Last year she announced, "Love sucks!" and then promptly got married. Then she got unmarried, and now she's really in love. Here Drew Barrymore talks about her beloved "String Bean," describes working with her "Apple Pie" (Chris O'Donnell) and explains "her tribute to Marilyn Monroe" in Batman Forever.
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The last time I interviewed Drew Barrymore, the untamable moonchild of Hollywood, she made a big deal out of announcing, in no uncertain terms, "Love sucks," and proceeded to declare that she had signed off on boyfriends forever. Then, about a week before that story hit the stands. Drew married a British bar owner. OK, I know actors lie. It's one of the things they do, part of their weaponry, right up there with their powers to charm, wheedle, manipulate, flirt and intimidate. Whatever it takes to close the deal, you know? But Barrymore, in previous encounters, had treated me like equal parts Father Confessor, born-too-soon boy pal manqué and pajama party guest. One of the things I liked best about her was what I took to be her damn-the-consequences commitment to the truth.
So, now that I am together with the young Barrymore once more, I'm feeling fully justified in my major I'm-over-you, Drew attitude. She's darting around the kitchen of her cool Spanish-style home, shooting me sidelong glances and talking her head off while making me lunch. Ticked off as I am, I can't help but marvel again at how nature has worked miracles with her. The pearly skin and bowed mouth (perpetually shifting between come-hither grin and got-you-sucka sneer) are now complemented by a shock of hair that makes her look like The Little Prince. Her whippy body is today clothed in a black mini, daisy-embroidered T-shirt, nosebleed-heeled corkies and reggae-hued knee socks.
Drew knows I'm miffed. And why. So I tell her, "Redeem yourself."
"I was telling you the truth when we talked, Stephen," she protests. "It's just that I had to put on a cute face and do something that was hard for me. Nobody could know what was really going on."
"What was going on?" She promises to tell all, but she cannot begin the process of redemption before fixing us her pasta Mediterranean, the recipe for which, she assures me solemnly, "came to me in a dream." Dream pasta? "Yeah. I mean. I dreamed every single ingredient in this recipe, which would be like saying, to some people, 'I talk to Elvis.'"
"Drew," I tell her, "don't think you're going to cook and charm your way out of the shitter, I'm listening"
Barrymore's expression hints at the dark, chunky stuff that churns under her punk goddess surface. Movies have yet to capture her heady mix of born yesterday and old soul. Of dip-shit and funky sage. Of some-thing utterly uncompromising yet terminally thrashed. Earth angel and psycho babe. She's a Barrymore. all right, not only in her eerie resemblance these days to the very young John Barrymore (her grandfather who was the stage matinee idol and Serious Actor of his day), but also in her ravenous appetite for just about every-thing, including trouble. Especially trouble.
Trouble is what she's talking about right now, in the form of the guy she wed, then ditched about a month later. At what exact instant did she realize Mr. Right was all wrong? "On the day I married him--when I realized I hadn't even known him long enough to find the '666' mark on the back of his neck," she snaps. "He turned out to be the biggest schmuck I've ever met in all my years of existence. He gained everything. I got nothing, nothing out of it, except to look like the world's biggest asshole. So, oh my God, Steve, did I really not believe in love when I said that to you. I'm not saying that I am the only one who fucked up on this. I fucked up because I succumbed. I didn't pay attention to my own heart."
I ask Drew, as she doles out pasta from a big Tupperware container-- "We both eat out of it and what we don't finish goes right back into the fridge," she chirps, like a hip Jan Brady--what her mistake was. "It was a marriage of convenience--his, that is. We were friends. He needed some-thing and I thought, OK. I can be a hero and save this person and that'll be that." Save him from what? "I don't know if I'm even allowed to say this," she whispers, then, shrugging it off, belts out. ''I mean, who fucking cares at this point, a year later? It was a green card situation. That's why I couldn't tell anybody. I had to lie, which made me feel like the biggest piece of shit on the planet. I left the day I got married and didn't come back for four weeks. So. here I was trying to be altruistic, doing this favor and the whole world is going, 'What an asshole!'
"I realized that living a lie was not fucking worth it," she continues. "I said to [him], 'We're two people that tried to have the right intentions and it got so screwed up and now I want to make the wrong right.' And that, Stephen, is the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help me God." So, is he out of her life? "I hate him," she growls, nodding in assent and shuddering. "I don't want to talk about him. But he'd better run the other way if he comes into a room that I'm in."
