Dangerous Blonde
At forty-two, Michelle Pfeiffer seems to have found success in the two most treacherous areas, her love life (she and husband David Kelley are going on six years and have two children) and her career (she is the most bankable actress in Hollywood, but doesn't believe it). So how does she manage a high-profile marriage, being a mother, and keeping her star burning bright? By never lying down on the job.
By Judith Stone. Photographed b Sante D'Orazio
Michelle Pfeiffer now knows that love nests aren't as much fun as they sound. "Romping in a bower," she reports "was miserable." In her latest film, William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, luscious, funny, and touching, Pfeiffer, as the fairy queen Titania, dallies with costar Kevin Kline in a feather-lined bed of branches hoisted a loft by leaf-twined ropes. The aerie pitched precariously, she recalls, twigs poked their soft parts, and her costume—a dusting of glitter, a whisper of gauze, a froth of hair extensions—kept catching on the feathers. "My dress was like a moth's wing, breathtaking but minimal. So my whole performance became about keeping my ass covered."
Pfeiffer is sitting, mortal and unadorned, in a cheerful L.A. café, laughter lighting her face with a native radiance as bright as Titania's movie shimmer. What tickles her especial]y is that she's at a point in her career where covering her ass isn't an issue. Letting it all hang out (figuratively; modest is a word she uses to describe herself more than once) is easier than it's ever been for her.
Perhaps that's because there is nothing precarious about her bower of choice, a home in the coastal hills near Los Angeles that she shares with her husband of nearly six years, David E. Kelley, writer and producer of the Emmy-winning television shows Ally McBeal and The Practice, and their two children, Claudia Rose, six, and John Henry, four. Anchored and unbuffeted there, Pfeiffer is looser on the job.
"I really think my work is different since I became a mother," she says. "In some ways it's not as good, and in some ways it's better." Take her praised performance in the panned film A Thousand Acres as Rose, an incest survivor toxic with rage. "I hadn't tried to tackle anything that bleak since I'd been a parent. I just didn't know if it would be possible to have this really strong diversion, my children, and give the same kind of all to the work. And you know what? I don't think it is possible." She laughs again, relit from within. In black-rimmed glasses, jeans, and a raspberry silk top, her hair straight and loose to her shoulders, Pfeiffer, who is forty-two, raises the bar for beautiful to approximately the height of the Himalayas, but in a way so unaffected not even a Gorgon could resent her.
"Before I had a family, work was everything, and it's not everything now," she says. "Yet I love it more because it's not. I don't have to hold on to it so tightly." She assesses her acting since entering parenthood, in Wolf, One Fine Day, and The Deep End of the Ocean, performances for which she was lauded even when the films weren't. "I make more mistakes, but I'm freed up. I disappoint myself more often, but I surprise myself more. I'm more willing to take risks, and that's a much better way to be."
Family happiness is the chief source of her new daring, but she also has the requisite clout. "I make sure now that I work with people I know I can take those risks with, people I'm really safe with, people who know in the editing room which take is the right one to use," Pfeiffer says. "Safe" doesn't mean unchallenged. "I like a strong director," she continuas. "One of the worst things about becoming a celebrity is that people are less willing to tell you when you're wrong."
Though perhaps that's not so true of her, she says, retreating a step. "Because it's really not my personality that's made me what I am. I'm not Jim Carrey, one of those people where they're going to say, `That's money in the bank, let's go with it.'"
But wait: Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times reported on a poll declaring her the female movie star most likely to improve a film's box-office appeal. Not the more highly paid Julia, or golden child Gwyneth, or sticky-haired Cameron, but seasoned, clear-browed Michelle. She's dismissive. "Yeah, but where did that come from? Nobody can figure out what that is, anyway." Pfeiffer seems hesitant to concede her stature, even after three Academy Award nominations (for Dangerous Liaisons in 1988, The Fabulous Baker Boys in 1989, and Love Field in 1992), consistent critical praise, several box-office successes, and turns with iconic costars like Redford, Nicholson, and Gibson.
Hollywood colleagues are less reticent. "She's in the pantheon of great movie actresses of all timeHepburn, Stanwyck, she's right up there," says director Rob Reiner, with whom Pfeiffer recently completed The Story of Us, a spiky comedy about a fifteen-year marriage on life support, costarring Bruce Willis. "She's capable of anything: She can be funny, she can do drama. Stunning beauty and exquisite talent—it's raye to get that package; you can count those actresses on the fingers of one hand. And you rarely get an actor who's a creative partner. Michelle had wonderful suggestions, not only about her own role, but the overall film, about the tone of a scene, what it's really about a director's take on things. Ultimately, if she wanted to, she'd make a really fine director."
Pfeiffer acknowledges her powers obliquely. "I used to feel that I would always study acting, that if I didn't, I would stop getting better, and maybe even regress. I don't think that's true anymore. For me, studying acting is about overcoming fear—and the more you work, the less afraid you become." Again, she backpedals self-effacingly. "Of course, there are still some parts that terrify me at the beginning. With Rose I was really terrified. And with Deep End, I was really terrified. I think I'm always terrified, actually." She laughs, looking 100 percent terror-free.
