Jim Carrey: Smart & Smarter

On the notion of security of another sort, I wonder if superstardom and megabucks have done anything to undermine Carrey's confidence that those who stay close to him do so for what he represents. "I feel good about the people around me." he observes. "I can tell there are certain people that are nicer to me than they are to normal people. There's nothing I can do about that--that's their hell."

Still, finding the right significant other can cause migraines when your internal klieg lights glare like Carrey's do right now. Gossip columnists and telejournalists sniped at him and Holly for seeming to be a cliché Hollywood couple, particularly those who believed Carrey scuttled his first wife--the one who came up with him through the lean years--once his ship came in. Now they're honing in on his break with Holly. About this, Carrey is willing to volunteer almost nothing. "Gossip in this country is out of control," he says, with a discernible edge. "Lauren and I came to look at it as a silly game of cat-and-mouse. When I'm at some event and being chased by the paparazzi, which is the Italian weird for "bad career choice.' I could turn around, smile, chat and give them everything they want. I guess. But then, it wouldn't be special, would it?

"Basically," Carrey continues, "watching Lauren and me trying to get together was like that movie about storms, Twister. It's hard enough making a relationship work when people are in kind of normal, nine-to-five lives. But we were like two doctors on call. It's just really hard."

Why, I ask Carrey, do male movie comics, not traditionally Hollywood Adonises, so often partner spectacular women? "Big dicks," he says, grinning. "A surface-to-air missile-type dick. Look at Milton Berle, Charlie Chaplin. I mean, I'm sure there's probably some real little-dick comics out there with tremendous senses of humor who make pithy, witty, Oscar Wilde-type comments. Ah, but the rest of us..."

Wondering whether Carrey was always a babe magnet, I ask him if he has any special memories of his first kiss. "It was playing spin the bottle as an 11-year-old," he recalls, "with, I think, this girl named Tammy, in a whole group of nasty little 11-year-olds. It was great. I remember my first orgasm more, though. I was fully clothed and I just basically kind of lost it. It was shocking to me, because I felt as though I had felt it before. I was hugging and caressing and suddenly something came over me. I remember recognizing the feeling and I don't know how that could be unless, as Socrates would say, there's just some kind of deep knowledge of such things that's already deeply embedded in our psyches."

I have to ask: was the object of Carrey's first Big O animate or inanimate? He did, after all, once tell me that he went through an adolescent stage where he lusted after a particular shag rug in his parent's bedroom. "It was animate," he recalls, "although I wasn't very discerning at that point. Although now, just thinking of that rug... I mean, it's that old thing--the carpet you can't have is the one that drives you crazy. To this day, I do a double lake when I see those rug salesmen on the side of the road. It's a good thing I don't get into an accident."

These days, Carrey could buy pretty much any carpet--or anything else he pleases, for that matter. "The hardest part about it is people know how much money you make," he insists, telling me that he still has the vintage T-bird on which he splurged when the big bucks started coming in, "Money doesn't faze me at all. It goes into an account and then I basically do what I need to do with it. The money takes a little of your fear away--you know, fear of the future. This country is pretty scary if you don't build some kind of nest egg for yourself. I don't go buy Maseratis, because I've never been impressed with stuff like that at all. I'll probably end up with two houses, someplace to escape to and someplace in the city, I'm pretty basic. I understand the dynamic of people who medicate themselves with things, but it always seemed hollow to me."

Having read recently how Tom Hanks was quoted as saying he had yet to receive all his Forrest Gump money, I wonder whether anyone in Hollywood actually ever gets all his money. "Oh, he'll wait for years for that to trickle in," Carrey says. "See, the number in the paper is one thing, but then there's 35 percent off the top for commissions, then there's taxes, so the $20 million check becomes $5.5 million. That's amazing money, but it's not $20 million. I could freak out. too, when I pick up variety and realize that the movie for which I got paid $20 million made, worldwide, $300 to S500 million. Then, of course, the studios have employees to pay and the cost of the movie and this and that, so they don't end up with that money, either. Believe me, I don't gloat about the money. People have lost fortunes that make mine look microscopic. You can never count on it for sure. People that do that are asking for trouble."

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