Jamie Lee Curtis: Please Refrain From Sucking

Although she protests that she is nobody's "role model." Jamie Lee Curtis demonstrates how to stay sane while managing a 20-year career and a decade-old marriage she says what she things does as she likes and doesn't give damn what anybody thinks.

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Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't so much enter the room as storm it. I'm parked at a table in the cavernous lounge of a swank Santa Monica beach hotel wondering what exactly it's going to be like a encounter the True Lies and A Fish Called Wanda star. Oh, have I heard tales. I admit to myself, though, as she's striding that singular stride toward me, a walk which melds hot-cha lollapalooza with no-nonsense linebacker, that Curtis has always fascinated me. Those unsettling, androgynous goods looks atop that stacked body, the comically edgy vibe and the all-over-the-map career defy so many odds.

After all, here is someone who graduated from horror movies to win separate big-star send-offs in Perfect and, later, Blue Steel, both of which tanked--yet kept on going. She committed the once-unpardonable sin of easing up on her screen efforts to do the uneven TV series "Anything But Love," then managed to return to features alongside bigger heavyweights than before, including director James Cameron and box-office lures Mel Gibson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. She got passed up for the title role in Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer-winning play The Heidi Chronicles, yet went on to snag the coveted role when it was finally filmed for cable TV. She's played mothers in a slew of movies (two My Girl movies, Forever Young, Mother's Boys, etc.), traditionally the death knell for a hot career, without suffering the slightest cooling effect. Although she has made the time to write children's books, and has announced that she plans to slack off all of '96, Curtis still has two feature romps coming up this year and is already fielding offers for future projects.

"Why can't I just move in here, call it a life, and have people quietly and invisibly doing for me?" asks Curtis, looking chic in a black blouse and matching slacks as she slides into a chair and ogles her favorite hotel lobby. With that wryly curled mouth and level, cooly assessing gaze, she instantly comes across as someone who does not suffer fools. Grinning, she takes in every detail of the Martha Stewart-worthy hotel lobby, pronounces it "swellegant," then, after ordering a mug of java, finds her attention riveted by a discreet, printed placard on our table. Eyes gleaming in wicked delight, she shows me its italicized entreaty: Please refrain from smoking. She says, laughing, "I thought it said. 'Please refrain from sucking,' and I was thinking, 'What an amazing thing to put on a table." Oh, that's too fabulous--what an unbelievable title that would be for some movie star's autobiography. Brilliant." Slipping the card into her purse, she confides, "This is going on my fucking tombstone. I like 'Please refrain from sucking' so much better than my earlier choice for my tombstone, which was 'I tried.'  "

Curtis displays such joy at the notion of not sucking, I suggest we make it a leitmotiv. This works for her. "In fact," she urges, "feel free to call your story 'Please Refrain From Sucking,' because often I think I'm all about 'not sucking,' as in 'Please refrain from being bad, from fucking up.'" From our first few moments together, I'm beginning to figure out why her movie star and author mother, Janet Leigh--whom I've known for several years since I wrote a book on Psycho--once told me she thought Curtis and I would get each other.

"I just want it on public record, now that I am the Equal spokesperson, that I am, in fact, using my product of choice," Curtis declares, sounding like some warp-speed Donna Reed as she dumps the contents of a packet of the artificial sweetener into her coffee. Pulling at her pants for a campy flash of leg, she adds, "I'm also the spokesperson for L'eggs panty hose, which is another perfect fit for me. See, I'm taking a year off from my acting gig to spend more time with my daughter, so this was a nice way to be able to make some money, to be upbeat and silly, and to do something that is fairly easy, the way my marriage is easy. It's fortunate not to have to endorse something that feels awkward, like putting a square peg in a round hole. Instead, I'm just putting round legs into round panty hose, you know?

"This connection with L'eggs is very fitting," she continues, "because this very shy college guy who was having dinner with his parents came up to me once and said. 'Is there any way I could get an autograph?' Obviously, he wanted it for his dorm room or something, and I--who don't enjoy being a celebrity any more than I have to--in a fit of pique, ripped off the leg of my L'eggs, signed that and gave it to him. Please understand, it was not the panty part I gave him, but the smelly foot part."

Whether or not she likes the product, I wonder if plastering herself all over TV and radio as a shill couldn't maybe veer dangerously into the realm of suck-worthy? In other words, doesn't she run the risk of becoming the equivalent of former Equal-pusher Cher? "Who I am in oh so many ways!" Curtis snorts. But, as I point out to her, Cher--queen of infomercials and catalogues--has wandered too far astray to probably ever turn up as this magazine's "Women in Hollywood" cover doll. Curtis won't enter the fray and dis Cher, and hastens to add that she categorically refuses to be "anybody's role model." either. Having heard how she merrily went off the rails at the planned glamour-girl style photo shoot set to accompany this story, I ask if that was her way of not being a role model. "I didn't want it to suck," Curtis says, then settles in to explain what, exactly, she was up to.

"If Movieline were doing, say, a 'Men in Hollywood' issue and Harrison Ford were on your cover, you'd put him in a tuxedo or a nice dark suit, and he would stand there, like this," she explains, getting up to demonstrate a standard issue take-it-or-leave-it Ford pose, not unlike the one that graced this magazine's December issue, "and those would be your pictures. A woman shows up for a photo shoot and there's, like, 15 evening gowns. I'm not comfortable just being a glamour-puss, because that pressure, that expectation alone, is a problem for women. Besides, I'm not a model and have never been. Had I just put on those gowns, I would have looked at the pictures later and gone. 'Where is it me? Who is this? Because none of these creatures are a picture of me,' Now, because this issue of the magazine is about women in film, you feel an obligation to vamp it up a little bit, OK, but, again, that's not me."

"So, instead I suggested we goof on Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich and Bette Davis, those grand dames in film, you know, women to whom no one in movies today even comes close, because those women were very specific, distinctive and unique unto themselves. It was much more me to wrap myself in a long-sleeved Calvin Klein like I was in a straitjacket, so that it was sort of Jamie as Jessica as Frances as Diana as Billie as Sally as Sybil. All these different women in film, not just one. In another outfit, I was Jamie as Julia as Sabrina as Stockard as Rizzo--and then, in my own favorite, which we called Clueless in Pink, I was Jamie as Alicia as Molly as Sandra as Doris as Debbie. To me, it was all very Debbie Reynolds."

None of this surprises me: Curtis, like Reynolds's daughter Carrie Fisher, is known far and wide for her show-bizzy, downright bawdy sense of humor and theatrics. Collaborators on her past movies describe how Curtis routinely writes satirical, sometimes randy songs that reimagine whatever film it is she is working on as a big, whacked-out musical. "When you're making out with Ron Silver in Blue Steel and you have to respond to him saying a line like 'Hold my gun.' " Curtis quips, "there comes a point where you just have to laugh. It had elements that were just parodyable. Is that a word? I just made one. Call Webster's."

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