Pfeiffer still prepares rigorously for each part; one valued exercise, for example, involves underlining key words in a script and then free-associating on paper. For A Midsummer Night's Dream, she worked with a Juilliard coach on the play's language and had long discussions with Kevin Kline, an experienced Shakespearean actor, who gives an extraordinarily tender and hilarious performance as Bottom. "He knew how really terrified I was," she says. Pfeiffer's only other visit to Bardville, as Olivia in the 1989 New York
Shakespeare Festival production of Twelfth Night, was slammed by critics; she says she didn't have the time she needed to prepare, or the directorial attention. "Kevin was so supportive and generous, helping me give the poetry a life of its own—you can't lose it, but you have to sort of give it up. It's a hard balance to find." She handles the part with regal ease and fine-tuned comic timing; her Titania is sweet and hot. "At first I thought, Okay, so no one asks me to do Shakespeare again. I'll still have a career. And by the end, I had loosened up and I was really having a good time."
It's pleasing to see, in Pfeiffer, working-class values—modesty, hard work, level-headedness—informing a world-class career. "The best job advice I ever got," she recalls, "came when I first started making money. Someone, I can't remember who, said, 'Don't go out and buy a new car. You think you're rich, but what you don't understand is that there are going to be long periods when you'll be unemployed. Be frugal.' I was. And that enabled me to say no early on, when I had no business saying no." Thrift bought freedom from "jobs that were just too humiliating, the sort of thing where they'd want me to be naked. I had a really strong policy about nudity; I was offered a lot of things I had to turn down because my father would have killed me. He would never have spoken to me again."
At first, Dick Pfeiffer, who ran a heating and air-conditioning business, wasn't keen on the career choice of his second child. (Pfeiffer has an older brother and two younger sisters, actress Dedee and model Lori, with whom she remains close.) "But he saw I was really committed, and that I was going to do it with or without his approval. And I think he saw a determination about it that he hadn't seen before in me." Growing up in Midway City, a southern California suburb between Disneyland and the ocean, Pfeiffer always had after-school jobs, but they left enough time for hanging out with surfers, totaling her red Mustang, and brooding over The Bell Jar. Unmoored after graduation, she worked as a grocery bagger and had started court-reporting school when she resolved to pursue a dormant goal. At twenty-one, she entered a beauty pageant to land an agent (she won hoth), took acting classes, and paid dues in commercials, TV shows such as B.A.D. Cats, and a couple of b.a.d. movies. One year she was doing Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, and the next, 1982, she was Al Pacino's mistress in Scarface, earning rayes for a performance as sharp and cold as a shard of sleet. The Witches of Eastwick, with Jack Nicholson, raised her visibility and viability. Through diligent deepening of her gifts, she scored big in roles as different as a sweetly loopy Mafia widow in Married to
the Mob anda bruised countess in The Age of Innocence. While we watched, her work grew in heft and invention. A bowl of turkey chili the size of a hot tub arrives as Pfeiffer is addressing the fact that acting is an oddish choice for someone once as self-conscious as she. "The thing that I find very amusing," she says, "is that a person who's hard on themselves, whose biggest fear is failure, would put themselves in a position where they can have the biggest failure of all, in front of the entire world." That person pauses to remind the waitress politely about the excellent corn bread that's supposed to come with the chili. Pfeiffer won't use the word brave to describe such exposure. "It's really the ultimate way of hiding, isn't it? Because if it's not you, if it's another character and somebody else writes the words, you're not responsible."
Finally, she'll sort of cop to being courageous, but only unconsciously so. "Maybe I chose something that forced me to get outside of myself. It's the Freudian thing: They say you create situations for yourself so that you can work it out, whatever it is. I can probably go back and now see why I chose the projects that I chose."
One of her favorite characters, for example, remains take-no-prisoners, take-no-shit Susie Diamond, the adamantine chanteuse of the 1989 film The Fabulous Baker Boys. "She's great. She was everything I wasn't: She was very extroverted, and I was in my early painfully shy period. I cringed at the thought of calling attention to myself, and Susie was screaming, 'Look at me, look at me.' It was very liberating for me to be able to safely explore that part of myself." Pfeiffer now chooses roles more consciously, less for their therapeutic value than for the professional challenge. Perhaps she's working something out in her marriage preemptively with The Story of Us; maybe years from now she'll know what lies beneath What Lies Beneath, a thriller she'll shoot in August, but today she believes she's doing it for the sheer pleasure of tackling a new genre and working with Harrison Ford and director Robert Zemeckis. That's one of the perks of having won big in the Freudian Daily Douhle, love and work.
