Diane Lane, an actress who's hardly 30 but has been on screen for 16 years, shows us her slick L.A. aerie and gives us a tour of some interesting Tinseltown terrain while she's at it.
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In the kitchen of her lushly teched-out condominium high above the streets of Los Angeles. Diane Lane is sneaking a smoke. Looking miraculously teenage in a gauzy white button-down shirt and baggy jeans, the 30-year-old Lane puffs greedily before cupping the cigarette behind her back. Who is it she's keeping an eye out for? Her daughter, Eleanor--a militant unit-smoker who, at age two, could burst in at any moment. Lane checks the marinara sauce she's poured out of a bottle into a pot on the stove, and exhales a plume. "These days, this is my idea of a party." she says, rolling her eyes.
This looks like the home of someone who likes to throw parties," I say. Lane responds, "I never entertain here. I've never even fixed a meal here. Ever, I'm not kidding." Suddenly stubbing out her cigarette, she decides that the marinara sauce is likely to be a disaster and proceeds to phone a local pizza joint that delivers. In the meantime, she opens up a bottle of wine. Not just any bottle, either. It's a claret from Francis Ford Coppola's own vineyard, a gift from the director of three of Lane's best early films, Rumble Fish ('83), The Outsiders ('83) and The Cotton Club ('84) and of the new film Jack, which Lane has just completed.
It's interesting to talk to Lane in this domestic setting, because her home, in a luxe building that looks nothing like the funky-elegant Chateau Marmont but rivals it for number of stars who have been in residence, is as much a statement as it is a domicile. Lane spent a good chunk of her childhood living in run-down residential hotels while her father eked out a living as an acting coach in Manhattan. She remembers threadbare sheets, him rooms, and countertops that never seemed to come completely clean regardless of how hard she scrubbed. Hence, "I have the prerequisite showplace apartment," she admits. "It's a mentality that I inherited from the older set. You know, that a certain amount of acquisition is fundamentally acceptable once you have a certain amount of money." I gaze around the dance-room floor of a living room, with its wraparound view of Los Angeles and remote-controlled black-out curtains, "I haven't gone crazy or anything," she laughs, "But this is nice."
As Lane takes me on a tour of her home, I realize that while these rooms are almost devoid of the expected trappings from a 16-year movie career, they are an unwitting museum of her failed marriage to Christopher Lambert, with whom she bought the place. We start out in the office, a converted bedroom with matching wooden desks, a PowerBook that Lane doesn't know how to use (her assistant docs), and stunning Hurrell portraits of Joan Crawford, Veronica Lake and James Cagney. The thing Lane takes pains to show me is a pair of boxing gloves signed by Muhammad Ali. "You can never write off talent as long as you stay swinging," she says somberly, perhaps speaking as much about the ups and downs of her own career as anyone else's. "I remember when Muhammad Ali got the championship bell for not going down. He didn't win that fight, but, God, everybody loved him. That's what probably inspired Raging Bull to get made."
In the adjacent living room is a seven-foot high cabinet made from tiny slices of inlaid wood in star patterns, "I bought this at an antique store in Buenos Aires where Christopher was making Highlander XII or something." Lane says, hinting that it was incredibly expensive and acquired during a period of marital pique, "It was made by a Japanese craftsman for a wealthy Argentines family--or at least that's what the dealer told me. If I was a guy and into cars, this would he my Testosteroni or whatever." On a shell of the cabinet are tchotchkes, one of which is a little metal frog. "That was always my metaphor for Christopher," says Lane. "It was charming at the time; now it just seems ugly."
At the far end of the living room is a wooden chair that is probably the gaudiest sitting apparatus I have ever laid eyes on. It's basically a small throne that's been festooned with shards of glass and many pieces of what seems to be costume jewelry. "This chair is bizarre, totally frivolous," Lane says, suggesting I try it out, letting me discover for myself that it is supremely uncomfortable. "It looks like a warlock throne or something, the kind of thing that Dorian Gray would sit in. This was from a jewelry shop, and they said that the chair used to protect the place. But then they got robbed and wanted to sell it. Christopher bought that line. And he bought the chair." She gives me a last-straw expression. "But they didn't sell chairs there. They sold jewelry. He should have bought me earrings, and instead we got this."
As long as we are on the subject of Lambert, what, I ask Lane, went wrong in her marriage? It seemed, after all, like a pretty classic show-biz union--the European hunk hooking up with the American starlet, resulting in the making of dubious movies (_Knight Moves_, Priceless Beauty) and adorable progeny. Lane pilots her way over to a '30s style couch, sits down and says, "I think I need to talk to my shrink about this first, but, sure, let's give it a shot." She hesitates, then shoots. "I'm still trying to figure out what didn't happen. Christopher keeps himself very, very busy. He's one of those people who can't stand to be alone; the meeting, for him, is everything. At first that was all quirky and romantic and a little bit of a challenge. Then it became my life. We were always living for the future or making up for the past. I mean, Christopher would be very romantic about flying to Japan where I was working. We would have a couple of wines in the hotel bar and he would leave 36 hours later." She adopts the expression of one who has mistakenly gulped a glass of vodka that she thought was water. "I was like, Please don't."
