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.
_____________________________________________
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."
When I ask whether she's inclined to be as provocative on camera, she bristles at the word. "I don't have enough emotional strength to provoke," she protests. "To provoke means you have to be able to stand up and take the heat. I'm still flabbergasted that my role in _True Lies _ touched off a feminist protest, but so were the other 129 people who worked on that movie for seven months. We were absolutely dumbfounded, because none of us ever thought, let alone articulated, 'Isn't what Arnold Schwarzenegger's character is doing to his wife mean? The only way I could go out there comedically in those scenes was knowing I was very safe, being way supported, by Arnold, by Jim Cameron, by the script, by everyone on the crew wanting it to be great. I mean, there I was standing around in my panties, and Bill Paxton, who hadn't even started working in the movie, came to the set wearing only a little g-string. No, I'm not a provocative type, at all.
"What I do have," she admits, "is a sense of play. I like to eschew the stereotype, to blow open people's perceptions of show business, because I think this business is like a drug for people. [The public] wants to think the worst of people, to hear that people are horrible. Now, it's true that show business does wreak havoc on personal lives, because it's a fantasy world where you're working in a very sexually-charged environment in close quarters and people get very confused about what's real and what's fake. There's lots of misbehavior and bad choices, sure. But, like, I've been married since 1984 and, of the four show business couples that got married right that same time, three of us--Mariel Hemingway and her husband, Bette Midler and Martin von Haselberg, and Christopher [Guest] and I--are all still married. I like to use my whatever you want to call it--my exposure--to tell the truth about the business, because, rather than perpetuate the illusion, I say 'Let's make fun of it.' "
While it's impossible not to enjoy Curtis's fireball level of play in person, I wonder if perhaps not everyone gets her us well on screen. Despite a daring dramatic performance in Love Letters and whip-smart comic turns in Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda and True Lies, she has yet to touch Sandra, Julia, Meg, Demi-level stardom and salary, let alone Anjelica Huston, Debra Winger or Meryl Streep-type prestige. I toss this query her way: Don't directors and producers get her?
"The way I've survived in this industry is that I don't give a shit that so-and-so hasn't gotten me or even talked to me about a job, let alone hired me," she asserts. "If they don't get it, what am I going to do? Call them and say, 'Get me! Please!'? I tell my agent, 'I don't want you calling a casting director, saying. "So, what about Jamie Lee Curtis as the older sister? I mean, I know that as written she's black and 14, but Jamie could do it.'" My position with my agent is, 'do not sell me. Just be a good sieve for what comes through. It embarrasses and humiliates me to think that you're going around pitching me to people that don't get it. If you're saying, 'You just have to meet her, then you'll get it,' then I say, 'Fuck them. If they don't get it, I don't want them to.' "
"The jobs that have made my career something on which I can look back with pride, they came to me. Jim Cameron got me. Having him call me at my house, his knowing that he needed someone who could deliver that stuff in True Lies, that was a dream experience, a gift. John Cleese, on A Fish Called Wanda, and our new one that reunites the film's cast, Fierce Creatures, got me a little less. I'm very happy with my level of 'gotness,' so I can admire Woody Allen and still not feel badly that he's never called me up, because obviously, he doesn't get me. That's fine. It allows me to be an actor in a world where he makes movies, and I do my work in movies with people who do get me."
How does Curtis react on reading about the $12 million and more being lavished on some actresses in the business? "For one thing, I don't read the trades unless I'm in a dentist's office and they're just there" she says. "Way too much is made about salaries. Stars flat-out get paid too much. I only hope those people who get $12 million a picture give a lot of that money away on philanthropy. Now, if somebody was going to pay me $12 million, I'm not going to say. Thank you very much, but just pay me $1 million.' I get paid a very good salary, but certainly not as much as many women in the movies. It may be that I work simply because I know that if I demanded a higher salary, they might go, 'Fuck, if we're gonna pay her that much, let's go pay her that much instead.' Frankly, I think that's kept me in the game a little bit longer than some other people who have priced themselves out of the industry."
When I wonder aloud whether Curtis wouldn't have liked a go at a hit comedy like Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, While You Were Sleeping, Four Weddings and a Funeral or, say, a big-scale blockbuster like Batman, she declares, "I like what I'm not able to do. I'm bored with what I am in movies, so I don't admire anybody who's kind of in the same range as I am. I'm much more interested in people willing to sacrifice what seems like anything to get the work done, someone like Sean Penn--whose The Indian Runner was such a fabulous movie. I sat there with my mouth open."
"I've liked Gary Oldman from a long time ago. I meet someone like Meryl Streep and all I want to know is, 'When you were doing that scene in Sophie's Choice, did you wake up, swig some orange juice, get up the kids and feed them, play a little Nintendo with them, then just go and do that scene?' See, my facility as an actor isn't even close to that. I'm not even in the same room. You mentioned a lot of romantic comedies before. Usually I don't like them, because they set up my expectations to the point where I go home, look at my husband, who's definitely not wearing those baggy slacks and nice loafers I saw Hugh Grant wearing in some movie, and I go. 'Why aren't you charming like Hugh Grant?'"