"Michelle is relaxed with her talent and with her personal life," says Reiner "She exudes a tremendous amount of confidence and openness, and a lot of that has to do with having a very good marriage." She was thirty-five and single when she decided to become a mother. "You know, everyone writes about what a risk adoption was, and I really resent it, because I've never said that. It was the most selfish thing I've ever done; there was nothing risky about it. I knew it was right." She'd always planned to adopt after having a child of her own. "All of a sudden a lightbulb went off," she says, "and I thought, Oh, I can reverse the order. I'm not saying never meet a man, I'm not saying never give birth to a child. I'm saying I want to be a parent, and I want to be a parent now, period." Pfeiffer's marriage to thirtysomething's Peter Horton, whom she met when they were acting students, ended amicably in 1988; she had to leave his force field to grow up. There followed a brief bad-boy period (John Malkovich, Michael Keaton), then a relatively peaceful interlude with the character actor Fisher Stevens, whom she met doing Twelfth Night. He was six years younger than she, good-natured but not fully formed; not bad for her, but not right, either. What mattered most to her, she realized, was becoming a mother. She broke up with Stevens and started adoption proceedings. "I thought, this will separate the boys from the men. And literally two weeks later I met David." (On a blind date arranged by her best friend and producing partner, Kate Guinzburg. They went bowling with a group of friends and, both shy, barely spoke two words to each other. They were apparently the right two words. It is said that when David Kelley told his agent that he was dating Michelle Pfeiffer, the response was "Really? Who talks?") They married at Claudia's christening, and Pfeiffer gave birth to John Henry nine months later.
"People would tell me that being a parent is so much better than you can imagine," she says with one of her frequent transfiguring grins, "but I've always been a 'the glass is half empty' type. This was the first time in my life I'd had anything be so much better than I ever thought it would be." Marriage has been that way, too, she says. When asked who she'd be if she could be a man for a day, Pfeiffer seeks clarification. "Who would I want to be, or who do I think I'm like?" Then she realizes that the answer to both questions is David Kelley. The term soul mate, she says, is not inappropriate. "Who would have thought?" she says. "Not me!"
Her husband, she says, is the person who most makes her laugh. She's a "devoted" viewer of Ally McBeal but has no insider information. "David doesn't tell me what's going to happen," she explains. Pfeiffer finds out when we do, but on tape—she rises so early with the children that she can't stay awake to watch. "Nine o'clock is really pushing it for me," she says.
The show seems to be one of the few sources of discomfort in their deep and placid union. When it debuted in 1997, one New York critic assumed in print that Pfeiffer was the real McBeal (a role that Kelley originally wanted Bridget Fonda to play). A bemused Kelley said his wife wasn't the model for Ally; the character is based, he's said, on all the women he dated before Pfeiffer.
More painful has been a tabloid rumor that Kelley was leaving Pfeiffer for Ally star Calista Flockhart. Fabricated more than a year ago and thoroughly debunked (the story may have sprung up, industry insiders believe, when Flockhart briefly dated the show's other executive producer), it resurfaced last March in a Chicago Sun-Times gossip column and was repeated by one L.A. radio and TV talle-show host. Kelley and Pfeiffer were enraged, all parties involved once again issued denials, and the SunTimes printed a retraction.
Pfeiffer is also sickened by Flockhart's continued pounding in the tabloids for an alleged eating disorder. (She is probably too thin, Pfeiffer has said, but she's not anorexic.) "Disgusting!" she says. "It's just disgusting. The truth is the press doesn't really believe it, but they'll just write anything because it sells and that's the bottom line."
Once famously reticent with the media, and who can blame her, Pfeiffer is easy and gracious, gamely willing to consider goofy hypotheticals. What actress, for example, living or dead, would play her in the movie of her life? She gives the matter earnest thought, but can't decide. "I just don't know," she says finally. "What do you think?" Hmmm. Neither Hepburn nor Stanwyck had the vulnerability. Grace Kelly was pretty enough, but too brittle, Bacall too much the siren, Garbo too much the sphinx. How about Carole Lombard—funny and smart, glamorous but real, a person who blossomed when she found the love of her life, a comedienne whose nuanced work hinted at the depths she might have plumbed. "Well, that's very flattering," Pfeiffer says. "I like that idea. Okay, go ahead and cast Carole Lombard." And what would the movie be called? Pfeiffer sighs and shoots a look that says, What is this, a Barbara Walters special? Ever the good sport, she takes a whack at it. Two of her most popular films have had the word dangerous in their names—"although I thought Dangerous Minds was the worst title I ever heard. I fought with the producers; I thought, No one's going to come see this movie because of the title, and I couldn't have been more wrong!" So something with dangerous in it, she decides.
"Dangerous Life? Dangerous Love? Dangerous Blonde? That's a good one: Dangerous Blonde."
She guffaws, but perhaps it's apt: You don't mess with someone who has summoned the guts for public risktaking. To wage and win the eternal women's war between diffidence and confidence takes large grit reserves. So, come to think of it, does successfully balancing love and work. But there will be no further probing. The Dangerous Blonde has to go pick up her kids at school.
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