Lane rises to fiddle with an antique wooden table that opens to reveal a roulette wheel and chessboard inside, and comments that this was the sort of parlor accessory that people had before they were able to glue themselves to TV and video screens. She sounds momentarily wistful for an era that neither of us has ever known. "Christopher just wasn't there enough, emotionally or physically," she goes on. "I met him when I was 19 and in Paris. I didn't speak any French and he spoke no English." She pauses, before cracking, "And when I finally figured out what he was talking about, I said, Oh dear." She laughs and closes the book on this subject by explaining, "Everything crystallized with my pregnancy, when I just had no bullshit tolerance. I knew [the marriage] was not going to work, and I did not want to wait around for another six years. Then I would be 36 and pissed off. Now I'm 30 and I still have my life ahead of me. Nothing horrible happened. The third or fourth time I told him I wanted a divorce, he said OK."
We are now in Lane's bedroom, luxuriously wall-covered in Carpathian elm (which resembles the same polished, burled wood that's used for constructing Rolls-Royce dash-boards). She wants to show me a really cool mechanism that allows a TV set to materialize from inside her dresser, but can't find the remote that controls it, so she points to a rack of rainbow-colored Spinneybeck baseballs that looks like one of those stupid Jeff Koons conceptual art pieces, but is, in fact, a bonafide retail display. "This was a gift for Christopher, but I don't think he deserves it," she says with put-on brattiness. "Unless he fights me, I won't part with this."
Lane whips a harmonica off her dresser, blows a stuttery bar of blues harp, and suggests that we catch the sunset from her living room. She positions me on the sofa so that I get a better view of the vibrant pinks, azures and golds, then fills our glasses with more of Coppola's claret.
Truth is, Lane is rarely around these days to enjoy this view. The last couple of years, she's been in career-rebuilding mode, as far as the big screen is concerned. After arriving at 14 in the charming A Little Romance and establishing her ingenue status with the early Coppola films, Lane voluntarily removed herself from Tinseltown's short list back in the mid-'80s. "[Hollywood was] really rooting for me then," she explains. "I didn't wig out or anything. I just wasn't comfortable with what I was doing. They send the pretty girl out on the junket because Richard Gere can't come. I felt that people were telling me what to do and that I was volunteering for something that would get way out of control. I said, 'Take me out of this race. I see a lot of rat shit around.' I backed off, went to live with my mom in Georgia, and told them not to call me." Lane hesitates, then adds, "There was no response. Nothing stopped. Six more girls came into town."
After a couple of years, Lane decided she liked Hollywood's out-sized paychecks. Following a spate of forgettable projects like Lady Beware and Vital Signs, she reestablished her career by receiving an Emmy nomination for Lonesome Dove, setting herself up for the TV dramas that have given her some of her best performances, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1995), and gradually won increasingly prominent roles in more promising big-screen fare, including honorable failures like the sly indie My New Gun, the megabucks Chaplin and Walter Hill's Wild Bill. Coming up this summer will be Jack, the Big-ish Coppola film in which Lane co-stars alongside Robin Williams. "I ran into Francis at a party for the reopening of the Beverly Hills Hotel--a $1,000 per seat event to which I had gotten a free ticket," says Lane, scooting over to sit on one of the kitchen counter's four sky-blue stools ("Quasi South Beach," she dismissively calls them, chalking up their purchase to Lambert). "Francis said. 'Wow, you're still here?' I said the same thing to him. Neither of us had changed very much."
Coppola sent her the Jack script and suggested she read for the role of the mother of Robin Williams's acceleratedly aged 10-year-old character. "I went in and he had this gizmo, about the size of your tape recorder, that was a video and monitor in one." says Lane, now opening the door for the pizza delivery man and proceeding to divvy up slices. "He's not supposed to tape the audition, but he's FFC--he can do whatever the hell he warns. Then I went home and it never occurred to me that I would get the movie. Thirteen years after the fact, I told Francis. I still can't believe that he hired me for The Cotton Club."
Ironically, during Lane's current run of higher-profile film roles, it is her most widely panned celluloid experience that has proven to be one of the most pivotal. While playing opposite Sylvester Stallone in I995's Judge Dredd -- she deftly skirts commenting on it -- the newly single Lane met and fell for her current boyfriend, Dredd director Danny Cannon. "It was really one-on-one risque behavior," Lane concedes, refilling our glasses with the last of the wine, "I told Francis about it and he thought it was a really uncool thing to do. I actually don't know how Danny managed to direct the movie." She contemplates this for a moment, then answers her own question. "You just compartmentalize, dear."
