Sandra Bullock: The Star Next Door

She describes the places, tucked into the out-of-the-way Los Angeles locales, as "another world, filled with Cuban cigar smoke, where you might see this young beefy guy dancing absolutely beautifully with a 70-year-old woman in flip-flops and these 70-year-old men who consider themselves Spanish kings dancing with the hottest women." And what does Bullock look like when she's obsessed? "My hair is down and wild and I'm usually in a little black dress with high shoes. The hair, the dress, the heels of the shoes change your whole presence." She shivers her shoulders, rolls back her head and purrs out a Carmen Miranda-worthy, "Jess! Coochi-coochi-coochi!"

Do Hollywood's ranks harbor other closet salsa freaks, good citizens whose hips flow to el ritmo latino as laid down by Celia Cruz, Willie Colon and Tito Puente, among others? I've heard that director Randa Haines, for whom Bullock made Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, has longed to make a movie set against the backdrop of L.A.'s salsa clubs. "That's how I learned about it." Bullock enthuses. "When we were making the movie, every lunch break, everyone was salsa-ing, including Robert Duvall, who is very good. Randa's friend, Darryl Matthews, who wrote the script for that movie project with her, is my dancing partner. When Randa gets on the floor and salsas, oh my God, she's astoundingly sensual, beautiful, powerful. We have talked a lot about that movie project. It's not a lambada movie or anything, but about people partnering, connecting. I don't care if the pan is the lead or she asks me to do one line. I want to be part of it and this movie is what she was born to direct."

All this talk about partnering and sensuality makes me wonder how Bullock's been coping with the recent breakup of her long relationship with Tate Donovan. "He's an exceptional human being, a very simple, classy, inspirational person," Bullock says of the actor and musician, from whom she split six months ago. "It was just one of those things where I had to move away to allow things to take their course. At least we can both say that it had little or nothing to do with this industry, because both of us were very far removed from that mumbo jumbo. The relationship just wasn't working right. [The breakup] came at a really odd time: all of a sudden the career was doing well, all of a sudden the rug was pulled out from under me. If things had been all that great, though, if I had been like, 'Oh, I've got everything going in my life," maybe I wouldn't have appreciated my success or worked as hard as I have since then.

"It's amazing how," she continues, "every script I've done always comes at a time when my head was in the right place for it. In While You Were Sleeping. I play someone who is really lonely but will never admit to it. She forges through her life until what she is missing most of her life is presented to her. then she has to do without it, give it up, yet still keep a sense of humor about it. I didn't have to dip anywhere for the emotion I needed in this movie."

So, until her love life sorts itself out, what's the prescription? "Luaus and Charo," she explains. "Before I start The Net, I'm going to Hawaii for my first vacation in a while with a bunch of friends. We rented a house on the beach. The very first night I'm going to find the restaurant Charo runs and go there just to hear her say, 'Jello, would joo like something to jeet?'"

Given Bullock's romantic state of flux and her career demands, she may not be ready to hook up amorously with anyone else soon. But when she is, what might be a few good reasons to date her, and a few good reasons not to? "I'm the first person to say, 'Don't date me because I'll probably make you miserable,'" she answers. "But, let's see, reasons to date me? I'm cheap. No, justjoking! But I am playful, funny, patient and a very good dancer. Reasons not to date me include that I'm very independent and I want to do it all myself. I'll never ask for it, but if somebody quietly helps me and is comfortable doing it, I love it."

She's certainly got her admirers. When she appeared on David Letterman's show, he raved as if he were inscribing her high school year book: "You're beautiful and you have a great personality!" She swears their edgy flirting confined itself to talk-show-host-snappy-guest badinage. "He's getting married, you know," she reminds, mock scoldingly. "But he is incredibly smart, charismatic and witty, and I have a good time with people who kind of, like, needle me at first, so that I have to battle it back and forth with them. Which is why I'm really looking forward to working with Denis Leary on Two If By Sea, because it's going to be a dogfight. He sparks me. He's sexy, he's got that shtick, yet the Denis I know is also a good family guy who smokes a lot and drinks a lot of Coca-Cola. Working with him is going to be like one great, long one-upping session."

She adds, "But if you're asking what I really go for, it's someone who can make me laugh, who makes me forget that I have to entertain people. Also, great hands--expressive hands and forearms--which is what I always look at first. They don't have to be macho hands, you know, but I don't like a lot or jewelry, either. Oh, and I don't want somebody who looks like they have polished nails. Somebody who is comfortable with their hands, touches people warmly, sensitively. Some women and guys look at shoes, I look al hands,"

So, how do my hands rate? "Put 'em up and roll back your sleeves a little more," she says. I comply. She appraises my mitts and each digit, as if with an invisible jeweler's loupe, "Very nice, totally seriously," she declares, finally, adding, "somebody who's definitely not intimidated. Plus, you've got these big, doe eyes going on, which is cool. Something I want to talk to you about, though: the drool down the side of your mouth from your sandwich." We both crack up. It's a typical Bullock ploy; after all, it's she whose mouth needs dabbing off from the cheese fries, "Notice how I kept telling you, 'Have some fries,' but I hogged them all for myself? Years from now, you'll he licking but people will be saying about me, 'See how she died? Eating cheese fries, that's how.'"

As I walk Bullock down Beverly Drive to producer-director Irwin Winkler's office where three household name actors await to read opposite her for The Net, she tells me what she wants from her career and personal life. "I want to be the girl nobody can quite figure out, 'Is she the funny chick in action movies? Is she the one who does those edgy, touching comedies? Is she the one who does those dramas?' I just want the chance to keep doing good movies. For my personal life, I would love to be part of a stable couple the press doesn't find dull and who can come out and say. 'We have great sex every night and go on excursions together every weekend. We're monogamous. We love each other. And we're fabulous.' Let's hear it for stable people!"

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Alicia Silverstone for the March Movieline.

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