then I don't think you get the richness that's available in a long-term relationship."
"But sometimes we get all whiny and want both those things."
"What?" he asks.
"To change partners and have the richness of a long-term relationship."
Bridges taps his head. "Fantasy, Martha. Fantasy."
It's funny he would use that word, because among many women I've talked to, Jeff Bridges's name always comes up as their number one fantasy. "He's the man of the century," one of them said to me, and I certainly wouldn't dispute it.
He's been toiling away on the screen from the time he was a boy (when he was on TV's "Sea Hunt" with his dad), and although he's been busy in his share of clunkers (anybody remember Tron, King Kong, or, for that matter, Texasville?), he's often been wonderful (Against All Odds, Jagged Edge, 8 Million Ways to Die and Tucker: The Man and His Dream) and sometimes brilliant (The Last Picture Show, Starman, The Fabulous Baker Boys and American Heart). But back to the present...
"Me and Lloyd, we're talking like this," I say, holding my two fingers together to show him just how close Lloyd and I really are. "So if you give me a hard time today, I'm gonna call him and get you in trouble."
"Fire away," he says, obviously afraid of the wrath of his father.
"Okay," I say, going for the heavy stuff first, "how the hell did you get in such great shape for American Heart? The picture that Mary Ellen Mark took for the poster is phenomenal. I mean, your stomach is like a fucking work of art. It's just extraordinary," I think I may be drooling.
"Well, right now I have to lose some weight," he says, although I think he's just being modest. "I'm about 15 pounds overweight. Over the years I've developed different little techniques. Fasting and eating certain foods and working out."
"Do you work out if you're not working?"
"No, not really. Not too much. I usually let it all pop, let it all go. And in-between I get to play a fat guy, like in Texasville. And in The Vanishing I let myself go. For Fearless I lost some weight. I always feel better when I'm thinner and in good shape."
"But what? You can't get it up for working out if you don't have to?"
"I don't know what it is. It's kind of sick, but to reward myself, I drink and eat ice cream and do all this stuff that's really bad for me."
"How else are you gonna reward yourself?" I ask.
"By getting healthy. By taking good care of myself."
"Oh yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun."
He laughs. "I worked out with a guy in Seattle during American Heart. He was the same guy who designed the tattoos for the movie. He was on the work release program up there. But he couldn't stay clean, he got busted again. When I went to visit him in jail, he looked kind of relieved. Like he was back home, finally. It's a weird system we've got here... they give you a hundred bucks, tell you not to drink or do drugs, and send you back out into the world. Do you know what I mean?"
Actually, I do, and I tell him this long, involved story about my family that has to do with unions, things falling off trucks, and dope deals gone awry. Which doesn't mean anything now, but it will later in this story. Then he tells me a much less revealing story that has to do with Roman Polanski, and which will not pop up later in this story. "I saw Rosemary's Baby at a matinee," he says, "and I was the only person in the theater. I was convinced that everyone who worked in the theater was a warlock or a witch. I was completely freaked out."
"Drugs," I say, and we both laugh. Our waiter joins in the laughter, which startles us both. It's then that I notice that the waiter is wearing what can only be described as short-shorts.
"I love when the waiters wear shorts," I say.
"I'll bet you do," Bridges says. "And I like when the waitresses wear shorts." Ah, America, what a place. We smile.
"One thing about your films," I say, "is that you never seem to do the same thing twice."
"I like to mix it up in my career. Like the next thing I'm going to do is an action-adventure movie. I've never done one of those before."
"Oh, that's going to be great..."
"You think so?"
"Yes, definitely," I say. "I can guarantee that people are going to love seeing you running around sweating, half-naked, and saving women. Which is what action adventures are all about, right?"
"I'm not sure about that half-naked part," he says (although I am). "It's called Blown Away. I play a bomb disposal guy."
"Is he good at his job?"
"I guess you'd have to be," he says with a grin. "You don't get too many chances to screw up. This is the first time I've done this kind of thing. I'd also like to do a balls-out comedy. I'd like to do a children's show of some sort, because my kids can't watch any of my movies."
"None of them?"
"Only Starman. I let them watch that."
"What do they think of it?"
"Their eyes get a little wide when I start kissing Karen Allen. 'Pretend,' I tell them. They're 11, nine and seven. I guess I have a few more years, and then, boom--hormone city. It should be wild. They're getting the idea, though. They like to put on shows. We make little movies of our own at home."
"Are they going to grow up to be actors?" I ask, with a moan.
"Probably," he says, and sees me shaking my head. "No, no, acting's been good to us. About a year ago, we had a huge family gathering up in Bear Valley at this place my folks have. They built this huge compound up there, so that all of us can go there to stay in the same house. All the kids, all the grandchildren, all 25 of us. And we got, well, we didn't get snowed in actually, but there were nights when we were all stuck in the house together. For a week."