"Well," I say, "having to keep everything so discreet must have been interesting,"
Lane laughs in my face. "It was riveting," she drolly responds. "Like getting rivets driven into your body. Actually, I spent a lot of time standing behind Danny so that I could stare at him and nobody would know. God forbid that I would become another problem for him on that movie set." She crinkles her face, showing distaste for the inevitable set gossip. "I don't ever want to know who's fucking who. Really, I don't give a shit. But it's always about that. They have networks built on it. Look at E!"
"How did you get along with Stallone?" I ask.
"It was a unique experience," Lane allows, treading gently. "He has his own locomotive tracks that are pre-laid before the pawns enter the game. It is definitely the Stallone Show. I remember the first day, I looked at his shoes and said, 'Yo, Sly, where'd you get those? At a KISS garage sale?' Jodie Foster's corkies in Taxi Driver were nothing compared to his. He began backing himself up and said, 'What are you talking about? These are Judge Dredd's shoes. Haven't you seen the comic book?' I had these ridiculously large boots on also, but his were exceptionally...heavy. Now, I meant this to be a private conversation, but we had mikes on and I didn't realize that people were sitting around hearing it on speakers and headphones," She laughs at the faux pas, adding, "This was my first day working with a mega-star, and I was not about to put myself in the bull's-eye for martyrdom. Fired on day one? When he finally joked back at me, I breathed a big sigh of relief."
Stallone is hardly the first star Lane's dealt with on a movie. "Who's the best leading man you've ever worked with?" I ask. "Robert Duvall and Donald Sutherland," she fires back without having to think. "They both have a level of confidence that assures me we are doing a surefooted thing. I don't tolerate insecurity very well. Working with them, I knew that there would not be changes in the middle of the game due to their doubts. After all, it is the male thing to lead; and it should be, with those extra zeroes on the ends of their paychecks. My attitude is. Get confident, buddy! You can do this at 50 and look cool if you are sexy; I can't."
If Lane didn't look like a teenager and weren't as razory funny as she is, she'd come across as the ultimate tough cookie. As it is, she graduated from her 20s relatively free of illusions about Tinseltown--she's smarter at 30 than many actresses are at a much later age. "Winona Ryder came up to me at a very Hollywood party and said she looked up to me." Lane tells me. "She was really sweet but she made me feel so old. I felt like Ava Gardner or something. But I remember being 24 and looking at a 30 year old and figuring she knew what she was doing."
The realities of being a single mother suddenly hit Lane like a freighter. Eleanor bursts in trailed by her nanny and makes a beeline for Lane's lap. After a session of mother and daughter bonding--which culminates in Eleanor nearly succeeding at unbutton-ing Diane's blouse--the toddler gleefully plays with a siren-blaring fire truck before settling down to a videotape of Snow White. Lane takes a moment to consider the professional changes that have been brought on by motherhood. "I don't want to partake in any more misogyny in the world, playing women as victims or women as bitches," she says. "I have done my share of sexy, if not sexist, roles, but I have become uncomfortable with some things on a purely spiritual level." I ask her for an example and she cites the Single White Female scene during which Jennifer Jason Leigh's character tests the aerodynamics of a puppy. "I love Jennifer Jason Leigh. She's at the top of my generation. But I couldn't do that. I mean, playing a crazy person is fine, but an out-and-out evil person? That said, though, [a role like that] will be coming any minute now, because women are now doing things that are just as heinous as the things men do in movies. They're just as tough, just as cruel, just as horrible. And just as crappy," She purses her lips, then sarcastically exclaims, "Excellent! Meet the challenge! Surpass them!"
Sitting in this fabulous apartment, watching a beautiful sunset, killing a great bottle of wine, I can't help thinking that however wised-up Diane Lane might be, she must still have a romantic streak. Does she have plans to remarry? "I can't imagine why." she tells me. "Marriage is a worthy effort, but I don't sit around pining about anything. I sacrificed a lot of my time and effort and thought for the marriage. I learned a lot, but..." Her voice trails off and she cocks her head toward Eleanor's room, from which Snow White's voice is emanating. "My father told me there always needs to be a dominant and submissive partner or else you can't dance. Maybe I just didn't want to do that dance."
Diane Lane takes a final sip of wine before concluding, "Right now I feel really rich." Then she turns around and enjoys her own view of the Pacific sunset.
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Michael Kaplan interviewed Pamela Anderson Lee in the Jan/Feb '96 issue of Movieline