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."
Yeah Halle, sure, but now that the shooting's over would she ring up her co-star to chat? "Would we be friendly and cordial if we ran into each other? Yes. Would we hang out or go out for lunch? No," Yet does Berry feel any kinship with Lange, in terms of how Hollywood treats women as they age? "I'm aware of a real double standard about how attractive women and men actors are seen to be as they age," Berry says, "When I'm in my 40s and 50s, I really see myself in a different lifestyle than making movies. I want to have a family. I'm hoping to get out of the movie business before gravity takes a hold of my face. Plastic surgery wouldn't be right for me. If I look good at 30 or 50 because of the way I take care of myself and exercise and eat, God bless me. But if I look that way because I've been under the knife four or five times, I won't feel as good inside knowing that I went out and bought it. Gravity's already taking hold and believe me. the subject has come up with people where I later go, 'Should I get a boob job?' And then I say, 'No, my boobs are real and if they're gonna fall and hit my knees, they can just hit 'em, I'm not gonna have fake boobs."
So, for all the Sturm und Drang involved, how does Berry think the movie will turn out? "Losing Isaiah may seem like a TV movie for some people," she observes. "When I read it, it seemed like a TV movie 10 me. I haven't actually seen it edited yet, but the trailer's great. Hey, at least it's a 100 percent positive movie with no guns, no violence. Because we wanted a PG rating, we could only say two 'fucks' in the whole movie. We split 'em up. I got to say one and Jessica got to say the other."
Although making Isaiah was clearly no picnic for Berry, the stories she's told me--and the no-nonsense, tensile air about her as she's told them--make it clear no one could now mistake her for the baby doll cutie she once appeared to be. When I run this opinion by her, she agrees, comment-ing dryly. "I don't want to be a baby doll. How can you be in this business and go through the ups and downs and see it for what it is and not change? You'd be an idiot. You're going to get eaten alive if you don't stand up for yourself. Years ago, I never would have been able to express myself like I did on Losing Isaiah, because I would have been worrying about what people were thinking of me, and wanting to keep everything 'just so,' I'm finding out about myself that I can't keep up that act. I have to let the real me out. Now, I'm like, 'Because I'm not say-ing and doing everything you want to hear and see me do, because I have a brain of my own and I'm being assertive, I'm a bitch now?' People want you to be the same little puppet that you were. Be nice. Don't say how you feel, don't do what you want to do. Be a doll? That's boring."
Speaking of dolls, what sparked that big fracas over the merchandising of The Flintstones, when Berry complained that there was no doll to commemorate her role of sexpot Rosetta Stone? "Believe me, it wasn't that I wanted them to make a 'Halle Berry' doll," she says, letting out a snort. "I've gotten amazing offers to market a Halle Berry doll of its own. you know. It just struck me when The Flintstones toys came out. is it or is it not racism that they didn't make a black doll not of me but of my character in the movie? Black kids went to see The Flintstones, too, and why shouldn't black kids, white kids or any other color kids be able to buy a doll of my character in that movie? But again. I expressed myself, and it's so freeing when you can let that out rather than carry it around and become bitter, jaded and miserable. It's really important to say what is the unsaid, to do the unthinkable, just because you need to do it to feel good."
We kick around some of the other things she has done recently to feel good. She mentions how she's bought a house in Hollywood and joyfully describes amassing an eclectic collection of paintings and sculptures. Perhaps noticing my arched brow, she explains that her career now demands she spend less time in Atlanta, which was, the last time we met. home base for her and her husband. I say, "But Halle, you've only made one movie since we last talked about a year ago, so it's not as if you've had to be here every second. You do know what people are saying, right--that this L.A. house suggests problems between you and your husband?"
"As much as I love Atlanta, I was just out of my element," she asserts. "There I was planting an herb garden and flowers but, after about a year, I looked around and thought, 'I love it here, but my life and the career I worked so hard for is in Los Angeles." If you're not here for those moments when things happen, you get passed by. I missed out on a movie role that was so me: real sexy, really sharp, very strong, in control of everything, sort of like The Last Seduction. David said, 'I agree. You have to go back there.' David is here right now, too, and I'm surprised, but he's lovin' it. With the baseball strike and all, I have to say, he loves the Braves, but, if he got traded to the Dodgers, we wouldn't care too much."
I repeat: Has she heard the rumors about the state of their marriage? "Yes--and sometimes from my friends, too," she says acidly. "If I told you all the rumors I've heard, it would blow your mind. I hear things like how they saw David here or there when they know that I'm away. Let me tell you one rumor, specifically." Fine by me. "I had an accident at our house and ended up falling and making a big, deep gash down my back. David thought I needed to be stitched: the bleeding wouldn't stop. It was about 3 a.m. and I didn't want to go to the hospital, but David took me and the X-ray people looked at my back and also at my elbow, which was really hurting. They patched me up without any stitches and sent me home. Two weeks later, David's cousin, who lives in Atlanta, got into a car accident and they rushed him to the hospital X-ray room. He was wearing a David Justice T-shirt and the technician said, 'You like David Justice?' and he said, 'Uh-huh,' and the lady says, 'Well, let me tell you, he was in here with his little wife and she was beaten up. Her arm was practically broken. He beats her.' She didn't know who she was talking to. That's how a rumor gets started.
"As soon as they sent David's cousin home, he called us and we had our attorney make a phone call and the woman got fired from her job," she adds, but she knows that is not how a rumor--especially a juicy rumor about not one but two celebrities--gets stopped. After all, in the past. Berry has outspokenly discussed a particularly abusive relation-ship, one that left her hearing impaired, and while many applauded her for shedding light on what TV talk shows like to call "one of America's dirtiest secrets," Berry tells me that she believes she is paying a toll for her candor. "Every article I read about myself now, they refer to me as this 'battered woman' or this 'used-to-be-battered' woman. Or they imply that all of the men in my life beat me. That wasn't the case at all. I was open about discussing one [relationship]... but the minute violence happened, I left that situation, I get really angry when I'm now always shown under a headline story about battered women."