"How'd it go?" I ask, imagining the worst.
"It was intense. It was wild. You run the whole gamut of emotions. And then, a couple of days before we were supposed to leave, my dad disappeared. Everyone was saying, 'Hey, where's dad, where's grandpa?' And we finally realized that he had locked himself in his room. We went to him and said, 'What's up, are you upset?' And he said, 'No, no I'm working, just leave me alone.' And so that night he came out and got us all around the table, and we thought, Oh shit, what's he gonna say? Because he looked kind of serious. And then he tells us that Dylan, one of his young grandsons, had come up with this idea that we should make a film while we're here. And he wanted to make a version of Robin Hood. So my dad had spent the last few days in his study and written a script."
"How old's Dylan?"
"Maybe, what? seven? And my father says, 'Okay, we don't have a lot of time, we have two cameras, and we'll have to take turns directing different scenes.'"
"Your sister Lucinda isn't an actress, is she?"
"Well, right now Beau is directing Lucinda and my father in something. So she has acted, but she's got a pile of kids and she's been busy taking care of them. Okay, so, we cast the thing and set out to make the film, and it was hysterical, because you had all these pros, and we were invested in the thing. It started getting a little testy..."
"Did you embarrass yourself?"
"No, not really. Eventually, it got so that the pros were getting along pretty good. But my wife wound up to be in this horrible position. Unbeknownst to her, she fell into the role of the stage mother, because she's the mother of our kids and my dad had all of them out in the snow in period costumes, in rags and things. And Sue was saying, 'C'mon it's cold, how long are they going to be out there?' And my dad got really frustrated, and he finally said, in this really tight and controlled voice, 'Okay, we won't do this anymore.' And Sue was in tears, because the director had yelled at her! It was all pretty amazing.
"We wound up doing a full-blown thing and it was great fun. We had special effects. Like Dylan, who played Robin, was a magical character, and he was on these little shoe skis, and we towed him behind a snowmobile, but the way it was shot, it looked like he was just sailing along wherever he wanted to go. We did it like a professional movie. And Casey, who's Beau's oldest son, he's a film student and he edited the whole thing. But what's so great is that when he edited it, he left all of the side action in, because that's really where the value of the thing is. And it's hysterical. I'm looking forward to doing more of those."
"I guess in the Bridges household, 'family entertainment' takes on new meaning."
"Absolutely. With my daughters, I do this thing. . . you know that comic strip called 'Little Nemo' ? We do a girl version of that, which we call 'Little Nema.' We do special effects, with flying and disappearing..."
"Who gets to be the director?" I ask.
Bridges throws his hands up in the air, as if to say, Who else?
"So the next generation of the Bridges clan is getting ready, huh?"
"Yeah, all Beau's kids are interested in the business. And as I said, it's been good to us. I mean, sure, there's a lot of humiliation, but it's been fun. And there's humiliation everywhere, only it's not as public. My father always encouraged us. So did my mom."
"Is she an actress?"
"Well, my parents met at UCLA, in the theater department. So she was an actress for a long time. She's probably the best actress in the bunch. She has a small part in Beau's thing that he's doing and I worked with her once, in See You in the Morning, and she was great. It wound up to be a very small part for her; we had a lot of scenes together, but most of them got cut. But she's really a writer. They're trying to get her to spill the beans on the family. She's dealing with some publisher now."
"Are you all trying to talk her out of it?"
"Well, it's a tricky thing," he says. "It's like that Truman Capote thing [Final Prayers]. It's like, she's an artist, and she's had things published, childrens' poetry and other things. She's also done this remarkable thing: she's kept a diary every day of her life since she's been married to my dad, which is over 50 years ..."
"Oh, so she really could spill the beans."
"Yeah, she could. And what she did was, in her own handwriting, she went through her journal, and whenever my name was mentioned or something about me, she put that in my book. So I have a book about my whole life seen through my mother's point of view, from pre-birth through age 21. She gave it to me when I was 21. She did it for all of us. Isn't that wild? So I get her perspective of all my changes and all the things she was worried about for my whole life. So on the one hand, she's an artist and you don't want to censor her."
"And on the other hand?"
"On the other hand, I want to tell her..."
"To shut the fuck up?" I offer.
"I don't think that's how I would have put it, Martha, but you get the point." And with that, lunch is over.
---------------
A few hours later, Bridges calls to ask if I'd like to go record shopping with him. He comes to pick me up at the Mondrian Hotel with his manager and sometime-partner, Neil Koenigsberg. When I come out, Jeff's white BMW is surrounded by B-boys, all talking excitedly. A few are rappers, one is a boxer, and one claims to be a photographer. "Can I take your picture?" he asks.
Surprisingly, Bridges says yes.
