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."
Why, things got so plummy the co-stars even started bonding. Well, most, anyway. "I wanted to feel equal to these women," Drew explains. "Of course, when I got to the set, they all had big trailers and I had a really small one. I felt like an outcast. But I also didn't want to get in the way of them doing what they needed to do, you know? I didn't want to have a problem with anybody. All of them are used to being the star of the show and, all of a sudden, three powerful Hollywood women have got to share? There we are in this town right near the Mexican border. It had no mailman, no restaurant, no shopping. I mean, if a J. Crew catalog arrived on Sunday, you should have seen people fighting over it. All of a sudden, though, out there in Nowhereville, we all let all the stuff go. No more Hollywood bullshit. We were totally in character, totally struggling and we had to learn to become friends with each other and not to be competitive. Thank God, you know, it happened, but, believe me, it wasn't easy. You know, after five months of this, as close as we all got to each other, it still became, 'If I don't get outta here, I'm gonna kill somebody.' I mean, five months! Jonathan's big joke was, 'We'll be eating enchiladas for Thanksgiving.' And we each gained 15 pounds eating greasy catering food all day and night."
So, with which of her incredibly strong co-stars would she least like to meet up with on a dark sound stage? Drew laughingly makes an attempt at diplomacy. "Andie is the fucking funniest woman ever. She's tasteful, so elegant, such a lady. I love Mary Stuart, who was the practical joker. The guys, James LeGros and Dermot Mulroney, were great--Dermot's one of the nicest men I've ever met, and James is so fucking brilliant in the movie, it's scary." Having gone out of her way to say nothing about Madeleine Stowe, Barrymore answers my question.
"The thing this movie most brought back for me is fearlessness." Drew says. "There was so much time to spend 'quality time' with Drew, I was like--" she breaks off, feigning nausea. Then, serious again, she observes. "I couldn't understand what I needed to fulfill me. It sure wasn't a boyfriend. There was this overwhelming emptiness inside and no way of avoiding it. I met this wonderful hairdresser on the movie, and while I was crying one day, she was comforting me and I said, 'I need to know. Does it get easier in life?' And she said it does. When I got back, I went to visit Steven at his office and I asked him the same thing."
From the vibe in her voice when she says "Steven," I know she means Steven Spielberg, for whom she made E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and who has remained a surrogate father figure, if an illusory one, ever since. "I went to visit him at his office and he gave me a copy of the book Schindler's List as a present. I told him how I had reevaluated my life and was hoping that it gets easier. He said it did get easier. I listened to him, looked at this little painting of clouds and buildings that I made for him when I was six years old that he keeps framed on his wall, and I thought, 'Steven is obviously one of the ultimate people that I respect, yet he will always look at me as a young child.' There's something so comforting about that, that someone would see someone else through such pure eyes.
"You see," she says, after staring off a moment, "I always had this theory that I would never live past 25." There've been points where I felt I've already lived my whole life. Now I know that I can take things slowly. I have been so scared of so many things. My friend, Justine, she's so free with herself, I admire her and I've always wanted that kind of freedom, not to be afraid of it. I feared change. [While making Bad Girls] I was thinking, 'Do I want to change who I am?' and I felt like it was the time. On my days off, I would drive around to little towns, hundreds of miles away, just trip around, dig nature, paint a picture, think about things, write a lot. I came back from this movie a very changed person. For the first time in my life, I'm not afraid." She flashes me a radiant smile. "Come on, Steve, I want to show you my new house."
As we're careening in her big black utility vehicle through the narrowest passageways of the hills above Hollywood en route to her place, she remarks, "Here's another thing I'm not afraid to say anymore: I don't think I'm a good actress." Wrapped in designer shades with a Marlboro dangling from her lips, she drives like a bat out of hell. "When Vincent Canby wrote about Guncrazy, saying it's the greatest film, I was, like, 'I didn't even think he'd see this movie.' But I think I have an amazing ability to adapt to other people, to bring them to life. I don't know where it stems from. If I'm schizophrenic, then at least I use it to the best of my ability. It's that 'technique' thing I'm afraid of. I don't know if what I do on-screen is right, wrong, good, bad. I don't want to go to classes. I want to do a character, no holds barred, to give my soul to that person. I never want to alter that. If I ever start talking to you about my 'craft,' my 'instrument,' you have permission to shoot me point-blank."