Fine, but I've heard, in fact, that Curtis was considered for roles in a couple of those very same movies. "I'm not going there." she states, "because there is nothing I loathe more than an actor saying what part they turned down. I want to slap them and say, 'Who in the fuck are you to say that you owned that part before the person who played it? You didn't take the part, you asshole. You may have been offered it, but you didn't do it, so the part is theirs. Don't you dare try and take away a big chunk of that person's success by saying, I could have been in that movie instead of so-and-so.'"
OK, fine, but taking away nothing from Michelle Pfeiffer, couldn't Curtis have been a very credible Catwoman, for instance? She shrugs, "You know what the problem is? Those big, huge movies are dinosaurs. People rarely score in those movies, because by the time you're exposing film on the characters, those sets, the lighting, the costumes, the history of the piece are all in the way. I don't think Jim Carrey was funny for one second in Batman Forever--and he's a very funny man. That movie didn't yield one good comic performance. Julia Roberts in Hook failed, because the movie was a big, elephant thing. I'm certainly not talented enough to deliver laughs in a vacuum.
"I've also never been particularly competitive about parts," Curtis adds. "I've never lobbied for one. I'm fairly sane about the way I get work. I'm fairly comfortable about the way work comes to me. When it stops coming, I will stop looking for it. I once believed, quite incorrectly, that something would change when I had success. Absolutely nothing changed, except that I got more famous. Your work as an actor will not change your life.
"I am certainly not the one to whom the [studios] are going to go first. There is a whole slew of 35-year-old women working, with a myriad of talent and styles, all of them capable of doing stuff I do. But I stopped thinking about stuff like. 'If you're a leading lady, you can't play a mom.' I've played moms in the last seven pictures I've done. I'll play grandma tomorrow. I got a call yesterday to do a TV series and if the series were good and if I wasn't on a break, I'd be doing it. My take on my career is like, 'OK. Great. What day do you want me?' The Heidi Chronicles is a perfect example. If they're gonna do that piece on stage, they're not going to call me. If they're going to do it for a feature, they're not going to call me. It just so happened that the feminist uproar over True Lies kept the movie in the public light long enough to make it a hit. Because of that, I would maybe be the first choice for The Heidi Chronicles as a TV movie. I was the one that could help them get it made. So I got to do the work." She adds. "And, I didn't suck."
As the child of a long-divorced pair of reigning '50s glamour-pusses, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Curtis has surely gleaned survival lessons from the careers of her parents and their peers. Her mother, who has not done a feature since working with Curtis in The Fog, once told me she would have loved to have teamed with Curtis in the movie version of Carrie Fisher's Hollywood mother and daughter saga, Postcards From the Edge.
"Obviously, we would have brought some real baggage to it," Curtis concedes. "But it's too manipulative to assume that just because you're a child of stars, you should want to act with them, I admire the work of both my parents, but if the work we might do together weren't organic, if it were some sort of forced thing, forget it. If I were doing a TV series and the writers came up with great roles for both of them, fine, But to play parent and child in a movie?" She shakes her head, no. "Besides, I never took back on a movie project and go, 'If only...' especially on Postcards, because Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep were so fabulous and it was a very funny, smart, sad movie."
Does Curtis ever ponder whether she'd have cut it in the age of movies when her mother and father were mega, when their mere presence at a movie premiere was sufficient to cause a stampede? Again, she shakes her head in the negative. "My mother, because of the times in which she lived and starred, had more to hide than I do," she says. "People nowadays can be more forthcoming than my mother was allowed to be. There was a veneer requirement back then that I don't have to abide by. She worked in a very protected time, a lime in which you were saved by the studio, by publicity, from yourself a lot. In some ways it was good, but it also bred problems for all stars, because they had to hide who they really were, and the way they repressed their tendencies was usually through alcohol abuse. Having the protection and nurture of the studio must have given people a feeling of belonging, whereas today, when you're a freelance actor, you cannot survive that without developing a very tough skin. You cannot be guileless and survive today."
Careerwise, Curtis says she has learned from her parents to be a generalist, rather than it specialist. "My mother came with me when I was up for a Screen Actors Guild award for True Lies, and Quentin Tarantino was at our table." she recalls. "He told my mother, 'Your work with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin and all those comedies you did is a fucking study of great comic acting. You were the most underrated comedienne in the movies.' She beamed and he was correct, because while people dismissed some of that work as fluff, she could deliver great comic timing and then, without missing a beat, do Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate. My father? Same thing. He did wacky sex farces as well as Sweet Smell of Success and The Boston Strangler. They both could play broad or subtle, they did movies, a play, TV, and most of it went unheralded. In many ways, I've followed them without ever having a conscious thought about it. I've ventured into areas that a lot of other actors haven't and I've emerged fairly unscathed."
