Drew Barrymore: True Drew

I heard that O'Donnell dropped out of the movie for a spell and that Barrymore, who had casting approval, was greatly discouraged when Leonardo DiCaprio turned down the role. "I would love, love, love to work with Leonardo," she admits. "He actually did a cameo in Poison Ivy because he's friends with Sara Gilbert. Even then I said, 'That person has such great charisma and energy.' and I'd put his Gilbert Grape performance among the fucking flawless performances of Al Pacino in Scarface, Val Kilmer in Tombstone, Eric Roberts in Star 80 and John Malkovich in Burn This on Broadway."

What, when O'Donnell came back to the project, made them both want to do it? "Being someone who never stepped inside a high school, I liked the challenge of me and Chris playing typical teenagers. Here we were, 20 and 24, playing 17 and 18, and sometimes we'd get a little freaked out by that, I was constantly in a battle with the studio because they'd say, 'Jesus, put some fucking makeup on.'

"The sad thing," Barrymore continues, "is that we both feel the same way about how [Mad Love] turned out. I don't know how it happened, but it just turned into something so totally different than what Chris and I originally attached ourselves to."

Given the intensities of Barrymore's personal and professional life of late, I want to ask her a question that's been on my mind. I know she keeps diaries, notebooks filled with poems, musings, intimate details, and that she never locks them or hides them. What if she ever lost one?

'"How do you know to ask this stuff?" she says, widening her eyes. "Two months after Eric and I started seeing each other, my purse was stolen out of his car in Seattle. All the pictures we'd taken so far were in there and every one of my recent writings, every single fucking detail from point A to point Z. I had $15,000 in cash, too. because I'd just gotten all my per diem. I dropped to my knees and just burst out crying and couldn't stop, I was hysterical. I was so worried that this book was going to get into the wrong hands. If I thought i was exploited before, I mean, oh shit, all this stuff I'd written was from the horse's mouth."

What happened next? "Eric kept saying, 'I'm going to find it for you.' I was like, "Eric, don't try to be Superman. The fact that you held me all night is the greatest gift I could have gotten.' I was on the phone with lawyers and cops all morning at work, freaking out. Eric went and chanted for two hours and had not so much a vision but an 'idea' of my bag in a closet. He 'saw' the bag and went, 'All right. I'm fucking on it." We had been talking to these girls when we first got there and Eric just fell it was them. Seattle's a really small town, everybody knows each other. He went and found this guy we had met before who had been one of the girl's old roommates. The guy was like, 'Why should I help you?' and Eric was like, "Because this person doesn't deserve this to happen to them.' So, Eric gets a baseball bat and they go and track down the girl."

Bottom line? Eric, with a little help from Buddha and a baseball bat, found the goods just where he envisioned them: in the closet of the girl's apartment. "I walked into Eric's place after work," she recalls, "and he wasn't there, but all of my contents were on the floor. I burst out crying, I was like, 'No way.' When he came in a half hour later, I was like, 'I'm so in love with you. No one has ever done any-thing like that for me before. You're the guy. You're Superman. You're Inspector Clouseau. You're MacGyver.' I don't know if I've really been in love before. But this is the most beautiful thing I've ever experienced. Our relationship, in every aspect, is very animalistic. Which is great. We are kind of like animals. You fucking put a cage around us, we're going to go wild. Our worlds glide perfectly. It's been the happiest nine months for me. Not a day goes by where I don't go, 'Fuck! I'm with the most amazing person!'"

Knowing how tight she has been with her circle of women friends, I ask whether her closeness with her boyfriend has caused any bumps in those relationships. It has. She describes the loss of her best friend as "worse than any breakup I've ever experienced. I still wear the ring and I hope she does too. I still think about her every day, always send her positive vibrations."

Barrymore is so filled with emotion that I ask if she has ever had a woman-to-woman relationship that went beyond platonic. "Do I like women? I like women. Do I like them sexually? Yeah, I do. Totally. To the extent of how I fool around with them. I think that when I was younger, I was with a lot of women, I used to love to he with women. I haven't been with a woman in a long time. It's weird. Women are so much more selective with women than they are with men. You really have to like the person. Unless you completely like women and don't like men, then maybe it is less selective. But if you're more for men but you definitely have this admiration and love for women, it's a matter of the right one. I don't think I could ever just solely be with a woman. It's not enough.

