One
PROLOGUE: WILD GIRL ON THE PACIFIC COAST - Prólogo. Una chica salvaje en el Pacífico

Michelle Pfeiffer started out with all the requisites for bimbo limbo. She is blonde and blue-eyed, and in her teenaged years she was bored. She was also in southern California. The Beach Boys sang about the West Coast Girls being hip and cool, and Pfeiffer was most certainly that. She dated the coolest boys, strutted the sexiest stuff along the Pacific coast beaches around the Californian surf capital of Huntington Beach -known to the surf crowds as HB; she was, in the parlance of the early seventies, a surf bunny.

The boys liked her bod but not always her attitude, which was disdainful and mistrustful of them. For most she was a fantasy figure -as remote as icy screen sirens of the early seventies like Faye Dunaway. But theatre teacher Carol Cooney saw her more as a beach girl than an actress like Dunaway but nevertheless gave her a B grade in her acting class.

At the same time Pfeiffer regarded her life like a B movie. Here she was living in what much of the world regards as paradise, but the most fun was doing Elvis impersonations using a garden hose-pipe as a microphone. Elvis was still around, but Pfeiffer and her friends were into disco and the Bee Gees. On the Pacific Coast, FM radio stations were pumping out Elton John, Neil Diamond and Cher; it was the pre-punk, pre-heavy-metal days, and California was letting go of the flower-power times of the sixties with more reluctance than the rest of America. Sun, surf and sand were the Holy Trinity of these growing-up days.

The music would blare out at the lifeguard stations on the beach where she hung out. Literally, at times. Pfeiffer says she was 'a wild girl'. Lifeguard Station 17 on Huntington Beach, where Beach Boulevard meets the Pacific: Coast Highway, was worth playing truant from school for. This was real-life Baywatch. Hunk heaven. And the surf bunnies with their bouncy bodies were, on daily parade. That's not to say they were readily available. The parading was fun.

Pfeiffer wore a petulant look with her swimsuit. She wasn't going to be an easy notch on any muscled man's surf-board. She dated but was selective. Football player Danny Jackson, her first boyfriend, and athlete Mickey Swenson were a couple of the lusted-after-lads she saw. Oh, she was cool, but she was perplexed. And unsettled. AIways casting around for something else. lf this were paradise, another paradise was greener.

There's an uncasiness that still sits around Michelle Pfeiffer today. The biggest problem in her early life was her own lack of confidence in herself. She would always be daring in her work. Being daring in her life cam much later. Born a beauty -she made America's People magazine's Ten Most Beautiful Women in the World list ten times in a row from 1989- she is critical of her looks. But she's gone from the beach to record-breaking box office Batman Returns had the biggest money-making opening weekend of any film in history. The clues, as always with the achievers, are in their beginnings.

A bright student, she never seemed to settle on a particular subject or a theme. Friends, schoolmates and teachers from that: time paint her as a lack-lustre personality happy to glide through life. But her father, who had the best experience of this side of her personality, says his daughter was aIways fiercely independent. And by the nineties Pfeiffer's determination had become something of a legend. It was she who single-mindedly got the film Love Field made and finally distributed, despite the bankruptcy of Orion Films who had bankrolled the movie. For her performance on screen she earned her third Oscar nomination, but it was her performance behind the scenes that won her the plaudits of the Hollywood power-players. To all who mattered she had gone from sex kitten to Top Cat.

Chapter two