Drew Barrymore: Drew Grit

The inimitable Drew Barrymore says her piece on shooting Bad Girls ("the pits"), on boys ("totally confusing"), and on her career in general ("the sky's the limit!").

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The morning after Drew Barrymore presented one of the biggest prizes of the night at the Billboard Music Awards, she awoke to find herself the subject of a couple of wild rumors, one of which I have now brought up with her. "I did not get my thing pierced, nor do I wear a ring down there," Barrymore explains, glancing fastidiously down there. We're lunching at Musso & Frank Grill, the legendary restaurant that reeks of "old Hollywood," and the 19-year-old Drew is looking every bit as lithe and sensational as she does in the Guess? jeans ads. "Steve, you know this story isn't true," she continues. "why would I inflict that kind of pain on myself? Besides, you know me: if I did have one, that would mean I had made a decision to have one and I would be proud of it. I'd be, like, 'Yeah, I got my thing pierced.'"

I'd bet 10 bucks that our waiter, who's all of a sudden hovering, has caught an earful of this. Drew seems to think so too, because she beckons him over, glances up with saucer-eyed innocence and whispers, "Sir, may I have another iced tea, please? Thank you so much." Now, that's true Drew: a perfect little contradictory moment from Hollywood's erstwhile little girl lost, a kid who can crunch your heart with her naivete one second and then in the next, curl her upper lip and make you feel like you just fell off the hay truck.

Drew Barrymore has been to some scary places since bowling over the world in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. She nearly took herself out with a combination of bad movies, tabloid headlines, killer drugs and erratic behavior on the set. But somehow she made her way through. When she and I first hung out together two years back, she was announcing to a town that had largely written her off: "I'm back!" She was right.

Back? She's so far back that at times she seems ubiquitous. It began with the improbably good reviews she got for the movies Guncrazy and Poison Ivy. Then she did her Amy Fisher impression in the highest-rated of the three "Long Island Lolita" TV flicks. She emerged sufficiently unscathed from Joel Schumacher's hilarious TV misadventure "2000 Malibu Road"--and a hot romance/engagement with "The Heights" star James Walters--to saddle up alongside Andie MacDowell, Madeleine Stowe and Mary Stuart Masterson in the upcoming big budget women's Western Bad Girls. And now she'll be bonding with Whoopi Goldberg and Mary-Louise Parker in the tragicomic AIDS road movie Boys on the Side. And, apart from all that, she's everywhere wearing Guess? clothing, a Bardot pout and little else. We'll get to how Barrymore has survived all this exposure. But first, more dirt. (And, later, as it turns out, even more dirt.)

"This pisses me off," Drew says when she hears how I heard about the ring down under thing--at a party.

"Heck, Drew," I say, "we haven't even gotten to the part about Billy Idol yet."

"Now, I know you hear everything about everybody," says Drew, "so check this out: since I saw you last, my friends Mel and Justine and I may go see a band play or go out for something to eat, but I rarely, rarely go out anymore. It's just too big a hassle. People look at you like you're from another planet. It's uncomfortable not only for me, but for my friends. So, I'm like a recluse. But when my manager says that Billboard wants me to present their biggest award, and he asks me 'Please, please,' I do. The next morning, I'm reading USA TODAY like I do every morning, and see, 'Drew Barrymore Gets Herself a Date With an Idol.' I hate seeing me in my morning paper. So, now I'm dating Billy Idol, huh? I'm reading it going, 'Oh, fuck. Great. Fine. Whatever.' I mean, I never went on one date with Billy Idol. Then, my publicist hears that Rick Dees, this cheesy, bad, '80s, fingernails-on-the-blackboard talk host on KIIS-FM, is planning to go on the air and say that I had this certain part of my body pierced. My publicist is going, 'Please don't go on the air and say this, because it's just not true.' He went and said it anyway. I mean, Billy Idol and a pierced you-know-what. Thank you. Not a good day. And I'm like, that's it, fuck it! No more favors, no more nothing. I am never going out again!"

Well, that I doubt. Just like I doubt that any Barrymore could ever be free of rumors. But, while we're cranking the rumor mill, why don't we dispense with a few others, like how "Drew Barrymore" and "Christian Slater" went on a recent spree hitting up local pharmacies for prescription drugs? "Oh, that one," she says, grinning. "Christian and I ran into each other the other day driving and it was like, 'Hey, prescription drugs. What's up?' I had to be on the phone with a detective for a whole day going through all kinds of bullshit, because, as you know, some chick and guy were going around to all these pharmacies getting hard-core prescription drugs posing as Drew Barrymore and Christian Slater. I think it's over with. But wasn't that fun?"

Probably about as much fun as another rumor that put Barrymore at The Viper Room the night River Phoenix died. "I was in Texas making Bad Girls," she says, somberly. "I was watching 'CNN Headline News,' waiting to go to work, when I found out. Then I found out that Fellini had died. Oh, man, that was a terrible day. I lit two candles and prayed for them both. I've never been once to The Viper Room. It's a weird scene out there now, a weird vibe, one that's best to keep away from. I've gotten to a point in my life where I figure, why be in a room where you're totally fucking uncomfortable? I stay in my circle of friends, people I choose to live my life with. I can completely be myself and I'm never judged. I'm just a human being in these people's eyes. It's a beautiful thing."