Yet Berry cannot fail to understand, particularly because her abuser is--by her own admission--"a Hollywood actor." that the curiosity is not likely to fade. To date, her name has only been linked romantically to three men who might seem to fit the bill: Wesley Snipes--with whom it's been reported she had a live-in relationship--Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee. Setting aside which gent we're discussing, I ask if she's ever been contacted or approached by the celebrity who abused her? "He would not want to show up anywhere around me," she replies. "These kind of men tend to be egotistical and feel no shame or remorse. They don't 'get' what they do, they don't see it, because if they did, they couldn't function. But, as I sit back and watch his career and hear what's happening to him, I see that it's all coming back to him, slowly. I have chosen to never give out his name or get into the details [but] as for whether he lives or dies I could give two shits about it."
Has anyone, knowingly or otherwise, tried to cast them together in a movie? "I will never work with him," she asserts, her tone hardened steel. "I don't want to go around town trashing him, so I would never say, 'Don't cast him.' unless I had to, But I could not do my best work with that kind of presence around.
"Let me go back to these rumors about David and me," she says. Sure, let's. "I wonder how people get that sort of thing in their heads, that he beats me up or that we're living apart. They never seem to put as much weight on the reality of the situation as they do [on] the negative end of the situation. Do they ever stop to think about what both people do for a living? Most baseball players have to live in the city where they play. I'm an actress and you have to live in Hollywood. This bothers me because I find myself defending David and me all the lime. When we show up to places, people are looking because they think there's trouble. It's happened a lot and it's a drag.'' In case I don't get the message, she leans into the microphone to send out this Hallegram: "David and I are not getting divorced."
To lighten the mood, I ask whether the heal that comes from appearing in one of the year's biggest hits. The Flintstones. has put her in the running for better parts in bigger projects. "I was part of one of the biggest movies of the year," she replies, "but all I've gotten from being in The Flintstones is a lot of five years olds running after me in Thrifty drugstores."
But I tell her I'd heard she was offered the role Sandra Bullock played in Speed--true or false? On pressing, she admits she blew off the movie, which, maybe, could have made her. "I turned down Speed because I thought, 'I don't want to drive that bus.' There wasn't a whole lot of dialogue." she explains, "and I admit, I just don't get it when I read action stuff like. 'The bus flies 100 miles per hour over an over-pass.' One of the script versions they sent me, the bus never got out of Dodger Stadium, it just kept driving around and around the parking lot! What did feel good when I read it, though, was thinking, 'Okay, this is not my Academy Award-winning role, but here I'm being offered some-thing that wasn't written for a black woman.' When I watched the finished movie. I loved it, and I thought to myself. "The movie gods sure didn't talk to me that day.'"
But the movie gods sure French-kissed Bullock, this issue's cover girl, who's been making movie after movie ever since at ever-rising fees. "Had it been me driving that bus. that wouldn't be my reality, and that's a fact,'" Berry insists. "It's not my reality after being in The Flintstones, one of the biggest movies of the year, so why would I think it would be my reality after Speed? As a black woman, I know better. My reality is very different. My struggle is very different."
Since Berry has alluded to the very real complications of race in the movie business, this seems a good time to ask whether she had, as I'd heard, taken flak for comments she made to me in our previous interview about what she sees as Spike Lee's predilection for light-skinned African-American women, and for describing movies by the Hughes brothers as blaxploitation. She says, "There was a rumor that Spike was upset and I know for sure that the Hughes brothers were offended and were saying, 'Why would I say that about them?' Well, I didn't attack them personally in any way. If somebody had something to say about me in prim, the last thing I would do is call them on it because that's someone else's opinion. God bless them. I really don't care what you think about me. I want to be able to express my opinion without someone thinking I trashed them or was disrespectful. My manager suggested that if Spike got in touch with me, I should make every effort to speak to him, and if he didn't get in contact with me, I should write him a letter." And? ''I opted not to. He never got in touch with me, so I figured. I'm not going to make trouble where there isn't any, for sure. I didn't contact the Hughes brothers either. Look. I'm sorry if they were offended but I said nothing with any malicious intent. It's my opinion, that's all."
Opinionated, toughened-up and nobody's baby doll anymore, Berry is in demand, at least for the short-86term. She's all but signed on the dotted line to play a schoolteacher to a group of special-needs kids who build a solar-powered race car in the based-on-real-life Race the Sun. Although the movie, which, she says, "has a Cool Runnings-type of feel to it," offers no acting challenge anywhere near her dream role--playing Sadie Thompson, W. Somerset Maugham's brassy, unrepentant hooker in Rain, played in the past by everyone from Gloria Swanson to Joan Crawford to Rita Hayworth--but for now, Halle says, it will do. "The producers said, 'You'll have no makeup on for most of the movie,' and I do want to get away from the beauty tiling. Besides, it's gonna be a kick. The money's good and it's a role of the kind I haven't gotten a chance to do before.
"I'm gonna just keep plugging away, staying strong and keep coming back," she concludes, as we head out of the restaurant toward our cars. Just as we're parting. I ask her to complete this sentence: "I know I'll have made it in this town when..." and she fires back, laughing, "I'll know I've made it, Stephen, when I'm on the cover of Movieline, no matter what movie I've got coming out." Why do I drive away thinking I've interviewed Berry for the final time?
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Alicia Silverstone for the March Movieline.