"I've had friends that I've been in love with, but never touched," she continues, sipping her iced tea. "It's actually a fine line. I don't think you should fuck your friends. It ruins the relationship, I'm in love with all my friends, but not sexually. I don't tend to find a lot of women that, like, spark me. I love a woman's body and I think that a man and a man together are beautiful and that a woman and a woman together are beautiful and that a man and a woman together are beautiful. Whether it's your complete preference or half your preference, it's, for me, like an exploration of your own body through someone else to whom you're attracted. Homosexuality has been going on since the beginning of time. It's not a new epidemic. What tastes good to you is the most important thing. And you should go with that or you're depriving yourself from life. If you're gonna do it. be honest. Yeah, I fuckin' like women. I haven't met a woman in years that I've really liked. But, before ... well, yeah, of course, you know? There's nothing wrong with that."

Barrymore is so comfortable with her sexuality it's no wonder she takes special delight in Batman Forever. She and her fellow "2000 Malibu Road" survivor Joel Schumacher had so much fun whipping up her role as a frothy, sexy Marilyn Monroe homage that, although the job was only supposed to be a two- or three-day cameo, they shot enough for a supporting role. "It's the sexiest, most unique and different of all the Batman movies, filled with genius ideas from [screen-writer] Akiva Goldsman," she asserts. "Marilyn is an icon, so it's crazy to think you can copy her, let alone try to be her. It's like making a movie about James Dean. You can never touch that. But my character, 'Sugar,' is like a tribute to her."

Speaking of things Marilynesque, what's up with Barrymore's having posed for Playboy? And what's with the recent headlines about her doing a strip act in New York? She says she talked over the Play-boy idea at length with her boyfriend. "He was like, 'Oh, God.' But, it was like a total adventure. Why not, you know? I'm certainly not afraid of controversy, because, if I was, I wouldn't be alive." So, doing the Playboy shoot, was she glad she'd undergone breast reduction surgery a few years back? She nods, "I walked through life with missile tits, with an eyesore in the middle of my body. It was something that made me feel degraded, insecure. It made me slouch. On a small frame like mine, double D's ain't comfortable. The surgery changed my life. But, the Playboy shoot? You know, everybody's 'Oh my God' about everything. Half the reason to do things is to provoke, 'Oh my God.' There is definitely a side of Eric that liked that I did it. But how he complimented me on it meant the most to me. He's the one person I aim to please that way."

Yet, one hears she aimed plenty in a much-reported incident in a Manhattan club, during which she showed her all in a strip routine for an appreciative crowd. When I bring this up, she rolls her eyes, explaining, "My friend John, the coolest guy, and I have an act together called 'Dick Haney and Lolita,' Dick is 'the funniest man in the world' and I'm, well, Lolita. We do this act where I strip as he does this comedy act. And it's totally brilliant. You have to see it some time. We did it one night at The Blue Angel, which you know is this nude performance art space in New York. Now, all of a sudden, the place is super popular, which kinda sucks because it was the coolest, most untrendy place in the world. So, we did our act and Eric was there and it was really crazy and fun. I took it all off. Somebody could say, 'Oh, that's sabotage,' but what's sabotage about that? That's my own time. I'm entitled to do what I want. When I'm doing things like that. I don't think, 'This is gonna make the cover of the New York Post.' You think I'd be jaded about it at this point, but I'm repeatedly shocked that people want to say things about me all the time."

Forget what other people want to say about her all the time. As has been our tradition in two previous stories, I ask Barrymore if she has a message to send back to Hollywood, like the time she declared to every casting agent and director who doubted her, "I'm back!" She leans closer to my tape recorder and announces, "I want to stay. For all the purest of reasons. I want to do what I love doing so fucking much. And, while I'm doing it, I want to live my life," See you next time, Drew.

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Val Kilmer for the June Movieline.

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