Kelly Lynch keeps her clothes on but lets down her hair to talk about what it's like working with leading men such as Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Patrick Swayze, Michael J. Fox and two of the Baldwin brothers.
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I'm about to meet Kelly Lynch at the Hotel Bel Air restaurant for lunch and, Frankly. I'm hoping I recognize her. It's not that the 34-year-old actress, who lives in L.A. with her screenwriter husband Mitch Glazer and nine-year-old daughter, Shane, has feiled to make an impression on the big screen. But am I meeting the brunette junkie from Drugstore Cowboy, the redheaded lesbian from Three of Hearts or the leggy blonde doctor from Road House? The bumper crop of press clippings I've collected isn't much help either, for in them the Former Elite model sports every look from '70s disco moll to topless Dorothy Hamill.
Perhaps she'll come in a newer incamation, left over from one of her three recent films. She could stroll in wearing a gunnysack in the spirit of the rural, slice-of-life flick The Beans of Egypt, Maine, or go retro like the glamour-minded '50s housewife she plays in the family drama Imaginary Crimes, or show up looking like the sexy wife of Alec Baldwin, her character in Phil Joanou's mystery thriller Heaven's Prisoners.
Turns out I was concerned for nothing. Regardless of what she's wearing, it would be pretty hard to miss Kelly Lynch. Poised at a table near the garden, dressed in avocado trousers and a matching sweater. Lynch is the picture of show-biz sophistication.
"I wasn't sure you'd be blonde," I say as she welcomes me to the table. But before she can reply, menus are thrust into our hands.
DENNIS HENSLEY: So, what's good for lunch here?
KELLY LYNCH: I might have a hamburger, I've been rehearsing with John Travolta and every day he has two lunches and dessert. Yesterday it was a hamburger, sushi and a huge piece of chocolate cake, but he looks and feels great--he doesn't care. It's so refreshing.
Q: Remember when he was all naked and bulled for Staying Alive?
A: He said he hated it. Life's too short. I don't exercise, I don't do anything and I'm thinking about having a cigarette. The more they tell me I can't do something, the more I want to.
Q: What's this movie you're rehearsing?
A: It's called White Man's Burden.
Q: Great title.
A: Isn't it? The funny thing is, that's what I call one of my girlfriends: white man's burden.
Q: So you're spending your afternoons with Tony Manero...
A: I can't believe I'm working with these guys. I mean. John Travolta. Tom Cruise, Michael J. Fox, Billy Baldwin, Alec Baldwin, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon. Hello? I told John that my favorite thing in Saturday Night Fever was him saying "Al Pacino" and doing the muscle thing in the mirror, and he did it for me. I've yet to get him to dance with me, though.
Q: Do you think a good dancer equals a good lover?
A: Absolutely. It's all about rhythm and so is sex.
Q: So, is your husband, screenwriter Mitch Glazer, a good dancer?
A: He's a great dancer. I could tell when I met him. He was with Sue Mengers and I was with my agents having one of those William Morris Agency lunches. You know.
Q: I have them all the time.
A: Exactly. You know how that goes. He came walking up to the table and I felt in love with him the second I saw him. I thought I'd pretend like I was not interested so I started shoveling food in my mouth. Then Sue Mengers and my husband-to-be sat down at their table and he said. "Who is that?" and Sue said. "You want that? I could get you that." It was really like she pimped for me. Sue.
Q: Does she get a percentage, like, for every 10 times you have him, she gets him once?
A: I'm sure she'd like to work that deal out.
Q: How did you end up getting together?
A: Mitch is shy and he doesn't ask women out, they ask him out. Well, I'm the diva, you ask me out. So I held out and he finally called me and a month later we moved in together.
Q: What was your first date like?
A: First, we talked on the phone for hours, He's so good-looking and I didn't really trust that--I've got all these had stereotypes about good-looking men, so it was great just to talk to him. When we had dinner the first time, he went to the bathroom 12 times. I thought he was a drug addict, but he was so nervous that he had to go throw water on his face, thick of something to say and come back.