As she lights up a Marlboro and blows smoke like a postmodern film noir jeune fille fatale, I mention that some people have accused her of self-sabotage. She mulls that over, then asserts, "I'm just out there living my life. The only fuck-up in my life is my marriage, and, the truth is, that's only for me to say. If I'm out there living my life and people don't like it, I don't know what to say about that. If I lived my life according to other people, I'd be going crazy. Hey, my whole life has been blown out of pro-portion, so, you know, let everyone fucking judge me if they want to. My marriage didn't hurt anyone else. It certainly didn't have anything to do with my career. Why would people think that that's an example of me fucking up?"
Because, I tell her, it seems impetuous, flaky, and a throwback to the fast-lane behavior that nearly got her blacklisted out of "A" movies. "It's like Johnny Depp, who's just living his life," she says, referring to the actor on whom she once had a major crush, but swears she has gotten over it. "You know, I get married. He gets upset one night and trashes his hotel room. Who fucking cares? We both make the fucking cover of People. People gotta get over it."
People will or won't get over it, but, on both the personal and career side, Barrymore seems to be heading up and up and up. Since her winning turn in Boys on the Side, she has partnered herself with two of her closest friends and associates in Flower Films, her own movie and TV production company. Piles of scripts litter the dining room where we're now sitting. She asks my advice. Should she star with Daniel Day-Lewis in a movie version of Arthur Miller's witch trials parable The Crucible? Yes. Should she play The Honest Courtesan for Legends of the Fall producer Marshall Herskovitz? Pass. Should she play a drug-ravaged, Judy Garlandish show-biz dynamo in a big-screen Return to the Valley of the Dolls, the sequel to Valley of the Dolls? In a heartbeat. I also urge her, although she will not confirm rumors that it's been offered to her, to play Joan of Arc in producer Joel Silver's violent, in-the-works epic about the young French warrior and religious martyr.
That's done. She thanks me. I bring up her new movies and she's fine with that--in fact, if that's what you're into, skip ahead, because we do talk about her new films Mad Love and Batman Forever, one of which she trashes mercilessly--but right now she'd rather talk about the new love in her life. For the last nine months she's been touring with, living with and madly loving Eric Erlandson, a 32-year-old, 6'4" musician in Courtney Love's kick-butt rock group, Hole. She calls her honey "String Bean." Most of what he's nicknamed her is unprintable, even here.
"He's a Buddhist, I'm a total geek head, so somehow, we seem to make this great combination," Drew asserts, now guiding me through the house, which features a breakfast room with a dome ceiling she had painted with shooting stars, light switch plates ablaze with floral designs, and walls washed in subtle sherbet hues. While showing off the work-in-progress that she shares with Eric, she's pointing out tokens of her lover's esteem. Explosions of cut flowers in vases. Potpourri of her favorite flower (daisies), which he has picked for her on their adventures around the world. A lamp that splashes rainbows across a wall. Pictures of Eric displayed with vintage portraits of the chiseled profile of John Barrymore. The whole house screams: Love Feast.
Drew's eyes brim when she talks about Eric. Damn if she doesn't shimmer. How did it all begin? "I threw up on the man's shoes," she says, dead-pan. "He sort of rescued me one night. I was at this party at Jabberjaw seeing a band play and I had eaten some bad food and there was the most claustrophobic, hot-and-sweaty atmosphere because there were 300 people in this club with a 100-person capacity. A friend of Eric's owns it and Eric was standing outside. I was really sick and running out of the place throwing up and he comes and stands by me. I'm going, 'Aren't you grossed out?' but he was just totally there for me, saying, 'Humans do it. It's a very natural thing. It doesn't gross me out.' I loved that immediately. It was like, 'I've found someone who's totally on my wavelength.
"We sat on the stoop for 45 minutes just chatting," she recalls, "and I was, like, 'This is the coolest. This person is so amazing.' I just loved the way he thought. I was, like, I've never felt this comfortable around anybody. And I've always wanted to feel comfortable around people. But the truth is, people are uptight, I'd rather be alone than invite bad company, you know? I said, 'If I say "thank you" now, it's just not going to say as much as I really mean. You won't get the gist of it. So, I really hope that I find you again.'"