Chances are good that Curtis may again emerge unscathed from her next two projects, both romps, House Arrest and Fierce Creatures. I tell her how funny I think she can be on screen, particularly when playing a bottled-up, frantic type completely at odds with her sensuous body. Although she makes appreciative noises, she puts it down to the fact that she has "carefully chosen whom I'm opposite. My success, on screen and off, has been married to being with people who are very funny, so that I can just relax. I always say, "Let's go to the people who don't get offered things. Let's find the guy who has never been a leading man before.' Although my work is fine in the Mel Gibson movie I did, Forever Young, I've always felt more comfortable with sort of 'outsider' people who aren't, by trade, leading men. Eddie Murphy. Dan Aykroyd, John Cleese. Richard Lewis--those are four funny men. Whip funny. If I had to deliver the laughs on [the TV series] 'Anything But Love,' there wouldn't have been a show. I'm not funny like Mary Tyler Moore or Cybill Shepherd--you don't hang jokes on me. I can give the director a laugh where he's not expecting one, like in True Lies where the script says, 'she dances clumsily,' and I did that little Skate, Shing-A-Ling thing, so that the director goes, 'How nice, she gave us a laugh where we didn't have one.' But given a funny line of dialogue, I rarely deliver it well."
Oh, come on, what about when she puts down Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda with: "To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people ... I've worn dresses with higher IQs!"? Damn funny and well-delivered, I'd say. "Look at it again," she urges. "I'm laughing in that scene. We reshot it on the last day, because I had fucked up so badly that I begged John Cleese, 'Please, it's the only funny scene I have in the movie. I needed to kick it and I failed you.' We reshot, but I was laughing, and that was the best take."
Will audiences be laughing with Fierce Creatures, which reassembles the Wanda gang in a completely unrelated tale of an Australian publishing empire doing a hostile takeover of a London zoo they plan to turn into a golf course? Although she declares the movie "good," she says, "We're gonna reshoot some, just as we did [on Wanda]. John is very structural. With his work, you have to shoot his structure, then examine that and go back and restructure. Woody Allen is famous for going back and redoing things in that way. Where the first film was a clash of cultures, Fierce Creatures is a clash of values, of profit and greed versus conservation and animal love. Both scripts are very smart, funny and concise, and it's the performances that make the movies. I play a bizarre character, but I don't think I have a laugh in the whole movie."
On the other hand, Curtis had nothing but laughs playing the nagging wife of Kevin Pollak in House Arrest. Will paying audiences actually go for the flick's premise, in which bickering parents are held hostage by their kids until they sort out their marital disarray? It sounds a bit like Irreconcilable Differences meets The Ref--both funny, neither one a box-office hit. "I always thought it was a very clever premise, but I didn't know if the execution, the coming together of all the variables, would work," Curtis comments. "It's come together delightfully and I feel strongly that it will have success."
When I suggest we cut loose and get seriously back to play, Curtis jumps at the chance. Which of her costars has she most enjoyed getting into a lip-lock? "Kissing has been one of the great perks of my career," she says. "Dan Aykroyd will go down in the history of my small, inconsequential but fun film career as an amazingly sensitive, affectionate, warm, funny, smart man. And he can kiss. We had a great kiss at the end of Trading Places, and we could kiss then with a freedom I certainly wouldn't enter into now, because he's married and I'm married. A great kisser and a delicious man."
What would she choose as her one key, life-changing musical theme song? "I remember dating, at 22, a man who was 10 years older who told me that Bruce Springsteen's 'Jungleland' was a transformation for him. He asked me if I had a similar experience. Now, would I like it that my life changed after hearing Bob Dylan? Yeah. Did hearing Bob Dylan change my life? No. It's a terrifying thing to say, but songs that changed my life would be more like 'The Partridge Family' theme song or the Archies' 'Sugar, Sugar,' which, whether I like it or not, is the song of my generation, right alongside 'Build Me Up, Buttercup.'" Curtis and I take a quick interview break to duet on the latter tune, to which we both know all the lyrics. Now that's scary.
As a Hollywood baby, what advice would she dole out to young movie and TV hopefuls arriving on trains, planes and busses? "Turn around and go back now," she snaps. What's the one thing a girl in this town should never be caught without? "A condom," she replies. What's one thing that someone in this business better take care he doesn't lose? "His soul." How about hearing Curtis confess one of her guiltier pleasures? "Awards shows," she fires back. "My friend Lisa Birnbach and I have an open line from New York to Los Angeles during every awards show ever known to man. They absolutely unleash my venom. I become the meanest person on the planet. Here it is, the biggest night of the year and these people come out like somnambulists. They're so aware of themselves, I just want to gag and smack them, I'm like, 'Hey, there are a billion people watching, could you just turn on a little fucking charm? It's not a cure for AIDS, you're just out there giving a screenplay award.'"
With that, Curtis must shove off. After all, she's anxious to make good on her decision to take a year's hiatus, starting right now. So, as we prepare to move on, one last question. Say her nine-year-old daughter were, decades from now, to run across an assessment of her mother's film career. What would Curtis hope it says? "That I tried to do things I never thought in my lifetime I would be able to do. That I never analyzed it. And most of all, that I refrained from sucking."
___________________________________
Stephen Rebello interviewed Edward Furlong for the March '96 Movieline.