Q: You once said, "I'll probably have 100 affairs with wonderful men and never fund one who can deal with me." You've obviously changed you tune.
A: I sure have. It's the last thing I expected. The parts of me that are the worst make him laugh and love me go figure. We've been together for five years and married for two.
Q: What was your wedding like?
A: We had one of the most star-studded weddings ever. James Taylor sang, Anjelica Houston and Buck Hency toasted us, and Bill Murray sang "Brandy." Unbelievable. It was like what I thought L.A. would be like when I came from New York: these very sophisticated but decadent places to go see your friends and be "Hollywood." In reality, it's so not any of that-so I made it that, damn it.
Q: If you weren't married and you wanted to hook up with someone, which one of your movies would you like them to rent?
A: I would think Road House because of the sort of Yvette Mimieux imitation that I did - I kept going, "Maybe I should have normal doctor clothes," and they kept saying. "No tanner, blonder, shorter skirts!" But it appears that it's Drugstore Cowboy. I just worked with Alee Baldwin, who had such a crush on my character from that. When I'd say my lines from that film, Alec would try to attract me.
Q: Back to Road House for a second. In the final shot, it appears you and Patrick Swayze run into a pond in the nude. True?
A: We were completely naked.
Q: It'd be bad enough to be naked in a movie but to have to run...
A: Yes, everything was bouncing, unfortunately.
Q: Patrick probably had the only thing that was actually bouncing...
A: Well, including the back, he had several things.
Q: Speaking of '80s hunks, did you get to roll around with Don Johnson when you guest-starred on "Miami Vice"?
A: No, Don had enough to roll around with without me.
Q: You and Alec Baldwin co-star in the new movie Heaven's Prisoners. What's that about?
A: It's this noirish action picture with really developed characters. Alec plays a tough, sexy, screwed-up guy and I play his wife and partner. We run a boat rental place on the bayou.
Q: Do you get it on a boat?
A: We're about to, when this plane comes right on top of us.
Q: Making it a threesome.
A: Exactly. I don't do it with planes, though. I don't trust them.
Q: Would you do it with a car?
A: If it was a really great car.
Q: Skateboard?
A: No, it's too L.A.--and don't even say the word Rollerblade. It was incredibly scary when we filmed this thing. The stunt coordinator told the pilot to aim for my forehead. Then Alec and I go underwater to save a person from this plane crash. We found out later that the lake is full of water moccasins and no one's been swimming in it for years.
Q: You could have been attacked by a snake and thought Alec was just continuing with the love scene...
A: I would have just said, "Wow, Alec, who knew?" Because it was a big movie, everyone had their houseboat. I had named mine the Bitch Lounge, but then Stephen Baldwin [visited] and said, "No, man, Bitch Barge." He is so funny. He really encouraged mayhem. When the producers; went by on their boat, we had these giant slingshots and we got them bad with water balloons.
Q: What was Alec's boat called, the Butch Barge?
A: That would have been good, but we called it the Mosh Pit.
Q: So, okay, what's Alec Baldwin really like? Movieline readers want to know, Kelly.
A: Incredibly funny--he does a great imitation of William Shatner. Alec's sexy, bright, funny, dangerous and unpredictable, like a man. It's like an old movie star thing that's no longer seen until you get to be 50 and you're Harrison Ford or Jack Nicholson. There are so few actors who are men in movies these days--this is the generation that refuses to grow up--but Alec's really a man. And that enables me to be a woman. This is my new battle cry: Grow up! Sure, times are complicated, but they're not that damn complicated--we're not living through the Depression.
Q: Is his brother, Billy, with whom you co-starred in Three of Hearts, also a "man"?
A: Billy's really boyish, but there's something sexy about that, too. We're almost best friends in real life.
Q: You say if a guy's a "man," you're able to be a "woman." When did you realize you were one?
A: I realized I was a woman at 30 and at first that made me sad. Then I started to find out what that meant and it's so cool. I still have my energy and my looks, but I have an ease and a groove about things and some authority when I say something. All of it's been really good, but to fit in Hollywood with that kind of thinking is weird [because] every [script] I read, if the women are women and they're intelligent and good-looking, they're evil bitches. I'd love to play one really great evil bitch in my life, but I just haven't found that script yet.