Drew treats me to a couple of tunes from an all-girl punk group she and her pals went out to hear last night. I'm popping my head to the beat, but there's this strange arrhythmic rattling I keep hearing. What's that? Drew grabs her handbag by way of explanation, and gives it a good shake. More rattles. "You can always hear me coming because of my Motrin," she explains, laughing.
"God, I love to drive," she says, as she shaves a corner on, I swear, two wheels. "This is one of those days, you know the kind, where you're really happy driving around, smiling for no reason, singing along with your song and people are looking at you, like, 'Who's that crazy blonde?'" Yeah. So what happened to her BMW, the one in which we tore through Hollywood one night a couple of years back? "Accident," she mutters. "I lost my license for months."
We draw up to the '20s-era Spanish house Drew shares with Justine, one of her two closest women friends, her "girlies." "We're very anal around here," she says, laughing, as we pick our way through piles of clothes, pocket money, cassettes, books by Bukowski. The decor? Blue Velvet meets Little Women: plum and cranberry walls, overstuffed Victorian sofas, flowy drapes, oversized mirrors, dressers decorated with decoupages, psychedelic-hued Mexican votive candles, a goldfish wobbling in a bowl that hasn't been cleaned anytime recently, stacks of CDs and videotapes, and photos of Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany's and Sue Lyon in Lolita.
I refer to Drew's house as The House That Guess? Pays For. "It's so funny you say that," she says, giggling, "because when we found this house, Justine and I had been living for six months in a hellhole apartment and there were 30 other people who wanted this house, too. I was in a state, like, 'Omigod, the rent's too expensive, but if I don't wake up in this house every morning from now on, I'm going to be very upset. Where am I going to get the money?' The next morning, my publicist calls and I'm like, 'What terrible thing did I say or do now?' but he says, 'Guess? jeans called.' I said, 'Yeah? Do they want to send me a free pair? I accept.' He said, 'No, they want you to be their girl, to shoot anywhere from two to four ad campaigns.' I thought he was joking. The amount was exactly what I needed to pay the rent."
And what's it like not only to have her rent paid, but also to be an international sex kitten? "That campaign changed my life. Now, half of my work is film, the other half print ads. I asked Paul Marciano, the owner of the company, 'Your models are six feet tall, drop-dead gorgeous and weigh two pounds. Why me?' He just said, 'You have the right feel, the right look.' Oh, yeah? So, I walked into a meeting with the whole creative team when I was broken out in an allergic reaction. They were looking me over, like, You're scary. Anyway, I couldn't believe it when they showed me the picture of Werner, my co-star, because I had actually met him when I was 13, and I said, 'You are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.' I hadn't seen him in three years because he was living in Paris. I requested him on both shoots I've done so far, because he's so goofy and wonderful, which makes it fantastic when you have to sit there every day for about a week and a half with your faces positioned like you're kissing each other. Your neck gets really sore and you're, like, omigod, do I have bad breath?"
So, with all the added exposure, how is Drew really doing these days? "For many years, I was so unhappy. I would have moments of happiness, but, for the most part, I was always down on myself. I felt completely alone for so many years. Growing up, I didn't know that the key to my happiness was myself. Right now, I'm the happiest I've ever been. I wake up with a sense of ease of pain, of fulfillment, but not loneliness. There are certain parts of my life that are totally confused, but that's everybody. It's strange. I'm like, 'Why am I so happy?' I'm loving the fact that I get to work. My career is going really well. I'm enjoying life because I have friends and I have work in the most inconsistent profession you can have."
Drew tells me about her journals. She grabs one, showing me pages of flowers, rappers' phone numbers, Polaroids of actor Balthazar Getty's hounds, rubber stamps of daisies and butterflies, postcards from her friends. As she thumbs through the pages, out drop a couple of hundred dollar bills which she shrugs away.
She offers to read me some of her pensees. "These are all the words I love," she says. "Hope and daisies, the sun, prayer, laughter, strength, nature, kissing, the rain, cigarettes, feelings, spirituality, the sky, bubbles, pot, religion, fire, water, holding hands, praying, searching, finding." And this poem: "Love is ... the sunshine, someone's hand to hold, the life that keeps us warm, the arrow that points us all in the right direction, ice cream, knowledge, strength, something or someone to cherish, good friends, hope--because we all hope to be loved. Love is what we all hope to give and receive. Love is good music, laughter, peace, comfort, fulfillment when you're in need."
