Starface

Michelle Pfeiffer has survived Hollywood, celebrety, even Shakespeare in the Park with her mistery intact. Graydon Carter is bowled over.

I was supposed to have gone bowling with Michelle Pfeiffer the other night. It was a Monday, the last week of her run as Olivia in the New York Shakespeare Festival's star-glutted production of Twelfth Night in Central Park. The cast had the night off, and so, evidently, did New York City's bowling fraternity. We were sitting around talking in Pfeiffer's room at the Wyndham Hotel, a charming little place on Fifty-eighth Street, when a factotum called to apprise her of the situation. "The bowling alley is closed on Monday?" she said to the person on the phone. "You' re kidding me! Oh my God!"

Oh my God, indeed. I had been told that bowling was a particular enthusiasm of hers. Before the telephone call, she had spoken of it passionately—so much so that I imagined bowling must be some sort of poignant throwback to her childhood in blue-collar Orange County. I asked her how long she had been bowling. Three months, she said. Perhaps it wasn't such a tragedy after all.

We made do with drinks and chips in her hotel room as a prelude to dinner. She was done up in the standard dress of successful young actors and actresses these days: oversize this, thrift shop that, scuffed lace-ups, distressed jacket, unmade hair, no makeup. Were she a man, she would still be wearing yesterday's beard. Michelle Pfeiffer is taller than you would expect (I'd venture five seven, but it could be the heels). And despite a sort of soapy tan and a permanent net­work of tiny red veins in the incide corners of her eyes, she seems only slightly less brittle than she appears in movies. As expressionlessly attractive as she is from a distance of three feet, she has a face that only truly hits its stride on a movie screen. Up there, hers is a face fairly built for expressing moments of enormous happiness or devastating sorrow. Down here, she just looks beautiful and painfully thin.

In an alarming number of interviews, Pfeiffer has felt compelled to apologize to one person or another for some momentary fit of testiness, with the explanation that she's having an off day. Fortunately, this did not appear to be an off day. Still, I couldn't help feeling that disheartening unease one gets in the presence of someone apparently working damned hard at keeping the charro purring along on the surface of things while an emocional cataclysm simmers underneath. At one point, after hearing her talk about how audiences often confuse the characters she plays in movies with her own personality, I asked if this was the case with Sweet Liberty, in which she plays an actress capable of great sweetness when the cameras are rolling and something less attractive when they aren't. She shot me a look that could have opened a clam across a crowded room and answered with a terse, "No. Because I know that I am not that person." It was at that very moment, and armed with the knowledge that she cares deeply about her own privacy, that I decided it might be best not to ask Pfeiffer about her rumored affair with John Malkovich during the filming of Dangerous Liaisons or her eight-year marriage to Peter Horton, an actor on thirtysomething.

Pfeiffer seems genuinely unaffected by the surface riches and trappings that can attach themselves to an actress of her celebrity. "I mean in one way, it always is a bit unreal to me," she says. "I remember a few years ago my accountant saying that he was going to get me an American Express card, and I said, 'What? Do you think they'll give me one?' You know, you never really leave who you are. I have no desire, nor have I ever had, to go out and buy big boats and to have seven houses."

Uninterested in the Hollywood social scramble, she prefers to spend her time poking about hardware stores, junk shops, and garage sales. "I'm the kind of person who likes to haul lumber and go to flea markets and bring back furniture and things like that," she says. To this end, she recently traded in her BMW 320i for a green Range Rover, thereby moving up one peg in Hollywood rolling stock cliché. Both cars are a far cry from her childhood, when she saw few movies, "because my mother didn't drive and there wasn't a theater near us." Her father, an air-conditioning contractor, raised her and her two younger sisters like men, she says. (Both siblings have become actresses.) Pfeiffer began working after school about the same time she discovered dramatics. She tumbled through a variety of jobs—as a supermarket check-out clerk, as an assistant at a preschool, at an optometrist's office, and in a jewelry manufacturing firm. Her only real training was as a court stenographer. A victory in the Miss Orange County beauty contest at nineteen led to the Miss L.A. contest, which she entered solely because an agent she wanted to meet was one of the judges. He signed her on, and after picking away at some minor commercial work, she was ready to utter her first line as a dramatic actress, on an episode of Fantasy Island "Who is she, Naomi'?" Regrettably, she never got to work alongside Ricardo Montalban and Herve Villechaize.

A decade later, Pfeiffer is rightly heralded as one of our finest screen actresses. And she's getting better as she goes along, as her performances in Married to the Mob, The Witches of Eastwick, and Dangerous Liaisons attest. In her new film, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Beau and Jeff Bridges are brothers with a two-piano lounge act that's going nowhere until Pfeiffer, playing a singer, gives them the only real success they've known. It is a strange little film, a logy, smoky melodrama of the kind that once starred actors like Dana Andrews and Gloria Grahame, and it probably won't make any­body a whole lot of money, but it is a jewel in its own way: a vivid, beautifully acted portrait of three of life's sweet losers.

Twelfth Night was Pfeiffer's first play, and, she says, quite possibly her last. At least for Joseph Papp's Public Theater. The production was star-heavy—it also featured Jeff Goldblum, Gregory Hines, Stephen Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio—and the critics were lying in wait. "Ms. Pfeiffer," Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, "offers an object lesson in how gifted stars with young careers can be misused by those more interested in exploiting their celebrity status than in furthering their artistic development." When she read those words, she was crushed. "The next day I had to go back up on that stage, and it was the last thing I wanted to do. I prayed the whole way to the theater. I prayed for forty days and forty nights of rain. But I got up and did a great show, and the audience was fabulous." I asked how she felt when she read a favorable review. She explained that she felt Married to the Mob contained her best work, and that the critics seemed to agree. "The day it opened, though, I son of stayed home and wept. I don't know why really. It was just kind of over. We are conditioned to believe that that's the big deal—that the movie coming out and getting good reviews and all of those things is what means something. Then it happens and you don't feel anything."

At one point in the evening, Pfeiffer pulled out a gift that she had bought Goldblum, who had played Malvolio in Twelfth Night. It was a small lithograph of two clowns riding a bicycle. Then she dashed into her bedroom and came out clutching a large book. "I was feeling really jealous because Sam Cohn gave Mary Elizabeth this beautifully framed print of an actress holding a viola. But the next day, I got this from Ed [Limato, her agent]." A foot by a foot and a half, and about four inches thick, the volume is, she explains, "a second-edition Shakespeare folio. I started crying when he handed it to me." The publication date was 1909, and although I felt fairly certain that a second edition of collected seventeenth-century plays had most likely been printed prior to the twentieth century, I found myself so caught up in the moment that I oohed and aahed along with her. After the whole bowling letdown, I thought, why say anything that could ruin the moment? A gift such as this from an agent such as hers is probably the stuff that Hollywood dreams are made of.