At the age of eighteen, there was no question Michelle Pfeiffer was a beauty. Like all teenagers, she was prone to being a fashion victim, but in the environment of the sun, sand and surf it’s difficult to go too wrong. And with her luminous skin and the cascading, glorious hair she was a California girl who glowed in a crowd. Everyone noticed. Her hairdresser, Jon Evans, who would later work with Liz Taylor’s crimper Jose Eber, said she should try modelling. The idea of parading in public rather embarrassed her.

Then, she’s at the checkout counter at Vons number 50 in El Toro wearing a little red smock, white ‘nurse’ shoes and black polyester pants, which were so faded the store manager was taking up a collection to buy her a new pair: you can bet he wasn’t collecting money to buy any of the guys new pants. Pfeiffer recalls her deciding moment very casually. She had been listening to a customer, a large, overbearing lady, going on and on about the quality of a cantaloupe. It’s the sort of scene where you’d want to kick the lady. And the cantaloupe. Pfeiffer thought about kicking her supermarket career into touch: ‘I guess I just asked myself: If you could have anything, somebody could just hand it over to you, what would you want to do? And it was acting.’

It may not be up there with the Road to Damascus, but it worked for her. She had purpose. Forget embarrassment, she had some ‘model’ photographs taken. She continued to work for Vons but she also entered the Miss Orange County beauty pageant in 1978. It was difficult for her. There were the professional pushy ’stage mums’ and their equally persistent offspring all over the place. A dozen times she decided not to go through with the contest. She didn’t like the catty remarks and, remember, even though everyone else thought she could have been Miss World, she was still burdened with the thought that she looked more like Daffy Duck. But she’d set her goals.

Michelle Pfeiffer became Miss Orange County, 1978. It made a picture and caption in the Orange County Register newspaper. And everybody turned the page. Except Michelle Pfeiffer. The careful side of her nature kept her behind the checkout at Vons, but she entered the Miss Los Angeles beauty contest that same year. She knew a Hollywood talent agent was one of the judges of that pageant. She lost, but with hindsight, now says, ‘Thank God, I did. I didn’t want to go to all those supermarket openings.’ Instead, it was Hollywood, ‘cattle calls’ turning up at en masse auditions for television shows and films. The first jobs she got were television commercials.

‘It was no fun. In order to be a good commercial actor you have to learn how to do a specific kind of bad acting well. If you walk out of an audition feeling like you made a complete asshole out of yourself, chances are you got the job.’ One commercial job was for the Ford car company. She had to stand in the back of a pick-up truck wearing cut-off shorts and sing her heart out on the merits of the merchandise: ‘I was terrible at it. There’s an exuberance needed for commercial work that I don’t have. It’s not my nature.’

By then she had an agent, John LaRocca. Her teacher John Bovberg recalls meeting her then: ‘One time I was in Vons in El Toro, and Michelle came running across the store: ‘Mr B!! Mr B!! I got an agent.’ It seems silly now, but I took her aside and said, ‘Now, Michelle, not too many people make it in the movies.’ I told her to give junior college another try but she seemed to be driven by something.’

Women favour cut-off denim shorts and skimpy white tops, which leave their midriffs bare. The US Surgeon General’s message about the dangers of smoking cigarettes hasn’t made much impact on Midway City. The late Fred Allen, a baggy-eyed radio comedian, pointed out that California is a wonderful place to live if you’re an orange. It’s not bad for the Californian girls either but sun, surf and sand, like certain tans, begin to pale after a certain age. It’s a world in which to be freeze-framed at nineteen would be fine. But wishing you were ten or twenty pounds lighter and years younger would not be.

You can ’see’ the young Michelle Pfeiffer bouncing around the area, taking the bus on Main Street and travelling over to Beach Boulevard and then down to the Pacific Ocean and Lifeguard Station 17. You can ’see’ her, as her father did, with a couple of kids on wider, heftier hips. But she never liked that script. And unlike many others she decided not to live it.

This is where the answers to explain Pfeiffer’s extraordinary journey up the Tinseltown tower begin. Of course, she is a delectable dish, a stunning, sloe-eyed beauty. But that’s not nearly enough to make it from Midway City to the Movies. The latter image is of a woman who has seen everything at least twice and done it all once. There’re pieces of all the lady legends about her, from Jean Harlow to Carole Lombard, Rita Hayworth to Lauren Bacall, to Grace Kelly, to… well, Michelle Pfeiffer. Sleek. Elegant. But always vulnerable. And unpredictable. And reluctant to rely on her looks. She’s made brave career choices, and they’ve paid off.

