Article: Pfeiffer - 'Married To The Mob'

Serious Screen Queen

MICHELLE PFEIFFER'S ACTING IN 'MARRIED TO THE MOB' IS AS GOOD AS HER LOOKS

By DAVID ANSEN

How would you like to be called one of the 10 most beautiful women in the world? All right, you could live with it. Well, so can—and must—Michelle Pfeiffer, though some days it seems a burden. This particular winter morning in New York, where she's in the midst of shooting Married to the Mob with director Jonathan Demme, the last thing she wants to think about is a bunch of inane questions along the lines of, What is the secret of timeless beauty? An other magazine has just anointed her one of the world's most beauteous, and it wants her to free-associate on the narres of the other M.B.W.I.T.W.s (Daryl Hannah, Isabelle Adjani, Kim Basinger, etc.). Pale as porcelain, Pfeiffer squints her fabulous al mond eyes, thinks for a moment or two, and frets. "Do I have to answer this?" she moans, correctly sensing herself in the middle of a no win situation.

Best to treat the whole thing as a joke, she concludes. "I guess I'm gonna call Cher—she'll help."

Thirty-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer is not unaware of the fact that she looks better than most ordinary mortals, but when you are a basically shy person, which she is, and when you are full of self-doubt, which she also is, that fact is not necessarily reassuring. Particularly when you would like people to judge you for your talent, not your gift wrapping. But why, one may wonder, would someone who's so skittish, even reclusive, someone who speaks of her natural tendency to hole up like a hermit, choose to be an actress, a profession that requires a healthy dose of exhibitionism?

"I have some horrible sadomasochistic streak in me," Pfeiffer Iaughs, with a whiff of woe. "It's a running theme with all of us actresses. We all need some kind of major approval we didn't get when growing up. Not only do we pick a career where we'd get worldwide approval—and that's how big our approval needs to be, worldwide—we also set ourselves up for world rejection. But we didn't think about that going in, right?" She laughs excitedly. "It's your worst nightmare come true. The joke's on you, hah hah hah!"

Pfeiffer got her first sweet-and-sour taste of fame six years ago when she landed the leading role in the much-ballyhooed sequel to Grease. Pfeiffer and her costar, Maxwell Caulfield, were total unknowns, so Paramount went into promotional hyperdrive, pushing its new, young stars in huge sexy ads with the sell line "Too hot!" "I wanted to die," she recalls. "It was so embarrassing." Here it was at last, world approval. And she wanted to flee: "This is not what I meant! Beam me up, Scotty. I take it back." She remembers that her father, thrilled to see his daughter's narre in print,
called her up in Chicago, where she was suffering her way through a promotional tour for the movie, and read her a major newspaper review of Grease 2. Unfortunately, the proud papa failed to notice that the critic brutally slammed her performance. She was devastated.

Grease 2 wasn't a hit—not many of Pfeiffer's films have been—but the newspaper
was wrong. In her singing and dancing debut, she came on with the hard vixenish edge of Yvette Mimieux and some of the beguiling sluttishness of the young Tuesday Weld. She was the ultimate high-school chick, the kind of girl who could make gumpopping a sexual provocation. It took several years and many varied subsequent performances to convince some people this was acting, not genetics. Hollywood, which has always exploited great beauty, is suspicious of it; Pfeiffer, like the smart and talented Weld before her, has had a tough time carving out a place for herself as a serious actress. How can she be good when she looks so great? But check her out doing her delicious number as the Miami moll in Scarface or rediscover her haunting performance as the endangered party girl in Into the Night. And in Alan Alda's best-forgotten Sweet Liberty, playing a tough Hollywood actress who transforms herself into a demure Colonial American lass, Pfeiffer lit up an otherwise dim movie. It wasn't until last year's The Witches of Eastwick, however, that Pfeiffer found herself in a certifiable hit. "I have to admit, it's made my life easier. There are more offers. What's frightening is that it has nothing to do with your work. Don't fool yourself. It's all about how much money a movie makes."

The critics have caught on to Pfeiffer, but what's eluded her is that one perfect role that would magically cement her image in the popular mind. When asked what she thinks her image is, she throws up her hands. "If other people's image of me is anything like my own, it's very confused. I'm a different person every day. I look at my wardrobe sometimes and say, 'Who lives here? Whose closet is this?' My house is the same way. One room is Art Deco, one room is Santa Fe, one room is South of France. Who is this person? I keep thinking I should be consistent; I should be able to say this is who I am."

