Four
THE LITTLE DUCK CONVERTS IN A CHECK OUT GIRL - El patito se convierte en cajera

The Dakota work ethic kicked in first. Her father paid her 50 cents a time to clean second hand fridges, which he would then work on, recondition and sell. 'He showed us without actually saying it that you get things in life from hard work, that you didn't just sit back and take,' said Dee Dee Pfeiffer.

Michelle Pfeiffer started working at part time jobs when she was just fourteen years old. 'I saw her say in some magazine interview in 1992 that high school sucked,' said her world-history teacher, John Bovberg, of Fountain Valley High School - Fountain Valley is, like Midway City, another of the rather anonymous string of towns that run down the Pacific Coast south of Los Angeles. But with a big laugh Pfeiffer's one-time teacher, a jolly roly-poly man and one of the best liked teachers at the school, added: 'I don't know if she was in class enough to know whether it sucked or not. I don't think she gave it a chance. Maybe she should think about that when she makes remarks today. She was very bright. She got A and B grades -it was a natural intelligence. I don't think she had to pore over the books to take her tests. Of course, that's what's the most frustrating for teachers. You see potential, and you just don't want it to go to waste. But she was a little cutie, and these are the looks that get a lot of attention that's not academic.'

Michelle Pfeiffer kept balancing her work, social and classroom lives. She even found time to keep up with her painting, for which she discovered she'd a talent in art class. She worked as a helper at a kindergarten, in an optometrist's office, for a printing press, as an assistant in clothes and jewellery shops and (in her longest run of casual employment) as a check-out girl in several supermarkets owned by Vons, a popular southern California chain of stores. 'I was the best checkout girl Vons ever had,' she boasted later when her star had risen in Hollywood.

It was easy to say that then. In the supermarket days she was a very unsettled teenager. Ironically, she was getting some lessons that would help her play the Hollywood game. Most of the boys who packed the groceries were in love with her. Or certainly wanted to get to know her out side the supermarket. Regularly offered were moonlight drives to the beach. Bob Heimstra was a Vons' worker, a clerk at store number 45 in El Toro near Midway City, and he went out w ith Pfeiffer on group dates, in a gang of the Vons' workers, going to baseball and basketball games. 'Once I asked her for a date, a one on one thing, but she said she made it a rule never to go out with anyone from the store,' he said. She realized it was easier not to mix business with pleasure.

In Hollywood they try to do that all the time. Pfeiffer's many experiences of keeping the lusty lads' hands off helped. She would choose who she would make love to. And in later years when the Casanovas swarmed around her in Hollywood she dealt with it: 'Whether you're married or not doesn't stop the propositions. But I do. You have to, or you'll spend all your time auditioning for parts you're wrong for just because casting directors want to sleep with you.'

But as a teenager the closest thing to the movies was when she'd film the surfers at Huntington Beach with a Super-8 camera. She says of those days that she was 'completely out of control'. She wrecked her first car, a 1965 red Mustang, when she was anything but sweet sixteen.

'I did a lot of trying to keep out of trouble with my parents. I once got caught doing something so radical - I'd ditched school, I had spent the weekend with all these kids in this unchaperoned house - and I knew I was busted. And I came home and I forget what kind of lie I told my father, but I actually burst into tears. I was so shocked with myself.'

Probably it's genetic, the morals of American MidwestDakota, as much as character, but there has always been a strong sense of right, of fairness, of honesty, about Michelle Pfeiffer. It didn't stop her running on the wild side, but it would not allow her to be cunning and deceptive to hide her wrongdoings. Her greatest fear is and has always been to be regarded as 'a fraud'.

Which is perhaps why she couldn't settle on a career. She dabbled in dance, became interested in painting. And she most definitely got fed-up at Vons. As a youngster she'd watched the Perry Mason series on television., That looked fun. Exciting. Maybe a career in the legal system would be interesting. She would become a court-reporter, the person who sits in front of the bench recording the evidence. It's a good-paying job, and she enrolled in school in Garden Grove, another of the nondescript towns in her area. Good-paying, but nevertheless involving assembly-line momentum, for which read drudgery. She hadn't the patience for that. She attended Golden Valley College. And then she didn't. She went back to work for Vons. And then she went back to Golden Valley College. The cute surfer bunny blonde was getting lost in this see-saw of life, up and down, up and down; she wanted to land somew here.

It had been the same in the early school days, her frustrations had always led to her being aggressively defensive. She was known as 'Michelle Mudturtle' - one of the more pleasant nicknames, she says, and one of which she seems to remain fond. She wasn't fond of herself during her early years: 'I was a rotten kid, just rotten. I was always in trouble. I tried so hard to be good, but I was incapable, just incapable. With the greatest of effort I would manage to get a C in citizenship.'

'I was a bully. . . Whenever there was a problem they would come to me. I was like the Mafia Don of my elementary school. I was a tomboy, and I was always the biggest girl in the class. The little girl with the long ringlets was always someone else, and I had a pixie cut and was regularly beating up the boys. If anyone ever needed any one beaten up they would come and get me.'

'When I was very young I never thought I was attractive. I looked like a duck. My walk was consistently made fun of. When I was in the fourth grade [age 10-11] all of a sudden, for some unknown reason, this very popular, very cute boy - who, of course, came up to my knees - decided he had a crush on me. That was the first time any boy had paid attention to me ever. But I never dated.'