The New Divas

On the more senior level of the new divas, Whitney Houston became a movie star in that irresistibly romantic goo known as The Bodyguard, where she worked those mighty pipes, strutted her way through her concert sequences, sparred bitchily with Kevin Costner and played-- how much of a stretch was this?-- a talented, complicated, volatile diva. She came on gorgeous, bossy and unreasonable, and some who have worked with her on Waiting to Exhale and The Preacher's Wife suggest she did not need to do much research to get into character.

Much of Houston's spikiest, most petulant behavior is, no doubt, a response to how the press has slammed her penchant for wretched excess (e.g., she lives in an $11 million New Jersey estate and she reportedly had a $75,000 miniature version of the estate built to house her two akitas, Lucy and Ethel) and her rocky marriage to Bobby Brown, not to mention the won't-die speculation about her sexual preferences. But not everything can be blamed on those naughty tabloids.

Tales from the set of Waiting to Exhale portrayed Houston as short-fused, mercurial, manipulative and partial to highly public tongue-lashings of members of her personal entourage (an assemblage she refers to as "The Royal Family"). She's reported to keep aloof from coworkers, to make little effort to disguise any boredom, and to be so utterly humorless that wags have suggested she may have missed a bet by not casting herself as the wicked stepmother in the Cinderella musical she's starring in for TV. As one crew member on Waiting to Exhale put it, "Whitney must have taken Diana Ross lessons somewhere along the way. She's like a kid in her own world and plays by rules she makes up along the way."

Another senior-level New Diva, Demi Moore, nicknamed "Gimme More" for the concessions she brazenly demands from studios and producers, has hung truly idiosyncratic bells and whistles on the notion of a diva, not the least of which is her ability to command a $12.5-million payday. A self-confessed "trailer-park kid" raised by a mother with a history of substance abuse (troubled or at least modest backgrounds are a common denominator among divas), Moore ended her involvement with drugs and alcohol early in her career to take hold of her destiny with a will comparable to Scarlett O'Hara's. Like many a hard-luck kid before her, she quickly learned the art of living lavishly--even by star standards.

Almost everywhere she goes, she has traveling with her-- often, one hears, at studio expense--two nannies, bodyguards, a masseuse, a yoga teacher, a cook, an assistant and an assistant-to-the-assistant. Her marriage to another star, a male diva who makes almost twice what she does, allows for excess and largesse that are gargantuan even by diva standards. She and husband Bruce Willis maintain a $2.5 million Malibu manse, a 14-room pied-a-terre facing Central Park West, and a $5 million, six-bedroom, seven-bathroom home on 48 acres in Idaho. "At first, people might have thought that Demi was a diva-by-association," says a studio boss, referring to Moore's relationship with Willis (who had written into his Billy Bathgate contract a provision for a paid 22-person entourage), "but she has always struck me as a diva-by-design."

One dramatic eccentricity that marks Moore as a diva-by-design is her propensity for self-exhibition. Every diva is an exhibitionist, one can argue, but Moore has raised the penchant to dizzying heights. Striptease alone makes that case. Demi didn't just bump, grind and vamp in that movie, she'd indulged in an orgy of Deminess while making it. After shooting one of the show-it-off titty bar sequences in front of 200 horny, cheering extras, Moore gloated to a reporter, "After my experience, I felt very confident." Then again, that experience came well after she'd appeared in the altogether twice on Vanity Fair covers, the most famous of which showed her seven months pregnant. ("I said I would get better with each baby," she boasted to a journalist, "and I have.") As a follow-up act to Striptease, Moore in G.I. Jane is every bit as exhibitionistic, only in a more bizarre way: this time she's physically brutalized for the entire movie by boot camp workouts that leave little of her musculature to imagination. Oh, and she sports that martyred, Sinead O'Connor bald look that so delighted the paparazzi. And in dazzling diva style, Moore had her newly bought StairMaster 4400 ($2,500) shipped overnight by Federal Express to the G.I.Jane set.

Is Lela Rochon watching Demi Moore the way Jennifer Lopez watches Sharon Stone? Blessed with a body Jessica Rabbit might envy, Rochon has had no compunction about showing it to great advantage. She plays a pole-dancer in Gang Related, Demi style, although she was quick to point out, "Unlike Demi Moore, I didn't have six months to prepare for my dance scenes in Gang Related. I had six days." And who but a diva would boast to a reporter that her skin feels as smooth as a baby's behind? At a recent magazine photo shoot, Rochon flat-out refused to don elegant designer clothes, insisting instead on wearing a vintage black lace bra with nothing over it.

But nervy ambition, not shameless physicality, is the true wellspring of the diva impulse, and there Rochon excels, inspired, she claims, by Diana Ross. "Divas aren't divas by accident," she's said, referring to her study of her spiritual mentor, who, as a Supreme, made certain she upstaged her fellow group members and cemented her power base by having a child with Motown boss Berry Gordy Jr., and who, these days, is setting herself up as the star of the remake of--you guessed it--Diva.

Even as a virtual unknown, Rochon took umbrage when TV promotional clips for Boomerang featured her scene, but only mentioned costar Robin Givens's name: "When they start off talking about Robin Givens starring in this movie and then they show my clip, it makes no sense," she carped. "People think I'm Robin Givens and I don't like it." Rochon has since shown full-strength ballsiness. "When someone says 'no' to me, it's kind of a turn-on, because it's a challenge," she has said. As a regular on TV's The Wayans Bros., she couldn't snag an audition for Waiting to Exhale, but her belief that she had to play the character Robin Stokes led her to call Waiting to Exhale author (and the film's executive producer) Terry McMillan.

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