Perhaps actors act precisely to avoid closing their personality options. On the set of Married to the Mob Pfeiffer gets to crawl inside the skin of a Long Island housewife named Angela. She has worked up a mean Queens accent to play a woman who, after her mob husband is bumped off, is suspected of being involved in organized crime. An FBI agent, played by Matthew Modine, has her under surveillance. The movie's a dark comedy, filled with Jonathan (Something Wild) Demme's unpredictable tonal swings. This might well be the movie that opens everyone's eyes to Michelle Pfeiffer's true range. "You know what frightens me about working with Demme? I'm afraid never be as good again. 'Cause he really draws things out of me. He gets me to do things I can't believe I'm doing. I feel if I could just work with Jonathan Demme and this crew in New York City for the rest of my life I would be a happy person as far as my career goes. It's such a good time, and I really need that right now."

Professionally, it has been a rewarding but frenetic period: She goes right from the Demme movie into Robert Towne's Tequila Sunrise opposite Mel Gibson. Personally, it has been a difficult year. Her marriage to actor Peter Horton—the bearded Gary in TV's thirtysomething—fell apart after seven years. "Usually when things are tough I dive right into my work and I use it as a drug," she says. So she threw herself into a John O'Hara movie, Natica Jackson (which aired last fall on PBS), playing a Thirties film queen. But this time the drug didn't work. She felt unconcentrated, and had a hard time playing an intimate sex scene with costar Brian Kerwin. "I was hysterical."

What went wrong in the marriage? Pfeiffer met her husband when she was 22 and he was 26, and it pains her that they had to inflict their growing pains on each other. "He's a great guy; I admire him. We grew up together. It's kind of a shame getting married that young, because you end up a busing each other. Generally speaking, I don't think people have any business getting married before they're 30. There's a lot of damage that relationships shouldn't have to go through, but that one needs to go through just to become an adult. We're better friends now. But we were really killing each other."

Growing up is hard to do. Perhaps especially hard if you're a blonde impulsive beauty from Southern California, where adolescence can be preserved indefinitely, as if it were fine wine. Growing up in suburban Orange County—a stone's throw from Disneyland and Huntington Beach—the young Pfeiffer could easily have be-come a fun-in-the-sun stereotype. She hung out with the surfers at Huntington, falling in love with sunburnt blonds with names like Sparky. "Lifeguard station 17 would be very hip fora while," she recalls with irony, "then the cool spot would change."

Her first inkling that there was more to life than riding waves came when she took a theater class in high school. At first she thought the theater people were really nerdy, very uncool. Then she fell in love with them. "They were funny and witty and unlike anybody I'd ever met." Alter high school there were some "ill attempts at junior college," a brief stint at a court reporting school, but she was drawn to the arts. As a gateway to Hollywood, she entered a beauty contest, Miss Orange County, and won. Then, while studying acting and appearing in bit roles in movies like Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, she fell under the spell of what she describes as a "vegetarian cult." It was a "weird, metaphysical thing," which required her to give up all her bad habits, not to mention meat and fish. Only when she met Horton did she break free of its authoritarian spirit.

"I'm very extreme in my personality, which is something I'm trying to cure. I have a very addictive personality." She now stays away from drugs, and after giving up alcohol completely for three years, only occasionally indulges. "Even after just one or two glasses of wine, I don't really like my personality, although I feel like I'm a lot freer, more comfortable, more outgoing. I like who I am sober. I don't like losing control. I have a balance with it now," she says in a confident tone. "With coffee, I have no balance."

The obsessive aspects of her personality now are channeled into her work. That energy goes into transforming herself into each new character. Speaking of her newest persona, in Married to the Mob, she confesses with characteristic self-denigration, "I frankly like Angela more than I like myself. She's a lot more fun than I am. I am so disgustingly serious. I read interviews I do and think, Who is that pretentious asshole? Would you lighten up a bit?"

But in fact she's not in the least pretentious, just your average introspective, drop-dead-gorgeous movie star who happens to be her own worst critic. "Some days I look at the rushes and think, Who am I kidding? You can't act. You are just a pretty face."

Fortunately, there are other days, when she says to herself, "Yeah, I'll work again." To which we Pfeiffer fans can only add, the sooner the better.