"Two weeks later, my friend Ellen gave me a wrong hotel room number at the Ma Maison and I knocked on the door and Eric opened it, saying, 'Macaroni and cheese girl!' because that's what I was throwing up that night. I grabbed him, gave him this huge kiss and said, 'Want to go out later and see some bands play?' He and [Hole] were in town shooting the cover of their album. It was so. like, fare. But then, I didn't see him again for a long time because I had to go and get married and figure my fucking shit out, learn my lesson in life, mold myself once again onto the road of a happy, healthy destiny."
It must have been so, like, fate, too when Mad Love, in which Drew plays a manic-depressive teen whom boyfriend Chris O'Donnell tries to save, was shot in Seattle, where Eric lives. Five months after she threw up on his shoes, they rekindled their relationship over herbal tea, eight hours of conversation, a long walk and earth-shaking smooches. "Kissing--and I mean like, yummy, smacking kissing--is the most delicious, most beautiful and passionate thing that two people can do, bar none," she says.
"Better than sex, hands down. I'll never forget the first lime I kissed Eric. We had hung out for hours having tea and we went for a walk and I ended up just walking him home and went up to his place with him. His bedroom is one of my favorite rooms. It just has the greatest fucking vibe. We're sitting on the edge of his bed playing records. I look up and go, 'Oh, my God, you have a blue light in your bedroom.' Thai's so wild because the first verse of one of my favorite songs in the whole world goes, 'There's a blue light in my best friend's room.' You know the one, 'Blue Light' by Mazzy Star on her second album, right?"
So, then what happened? "Eric had the Mazzy Star tape, put it on, turned off the lights and put on the blue light. Like I said, he was sitting next to me on the edge of the bed and he's six-foot-four. He's really long. He just, like, put his bead on my back and wrapped his arms around me. They wrapped all the way around my body and he had his hands together under my legs. This warm, honey-like energy just poured into me. I sort of had to take a deep breath and go, 'Whoa.' because, the whole night, we were trying to figure out whether we were gonna be best friends or totally in love. And the moment he wrapped his arms around me, it was like, 'OK, I think it's an "in-love" thing.'"
What about the smooching? "It happened right then." she says. "It was very, very gentle, at first. Small kiss. Then, it went just a little bit bigger, then a little bit bigger, bigger, then we were just kissing for a long while. Just kissing. And that's all it was. Just the softest, most beautiful, non-threatening kiss I've ever received in my life. After that, he was with me every day shooting Mad Love. He got me through that job. He would have to wake me up in the morning because [the movie] was so emotionally debilitating and strenuous."
Turns out it's a good thing she had something else to occupy her mind while making the movie for director Antonia Bird, who made Priest. Although Barrymore confirms that this is the first movie on which she "made some money, like $1.5 million," things started off rockily with Chris O'Donnell. "When we first met, I was, like, 'Fucking frat boy, get out of my face,' and he was like, 'Hollywood chick, go fuck yourself.' We totally freaked out on each other. But we got so close doing this. He is my 'Apple Pie,' that's my nickname for him now. He and Eric and I got to hang out together a lot, too, Chris is sooo beautiful in this movie, so fucking amazing. His acting is my favorite kind of acting. So many young actors are, like, acting so much, it's like a disease you can't shake. It's like if we were sitting here and I'm going, 'OH, MY GOD, ISN'T THIS PASTA GREAT?' and you go, 'GOOD FUCKING PASTA! AND HOW ABOUT THIS ICED TEA?' Chris isn't like that. He's real. He exists."
I know how she feels. When I bring up the names of a small platoon of actors, she brings up one I didn't name. "I loved the story you did on Stephen Dorff. You made him sound way more eloquent than he is. I like him. Hey. Dorff, you little fucker! I mean, he was my boyfriend in the third grade. I've known him all my life, and now he's like Mr. Hollywood Schmoozer. He has a mouth and doesn't want to keep it shut, but he's all talk--totally, totally all talk. He means no harm. Eric was around Stephen 'cause he went to the Hole show in Japan while he was promoting S.F.W. there and, you know, Stephen hangs out with Courtney all the time. So, Eric calls me and says, 'Now, I don't want you to get mad at this, but you and Stephen were definitely brother and sister in a past life,' and I told Eric, 'No, the only similarity is that we grew up in similar sick circumstances. Young actors, same school.' We were close, we were on the same path, but we definitely branched off. It must take so much fucking energy to remain out there in the scene like a socialite."
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.