"And you are ... ?" the photographer asks, sounding puzzled.
Bridges is nonplussed. "Jeff Bridges," he says.
"Right," they all shout in unison, as if he had the correct question on "Jeopardy." Lots of high-fives and then we're off.
On the way to Westwood, Koenigsberg and I discover that we were brought up in the same neighborhood in the Bronx, that we spent our holidays in Miami Beach, and that we moved to Long Island when we were in grade school.
"We probably come from the same family," I say.
"Yeah," he says, "crazed, Jewish..."
"Well," I say, defending my family honor, "they're not exactly crazed."
"No, just illegal..." he begins.
I bang hard on the back of Bridges's seat. "Wait, you told him? I told you that in confidence and you repeated it? You're in deep shit now, Jeff. You owe me big time."
Bridges is hysterical, but Koenigsberg thinks he can save himself. "No, he didn't tell me anything," he insists, "it's just what I imagined you were going to say."
"Yeah, right. I'm telling you, Jeff, you better give up the goods now." When we drop Koenigsberg off at his apartment, he's still protesting his innocence. But I was not born yesterday.
-------------------------------
"I hope you don't mind just looking around in the record store," Bridges says, as if I would mind reading the phone book with this guy. "I don't have a list or anything," he says as he randomly grabs CDs off the racks. "I just like to see what they have." We look through the country section (he loves Willie Nelson), the blues (he's a big fan), and reggae.
"Look at this," he says, holding up a Bob Marley CD. "Bob's looking kind of weird here. In his younger days."
"Yeah," I agree, "he looks like Rita [Marley]."
"Drugs," we say simultaneously.
"When I was doing The Fisher King," Bridges says, "I got into being a deejay. I hooked up with this guy who was a deejay and he did this great thing. He said, 'I'm going to teach you how to do a radio show.' He told me to look at the newspaper and decide what I was going to talk about, and he taught me how to do this riff. He taught me how to prepare.
"And he rented a real radio studio and he videotaped it so I could look at that and see how I was coming off, and I did three radio shows. I'd go in and prepare, and he hired three or four actors to go into another room and call in as if it were a real talk show, and we'd do improvs. I had a ball. It got me in the habit of playing all my favorite songs, and of making these tapes that I loved, and I still do that."
"Do you sing?" I ask. "I mean, have you ever sung in a movie?"
Bridges thinks for a second. "Oh, sure I did. In American Heart. I sang in that. Very impressively, obviously, since you don't remember it! It sure left one hell of an impression on you."
I turn red, but keep my mouth shut.
"I sang in The Fabulous Baker Boys, too, just a few little things. But have I ever gone out and sung a song as if I were a singer? No, not yet."
He buys two Dusty Springfield CDs and a Patsy Cline collection. Afterwards, we wander around Westwood. And wander. When we pass the same Harley for the third time, I ask Bridges whether he rides.
"I used to have a motorcycle in Montana, which is a great place to have one. But I started having these dreams... of flying off and grinding my ass on the road, like in a cartoon. So after I had that dream three or four times, I sold it. But I have to ride one in my next movie, so I'll have to get back on."
And then he slaps himself on the head. "Oh, okay, I remember where we parked. I totally spaced there for a second. But I remember now." Silly me: I thought we were taking a romantic stroll.
On the way back to the car we're approached by a homeless man. "Got some change?" he asks.
Bridges reaches into his pocket.
"Hey man," the guy says, "aren't you... ?"
There's a long pause. "I'm Jeff," Jeff says.
"Oh right," the guy agrees. "You're Jeff Beau."
"Well, no, my brother's Beau..."
"Oh right, right," the guy says. "Jeff Bridges. And your father is... ?"
Another pause. "Lloyd," says Lloyd's son.
"That's right, man. Lloyd Bridges. Well, you got any change or what?"
Bridges hands him a dollar. "Say hi to your family," the man says as he shuffles away. Bridges just shakes his head.
"Let's eat," he says, and grabs my hand to hurry me along.
But he can't find his way from Westwood to West Hollywood, which seems amazing, considering he's lived his whole life in Los Angeles. "Well, I always go the same routes," he says, weaving in and out of traffic with the accelerator slammed to the floor, "so sometimes I can't find my way without going back to Sunset."
In the end, we decide that we aren't really that hungry, and we drive around West Hollywood listening to Tom Waits and Joan Baez. At one point, when he's talking and driving and switching CDs, I actually fool myself into believing we're on a date, a first date, and I wonder if he's having a good time and if he'll call again. For these few seconds, I'm on my best behavior.
When Sippie Wallace and Bonnie Raitt start howling from the speakers ("Woman be wise / Keep your mouth shut / Don't advertise your man"), Bridges joins in.
He's got a damn sweet voice.
____________________
Martha Frankel interviewed Mike Myers for the August Movieline.