Q: Is it true you passed up Basic Instinct?
A: Yeah, I didn't think it was sexy enough. It didn't get me off. I thought, 'This is sort of goofy."
Q: Was the beaver shot in the script that you read?
A: Yeah. There was sort of a diagram. [Laughs] Whoever did that part had to embrace it because there was very little besides the camera taking advantage of you and being lit, dressed and coifed by the best.
Q: Do you ever wonder where your career would be if you'd done it?
A: I think I would have taken shots for it. I had done other kinds of work and I think that critics would have thought I was slumming or going for the money. I certainly don't begrudge any woman for doing that because you don't get very many shots but, in the end, I just thought that I wouldn't have been great at it.
Q: Let's talk about some of your other new movies.
A: I just did a thing for Showtime with Danny Glover called Red Wind. It's a Raymond Chandler story directed by Agnieszka Holland.
Q: She made Europa, Europa, right?
A: And Olivier Olivier. Everything has two names.
Q: Did she have anything to do with Duran Duran?
A: She set all that up.
Q: You are in The Beans of Egypt, Maine, too.
A: My character's the earthiest woman I've ever been near. We made the movie for a million dollars in four weeks so I was eating beans and playing Beans and looking like a bean, but I think it's pretty wonderful.
Q: What about Imaginary Crimes?
A: My character's this mother who creates, superficially at least, a really sweet life for her family. Then she passes away and Harvey Keitel's character is left to care for these girls and he hasn't had much practice at it. You know, until the '80s, [when] all these yuppies [started] having kids, no one thought about the responsibility of having children. My mother got pregnant and they had me. Then they did what their parents did--some things were good and some were insane.
Q: That's interesting, since I know you're the mother of a nine year old. If you were going to be a pushy stage mother, what class would she be in right now?
A: I'm already a stage mother and she's in it. She's this cool modern¬ist, cubist artist, and she's in an class.
Q: When you were 21, you were in a near-fatal car crash. How long were you laid up from that?
A: About a year. They told me I was never going to walk again and today, I have no disability. I can put my leg behind my head.
Q: What do you remember from being in the hospital that long?
A: I remember being completely strung out on Demerol. It was surreal, I remember Michael Jackson's Thriller album. And the nurses watching Luke and Laura on TV. My roommate thought I was a witch and said I was making things move around the room, but I was so spaced out I don't have any recollection. Looking back, I have to say I enjoyed [it].
Q: Let's talk about Three of Hearts. What's this I hear about you shutting down production on that film?
A: I had it in my contract that if any changes were not agreed to by me, I could release myself from the film. They were trying to take a lot of the gay aspect out of the movie and I said, "I'm not here to make some 'Three's Company' TV movie where we're both in love with this guy," and everyone agreed.
Q: Were you surprised at the way people reacted to the movie?
A: When you do something interesting, you get heat. One gay writer was very offended by my choice of costume. He thought I was too butch and I said, "I'm sorry, but those are my clothes." Then there were straight people that thought I was too pretty--they had this stereotype that you had to be ugly. Part of the gay community really got that it was a step beyond what's acceptable in gay characters in Hollywood, which is either: a) you have sex with women like in Basic Instinct and you hale men, which is a heterosexual male fantasy anyway, or b) you're dying of AIDS. You can't have a real life.
Q: You lost your best friend to AIDS, didn't you?
A: Oh, God. Jeffrey, my best friend in the world. There's not a moment that goes by that I don't think about him. Jeffrey was somehow able to make people laugh at themselves and get over it. I've lost every gay man who is between 30 and 40, everyone. It's like all of us having gone through a war. Jessica Tandy said the hardest thing about getting older is watching all your friends die. We're not old and we're dealing with it I brought Jeffrey's ashes to the Chanel show in Paris and as the supermodels walked by-- 'cause I'm the diva who gets to sit in the front row--I'd flick a little bit of ash [out on the walkway as] Christy, Naomi and Claudia [passed by].
Q: Were they aware of it?