John Bovberg never thought Michelle Pfeiffer, his sometimes tardy pupil, would get on any airwaves. Sitting by the pool in his suburban home, he said:

‘My advice to her sounds rather stupid now. What did I know, right? Yes, I’m the idiot who told her to go back to school. Just as back-up, just in case the acting doesn’t work out …

I saw Michelle every day, and she was a good student, about a B student. She was fifteen years old when I had her in class. And she was just a straight and narrow little kid. She was there when we had 5000 students at the school. We had the biggest enrolment this side of the Mississippi River. The school was built for 3000. We put portable classrooms all over the place, and our highest capacity was 4980 students or something. That’s how many kids were there. Now, she was there at the height of enrolment, and we were very overcrowded. We were on two lunch sessions, and I know she had to deal with a lot of people.

All right, she went to school that first year, that freshman year when you’re trying to wait, hope people don’t put you upside down in a trash can. And then the sophomore year is when she started to fill out a little bit. An attractive girl… but, still, she was just a little girl, an innocent little sophomore.

She was kinda shy, and halfway through the year, in fact, it was the end of the second semester where the other kids had been doing the debating and making the fiery speeches and stuff, Michelle hadn’t volunteered very much. But then we did, the Harry Truman trial, where they bring in witnesses.

The players had to get some other kids to participate, so a little peer pressure. Michelle ended up being one of the victims of the bomb. She gets on the stand, and she had dressed herself up as a victim and had gauze and everything. She starts to talk, and she starts crying. You ever been in a play or something where you feel kind of uncomfortable that all of a sudden someone’s doing something so emotional you don’t know what to do? She does that to the class. And they’re looking, and they can’t figure out, What the hell is she doing? She hasn’t been like this all year. It was just a stunning performance. And we thought, God, she really is a victim of the bomb. To the end of the year, we had her take on some more responsibility. But that was the first little bit of acting.

She had to have been a couple of years out of high school when I met her in Vons (it’s a clothing store now) and I was only in El Toro by chance. When I saw her at the supermarket, there was a difference. Something had happened in there. I don’t know if it’s because she tried some other things. She had this steely look of determination. She looked at me, and she says, ‘I’m gonna be an actress.’ And I remember telling her, ‘Now, Michelle, a lot of people have agents and wanna be an actress and…’ …’And, ‘No, no.’ She told me there was this movie with Tony Danza, The Hollywood Knights. She was just trying out for it, and she thought she might have a chance for it. I give her that look, ‘Now, Michelle.’ And so I gave her the name of a counsellor.

I don’t know. You’ll see a kid coming through that’ll tell you, ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’ They’re just hell bent, they’re sure that’s what they’re going to do. Nothing stops them from doing it. And some kids do that. And then I get a call, ‘Hey, you gonna be in your room today?’ And they come back, and they’ve just gotten their law degree from Harvard or something. And it’s usually one of those kids who has that look. And she had that look.

It might’ve been in being the box girl at a supermarket and banging around and doing office jobs and working for her dad that she decided I’m gonna try this and then she found out she was good at it. I think she found something she’s very good at. Then she could build on the other things later as she realized how important they are.

I don’t think she thought education was very important when she was at school. She has a really bad impression of public education. And at the time she was there, we had some really good teachers, and she had some good teachers. Carol Cooney’s outstanding. I mean she’s really an outstanding teacher. But her heart wasn’t, y’know, it’s like you’re there, but you’re not there. She’s. bright enough to still get good grades. And then, later on, kind of slam the system… But she wasn’t into it. It’s like if I went to a training course to be a truck driver and never paid attention and didn’t have my heart in it, I probably wouldn’t do very well. Of course, she did well anyway. She knew she was gonna do it …

I was a single parent, and I was ironing at two o’clock in the morning. That’s when I do my ironing and catch my breath. This movie comes on, The Hollywood Knights, and I’m thinking, trying to figure out where I heard that name. And I’m watching, and Tony Danza and then this girlfriend comes by. And you take a double take. I go, ‘Michelle?’ Well, she got the part. I couldn’t believe it. I’m thinking I got a student who got a role in a movie. Good for you. I’m watching it. You know, you’re kind of proud of her. And there she is. It was a little role but she was good in it.

Chapter Six | Biography Index | Chapter Eight

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