Well, if there's one thing I know about Drew Barrymore, it's that she loves to rip. So, if she's not into piercing, Idols, raiding drugstores or stepping out, what's her idea these days of "a good time"?

"Fat, adult, prime-time, white-trash TV," she fires back, laughing. "Every Wednesday for the past two years has been Girls' Night. We cook and watch 'Beverly Hills, 90210' and 'Melrose Place' in complete fascination. Call us cheesy. We don't care. It doesn't get any better. Our guy friends used to be like, 'You girls are so lame.' Now they're, 'Can we please come over?'" Drew laughs merrily when I tell her that I was so into her "2000 Malibu Road" series, I haven't gotten over its speedy cancellation. She concurs, "It was just our first season, you know? You can't imagine all the good stuff we were going to get into. My friends are always kidding me that if I don't watch out, I'll wind up forever on some terrible TV series."

She's not kidding, either. Rumors have abounded that Aaron Spelling wanted Barrymore to join the cast of "Beverly Hills, 90210"--to hopefully revitalize the show, the way Heather Locklear did when she was added to "Melrose Place"--but for Barrymore, the release of Bad Girls, about a pack of Western gals who avenge themselves on the varmints who wronged them, may point the way to much better stuff. In it, she plays a trick-riding, roping, Annie Oakley-ish tear-ass with brashness to burn. The role came to her at a time when she was feeling anything but brash and the shooting of the big-budget adventure was rocky. It all started when the project, which was developed by Tamra Davis, her Guncrazy director, and intended as a "rough, gritty little movie starring a couple of cool chicks for New Line," escalated into a big-budget, name-cast Fox movie. This class jump sent up red flags as to whether Barrymore, who had not done a big studio job since See You in the Morning in 1989, was fully reliable.

"I had been connected to the project for three months when my agent called and said Fox had bought it and that my original contract was out the window. I was like, 'What do I have to do to get this part back?' The answer was, I had to jump through every hoop of fire in the business. I had to meet everybody at Fox. I played the game. Thank God everybody was incredibly gracious. They practically apologized at the end of the meetings for having to do this. The only reason that I wasn't completely resentful was that I've made it a point to climb up the ladder so slowly, never trodding on anyone's toes, trying to build a stable base for myself so that I would never fall back down again. I couldn't handle another fall like that."

So, I ask optimistically, since the budget got hiked, did Fox sweeten her salary? "That ladder I've climbed up very slowly," she says, smiling, rancor-free. "I make very small money. Hopefully, one day I will be making $1 million a picture. But that's never my first priority. To me, money is paper that burns people. I need enough to pay my rent."

So, for "small money," Drew headed off for an experience all of Hollywood was soon hearing about: rumors of cast members squabbling, a director who wasn't cutting it, the studio stepping in to shut down the movie. Oh, well, let her tell it.

"Who-hoooo, the cat fights," Drew says, wincing. "It was becoming so incredible that, like, nobody was shocked by anybody else's behavior. It was just how it was. It was a totally unstable production. Nobody got along. The pits. The worst. I had never seen so much shit go on, you know? I love coming in and doing my work, not doing all the politics and the partying. I tried desperately to keep myself out of it. There was so much energy being wasted on nothing. We'd be shooting a scene, like, the four of us sitting around the table talking, supposedly relating like pals and, believe me, it sure wasn't like four best friends sitting around a table. It was four actresses."

At one a.m. one morning, Barrymore got the call: the actresses were temporarily dismissed, the director fired, the movie halted. "I never thought they would make Tamra the scapegoat. Unfortunately, they did. I came back home and had to make really sure that I could go to her and say, 'If you want me to leave the picture along with you, I'd be more than happy to do so.' I mean 99.9% of my motivation to do this film was because of her. And, when I got a call saying, 'You need to get back up here immediately, we've got a new director,' Tamra encouraged me to do it."

Barrymore's spirits rose when Jonathan Kaplan, whose 1979 Over the Edge she rates as "one of my all-time favorite films," got hired to replace Davis. Yet, virtually everything else went scattering to the four winds, including the film's writer, cinematographer, several cast members including Cynda Williams, and all the footage shot to date. The remaining and new crew went off to Texas for another stab at it. Barrymore moans, "There were so many drastic changes, we didn't know who we were anymore. We also went to Cowboy Camp, which means up at six, ride horses from seven to nine a.m., 15 minute break, shooting lessons from 9:30 to 10:30, roping lessons from 10:30 to 11:30..." She covers her face in her hands at the memory. "Fuck, all I wanted to do was lie in bed and watch 'Supermarket Sweep.' Then, all of a sudden, I started to soften a little bit, because I realized that we were getting good and started to look like we knew what we were doing."

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