Not to get too mundane, but, in Barrymore's daisy world, is love ever a juicy romantic lead role in a movie? Or, better yet, in real life? "I know what you mean," she says, laughing. "I haven't done much of that. I mean, in movies, I've kissed Sara Gilbert in Poison Ivy, which was kinda fun, because you just don't see that often, you know? Even in Basic Instinct, they never showed women really making out."
Who would she like to kiss on-screen? "Johnny Depp's about as cute as they come, with that very beautiful mouth. It's, ooooooooh, like a little bow, a rose. Christian's cute. It's strange. I don't think that many boys are cute. Boys, boys, boys, boys. I don't know about 'em. I haven't been with anybody in so long, part of me is so not focused. If I see a cute boy, I'm like, 'Oh, he's cute,' and it goes in and out of my mind. I'm a little worried about what I'm saying. Why don't I think anybody is cute?"
Well, she did think somebody was at least cute enough to get engaged to--James Walters, who was the star of the short-lived "The Heights." "Actors scare me," she snaps at the mention of Walters. "I thought that my life was becoming a fairy tale and then, boom, one day, it's not happening. We were oh-so-happy, the first time in my life that I felt that kind of safety and happiness with another human being, the first time in my life that I let my walls down with a man. Which made me all the more vulnerable. So I'm the ultimate cynic now: Love sucks. I was not the one who did the leaving. I went through an incredible amount of pain over that relationship. I've only gone on one or two dates since [Walters] and they were absolute disasters. The person I thought was my great love, wasn't. Boys. They're totally confusing to me. You think that they're on one track and then--" she makes the sound of screeching breaks, smashing fenders "--they're zooming off on another track. And you're like, 'I'm sooooo confused.' Oh, my God, Steve, let's sing 'Cry Me a River.'"
So we do, making it a good, mournful shout for the crimes and glories we've committed in the name of love. "I'm such a total drama queen and I love to get into the agony of it. Fuck it. If you're gonna go through it, you might as well milk it every once in a while, right? Have a really good cry."
It's not like Drew has had sterling role models in the area of romance. For instance, how are things with her wild-child father, former actor John Drew Barrymore, who has a penchant for traveling shoeless, keeping no particular address, and tripping to his own private drummer? "When I was younger, I thought he was crazy," Drew admits about the son of legendary star John Barrymore. "Now, I think it's the grooviest thing ever. You can't put him in a nutshell, he's so many different people. If I truly need him, I can find him. He'll leave me a message on my machine every couple of months. 'Daughter, it's father. I'm out living life. I'm looking at a tree right now.' Oh, yeah? Go hug it, dad, you big hippie!" Her eyes well with love. And her mother, Jaid, who raised her? "I haven't seen her in over a year," she answers in a tone that says this is just fine with her.
I wonder if Drew feels any nervousness, considering all the hassles on her last movie, about her next, Boys on the Side? After all, she'll be working with Whoopi Goldberg and director Herbert Ross, whom some consider to be very tough birds. "I did get a little nervous," she admits, "especially after going through what we did on Bad Girls. I decided to back out of Boys on the Side as discreetly, kindly and professionally as I could. Herbert would not take it. I got scared. Oh no, I thought, I've pissed him off. But he said, 'You're the only one I want for this part.' I was so flattered by how much he wanted me that it was one of the bigger compliments I've ever received. I feel like we're gonna work incredibly well together." I tell her I'll check back with her on that one.
Did she have to run the gauntlet with the studio, Warner Bros., to snag this role, too? "I think 1993 is the last year that I had to deal with that kind of bullshit. But if anyone's watching to see if I 'go Hollywood,' that's not going to happen. Because of all the things that have happened in my career, up and down, I'll never take things for granted. I know what it's like to feel, to see, to know that I might never work again. Now I treat every movie, every opportunity, as if it's the last one I'm gonna do." And, does the woman who once announced to the business, "I'm back!" care to broadcast a new message? She slowly straightens herself in her seat, smiles triumphantly, makes sure the tape recorder is running and exclaims, "The sky's the limit!"
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Nicole Kidman for the March Movieline.