Catherine Zeta-Jones: Woman with a Past

"Well, I know the short version of the story." I tell her. "What's the longer form? What made it so crazy?"

I was the new kid on the block," Zeta-Jones begins. "Someone on whom they didn't have anything, whom they hadn't seen in anything before, as far as TV viewers were concerned. To them, the stage work I'd done--things like the English National Opera's revival of Kurt Weill's Street Scene. Anthony Hopkins's revival of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood--were nothing. I'd done everything I could in the way of classes and training to be ready for a career, but I'm not from a show-business family. My friends were regular people. I literally didn't know what to do. I didn't go out of my way to manipulate the media, or do anything to get more attention or make more money, but every single day there was something new about me in the newspapers and magazines.

"I was 20, going out and having fun for the first time, and that was all documented by the British press. I'd never been a party girl at all. Suddenly, someone I so much as shared a cup of coffee with became, in the papers, the 'new love of my life.' I went from 'never going out and nothing going on' to people thinking I was having everyone out behind the shed. When I didn't want to participate in the stuff journalists wanted, like talking about when I lost my virginity, it got very nasty. And no one taught me how to protect myself or deal with all that attention. I remember arriving at an airport one time, seeing my face on the cover of every tabloid, thinking. 'What have I done, murdered someone?' Some of what they said at times was very nice and complimentary. But I think of myself back then as trapped."

"And then the vise tightened?" I ask.

"There were terrible lies written in the press about how I'd stolen somebody's husband, an actor with whom I worked," Zeta-Jones continues. "They wrote how this man's wife, a very smart writer, dropped off her kids at school, only to be told by the mothers, 'How terrible that your husband's running off with Catherine Zeta-Jones.' I felt disgusting and horrible and, even when I said it was all absolute lies. I still couldn't afford to sue the tabloids. I felt like this marriage-and-family-breaker. It was ghastly. Later, when Diana Princess of Wales died and there was that big international outcry about the media and the paparazzi, the wife of this gentleman whom I had supposedly stolen wrote an amazing article in The Guardian about what it meant to have her life connected with mine."

"Is it true you actually smashed up your car in London trying to elude the press?" I ask.

Zeta-Jones nods. "I was driving my little Mazda Miata and I could see in the rearview mirror that they were following me. So I turned left into this oily little backstreet and I skidded and hit a lamppost. I was basically unharmed and they just drove away."

"And what was all this doing for you careerwise?"

"I did a couple of scenes in a couple of small films, and they were written about as though it were my fault that they flopped," she declares, referring, I gather, to Splitting Heirs, a flat souffle in which she costarred with Rick Moranis and an equally stranded Barbara Hershey.

"The perception of me started to affect the small nucleus of people who made creative decisions about films I was totally cut off from a whole new generation of filmmakers and stage directors coming out of Great Britain. To them, I suppose I was TV or just fluffy. I didn't even get close to [Trainspotting director] Danny Boyle, [Jude director] Michael Winterbottom or [Cabaret revival director] Sam Mendes. And all the while, I was going nuts seeing some projects other people were doing and going, 'What's that woman doing there instead of me?'"

"So, while Helena Bonham Carter, Kate Winslet, Emily Watson and Cate Blanchett got the sort of roles you longed for, you were doing a little number called Blue Juice?"

"I could just see myself having a lot of money but doing crap, being just sexy and pretty, for the rest of my life, and I didn't want that," Zeta-Jones says defiantly. "It was a very personal kick in the stomach. My wonderful agent, who's been with me since I was a kid, kept saying, 'Hang on, Catherine, hang on. They either want to meet you or they don't.' I was this close to giving them all the big finger and going, 'Sit on that, OK?' But I'm not like that as a person."

"And then?"

"Around this time, there came a three-page article about 'Catherine Zeta-Jones, has-been at 24.' I was called a 'loser,' that terrible word that should be stricken from the language. I definitely started to lose my confidence. Finally, I decided--maybe I was out of my mind--I wanted to come to America, even though I knew only one person here. It was hard, especially since I'd never spent one Christmas away from my family. Immediately, they wrote in Britain that I went to Hollywood to pick up my failing career."

All of which brings us back to Pacific Palisades where, circa 1995, she settled into an apartment. "It was opposite the Self-Realization Fellowship and the number of the apartment building was 666," she says wryly. "I thought: good omen. I was really lonely. One time I also stayed between leases in a friend's big house in Malibu--I was so scared. I slept in the closet."

But surely she did not spend every waking moment in the closet. When I broach the subject of past romances, it becomes evident how scorched she has been by the notoriety that attended her personal life in her first era of stardom. Zeta-Jones has no intention of discussing the apparently quite serious relationships she reportedly had with British TV star John Leslie, with movie actor Angus MacFadyen, or with ex-movie mogul Jon Peters, from whom she broke off after he proposed rather than risk becoming a Hollywood trophy wife. Nor will she discuss her romance with singer Mick Hucknall. "The focus is back on what makes me happiest, which is my work," she says pointedly.

Zeta-Jones is equally reticent about the whys and wherefores of some films she reportedly didn't land when she first came to Hollywood, including two that then-hot British import Julia Ormond won, First Knight and Sabrina. "I knocked on door after door to be greeted by, 'So, what have you done?'" she recalls, savoring the irony of having gone from a situation in which doors were closed thanks to intense notoriety to a situation in which doors were slammed thanks to complete obscurity. "It was like another big slap in the face," she recalls. "But that was very centering for me."

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