Halle Berry: Halle Terror

I have every right to throw a tantrum," says Halle Berry, confirming she did just that while making her latest film. And as for the rumors that she's far from the baby doll cutie she used to be? "I can't keep up that act. I have to let the real me out."

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I'm driving across town for a lunch with Halle Berry, thinking how eventful her life has been in the short year since we first met. when I interviewed her for the January/February 1994 issue of Movieline. On the upside, her shaking her Stone Age booty helped turn the rock-dumb The Flintstones into a '$130 million-plus hit. She has a new movie, Losing Isaiah, in which she plays a recovering crackhead mom who battles to reclaim her son from adoptive mom Jessica Lange. She recently starred, opposite Jimmy Smits, in the Showtime TV film Solomon and Sheba. She's been offered three features, all to shoot at the same time, but I'm betting she won't pass up the chance to grab Race the Sun, scripted by Rain Man Oscar-winner Barry Morrow. What's more, it seems every time you turn around, the name Halle Berry is either being lustfully invoked in a rap song or on a TV comedy sketch, or her mocha java features are adding a sexy bass line to the customarily all-white Muzak of another Most Beautiful People list.

So much for the upside. The rumors dogging Berry lately are a reminder that fame comes with a downside. One hears rumbles of domestic discord between Berry and her handsome husband, Atlanta Braves power slugger David Justice, and insiders say this is why she has recently relocated to L.A. from Georgia, Her face invariably turns up in tabloid lineups of stars who have been physically battered, and now there are rumors that the abuse continues. Another tale has it that Berry's been living large and not caring who knows it and that she's been throwing hissy fits on movie sets.

As I wait for Berry at a West Hollywood restaurant near The Argyle Hotel--where she's due later to shoot photographs for this story--I'm wondering, Has Halle gone Hollywood? Just then, she enters the room and makes her way toward me, smiling warily. As we reacquaint ourselves, she seems more beautiful than ever. While it's true I'm a sucker for that rare thing, a world-class face like Berry's. I believe that beauty doesn't excuse bad behavior. So I begin our chat by asking, "What are some of the less attractive things you've been finding out about yourself as you've gotten more famous?"

"That I'm really bananas," Berry replies like a shot, in a tone of voice that announces she's not kidding, "That I have these mad temper tantrums. I'm throwing fits these days, I'm finding out that I'm really not as strong as I like to think I am. I'm strong one day, but I'm having a fit the next day. That's what I've been finding out."

Okay, since she is aware of at least one of the unattractive things people are accusing her of, might she care to share details of any particularly memorable tantrum? "It happened once on Losing Isaiah when I felt, 'Boy, I'm a diva,'" she recalls about her new film in which--as in Jungle Fever--she plays a crack fiend. "I was bad. Somebody lied to me, called me a bitch, and I really lost it. That's something I cannot take: liars. I just completely lost it in the makeup room and started throwing everything I could lay my hands on, going, I'm just sick of this! Who is this woman to call me a bitch?'"

Whoa, back up, Berry: who is this so-called liar and what incited the makeup room melee? "We were doing reshoots and the assistant director was supposed to phone me with the call time to show up for shooting," she explains. "I felt like these assistant directors didn't know what the hell they were doing and, anyway, when I didn't get a phone call, I thought, it's not my job to call you, it's your job to call me.' So I went to sleep and the next morning, they called from the set saying. 'Where the hell are you? Didn't you know you had to be here'?' I said, 'Sure, but I'm not going to show up without knowing what time I'm supposed to be there. I was home waiting.'"

Berry remembers rushing to the set to find "everybody pissed off and dogging me. I heard the director, Stephen [Gyllenhaal], had a major tantrum and I just said, 'No way I'm going to work all day with these people acting like this,' so I got a major bug up my butt to find out who didn't call me. When I heard that this particular person said she had called me, my manager and my assistant--in other words, that I got three calls but pulled a stunt and didn't show up--I couldn't even get through my day's work. I held up shooting for a couple of hours because I was on the phone calling around trying to get the story straight. Finally, I called the lady who said she had phoned me, my manager and my assistant, and I said, 'Why would you tell a bald-faced lie and say you called three people when you didn't call anybody?' Two other people were there and they said, 'She didn't call me, either.' But she kept saying that she called us all. I said, 'Come down here [to the set] and tell me that to my face because you're lying to me and you made my day miserable,' but we kept arguing. Finally, she said, 'Will somebody talk to her? I'm not talking to this bitch anymore!'"

Apparently, that's when all Halle broke loose. She recalls, eyes searing. "I was really angry and started yelling and screaming in the makeup room: 'She's caught in a lie and she's calling me a bitch?' The producer came in and said, 'She called you a bitch? She's fired.' I didn't want someone to get fired, so I said, 'She just needs to come down here and we'll talk it out like adults. You can hold my hands. I won't hit her. I just want to get to the bottom of this.' I pride myself on never being late to the set, on know-ing my lines, working hard. I mean, I have enough strikes against me. She never came down and I had a tantrum. So, she was fired and I tore up the makeup trailer. There was foundation all over those walls! I got so angry because I knew that, no matter what I said, somebody somewhere was going to think that it was my fault."

Adds Berry, "I have every right to throw a tantrum, to say how I'm feeling. If I'm angry, I have every right to let you know you've done something to offend me. I do hope that side of me never comes out again, though, I shouldn't have been scream-ing and yelling and tearing up stuff. That was not cool. It's just that a lot of things happened on Losing Isaiah that made me feel that way."

What are some of the other things that happened to make her feel that way? Did she perhaps encounter trouble working with co-star Jessica Lange--who. like Berry, once had to fight hard to overcome early assumptions that she was little more than just another nice set of bones? "When she got into the business, she was just a pretty face. I've worn that crown for a couple of years, so I felt something in common with her," Halle comments about Lange. Yet she concedes that, when they met, "It was like, 'I don't want to know you.' and I was, 'I don't want to know you.' It kept a kind of uncomfortable feeling between us that would help us in the movie." But, she adds as an afterthought. "I respect and admire her."

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