A: No. Later, I took a walk to the Seine and I had my husband take pictures and as soon as I let his ashes go, there was this rainbow thing that happened on the film. It was really weird and beautiful. [Losing him] was so hard. That was as real as it's ever gotten for me, and I hope as real as it will ever get.
Q: Since you were a model, tell me about one contemporary fash¬ion trend you just can't get into.
A: One of the things I truly hate, and living on the west side of L.A., I have to deal with it all the time, are what my husband calls the Virgins. The Virgins are usually in their forties but they wear little frocks, anklets, hats with flowers, some version of long hair which is very often penned in a bad way, and they may or may not have a daughter who is dressed exactly like them--that's the Virgins. They [appear to] never have had sex and are in denial of whatever's happened to them in the last 20 years. The only person who can pull that stuff off is Courtney Love. She came up to me at a party and she started screaming about Drugstore Cowboy, There was something so vulnerable and so strong about her at the same time. Her lipstick was smeared all across her face and she had this big smile and I just thought she was the greatest.
Q: We saw you snort cocaine in your first film, Bright Lights, Big City. What did they have you use for blow?
A: Some awful powdered milk that later became a solid. All I remember about that movie is thinking that Michael J. Fox looked very fresh for having just done a line.
Q: What was it like making Cocktail with Tom Cruise?
A: He was very sexy and romantic. I had these stilettos on and I was going to kick them off to do the love scene and he went, "No, keep them on."
Q: When did you first realize that you were desirable?
A: In the ninth grade when Reed Sandsted, the homecoming king with the Harley, asked me out. At that very moment, I knew that my life had changed.
Q: So Reed Sandstud...
A: [Slaps the interviewer] Sandsted!
Q: Right. He saw something in you that you hadn't seen in yourself?
A: Nor did anyone else, mind you. He was incredible.
Q: What's the must obsessive thing you've ever done in pursuit of a crush?
A: I climbed up a fire escape to look in the window at my boyfriend, I was 18. He was 32. He was this artist and had said he was going to stay in and paint. I thought he'd gone out but I could see him through the window and I was hoping he wouldn't catch me--when the fire escape came loose off the wall and fell to the ground! It was like three stories up and I jumped off just in lime, and it just barely missed smashing my really cool Oldsmobile 442. Merchant Ivory used that story in Slaves of New York.
Q: Really? Did you get paid for it?
A: No, but I haven't forgotten it. They will be getting a bill from my people.
Q: You grew up in Minneapolis. Did you ever walk down the street and throw your hat in the air like Mary Tyler Moore?
A: No, I threw Prince--but he sang "Raspberry Beret" in honor of Mary's beret.
Q: Did you catch him like Mary or drop him like Rhoda?
A: I dropped him, but that was because I knew he'd drop me first. My sister Robin was Prince's makeup artist. He was doing a local news program [where] she'd [made up] the anchor people and she looked at Prince and said, "You look like a bad hooker." He went and washed his face and said, "Okay, do it," so she did a very simple thing and he looked great, hired her and that was that.
Q: I just realized we should probably be referring to him as "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince."
A: Well, he'll always be Prince to me.
Q: If you were going to change your name to a symbol, what would it be?
A: The Playboy girl, I love that symbol.
Q: Have you seen those guys with the Playboy air fresheners hanging on their rearview mirrors?
A: Yeah, but it's never a guy that could actually be anywhere near that girl. It's always some gardener. It's sort of sad. It's like those reflectors that are on mud flaps. I always think it would be funny if women put a guy with large equipment on theirs, like a Chippendales guy.
Q: Have you ever been to Chippendales?
A: No. I always assume that men and women who do that aren't into the opposite sex. I did some research and everybody was gay. I have to teach Mitch some of those moves, though.
Q: If your husband were going to strip for you, what would the scenario be?
A: James Brown on the ghetto blaster, I'd have him dress like Sly Stone, the ultimate sexy guy, and he'd be leaping like Michael Jordan and moving his butt like John Travolta, which is basically how Mitch dances anyway. I'd tuck money in his hair and it would be heavenly.