MICHELLE'S NEXT MOVIE
MICHELLE PFEIFFER IS CALLING IT QUITS - FOR A LITTLE WHILE ANYWAY.
SHE IS DISBANDING HER PRODUCTION COMPANY AND TAKING A SABBATICAL
FROM ACTING, BUT NOT BEFORE STARRING IN FILMS WITH BRUCE WILLIS
AND HARRISON FORD. HOLLYWOOD'S ETERNAL GOLDEN GIRL TELLS ANDREW
ESSEX WHY THE ONLY ROLES SHE WANTS TO PLAY RIGHT NOW ARE MOMMY AND
MRS DAVID E. KELLEY.
FASHION EDITOR TONNE GOODMAN.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY PATRICK DEMARCHELIER
This month, when you watch Michelle
Pfeiffer brighten the screen in The
Story of Us, her 29th film in 19 years (and the first in
which she kisses Bruce Willis), consider
the following: The world's fourth highest-grossing actress once
belonged to a vegetarian cult.
"Actually," she says,
"it was a couple who worked out of their home. But some brainwashing
did go on." Pfeiffer doesn't feel particularly comfortable
discussing the veggie cult. But it marks the end of an era, and
the story must be told. "My first husband
[Peter Horton, best known as
Gary from Thirtysomething] was
making a movie on the Moonies," she continues, wringing
her hands between her knees. "We met
some deprogrammers, and I realized they were talking about me."
(She won't get into the gory details.) Since Pfeiffer's early life
had already included such canonical Southern California activities
as totaling her car, failing as a supermarket checkout girl, winning
the 1978 Miss Orange County beauty
contest and parlaying the crown into an underwear-challenged role
on the TV show Delta House (her character
was called Bombshell), a cult didn't
seemed entirely odd. In fact, it may have been a blessing. "it
was probably a good thing," she admits. "At
the time, I could have been doing a lot worse."
Michelle Pfeiffer is 41. Age
is presented for two important reasons. 1)
The press keeps insisting she's 42. "I'm
411" she says with mock horror. "Wanna
see my driver's license?" 2)
She seems ageless. To paraphrase Mel
Gibson in Tequila Sunrise, just
looking at Michelle Pfeiffer
hurts. Cocooned in side a movie-star-size suite at Shutters
On the Beach, a plush seaside inn some 30 miles from the
lesser circum stances of her Midway City hometown, she is wearing
a sleeveless white shirt and lived-in khakis. Her hair is pony tailed
in girl-next-cloor anonymity; her skin is perfect. "I
don't obsess," she says, swearing off expensive potions
and emol lients. If there's anything odd about her, it's the impression
that her very blue eyes are unusually far apart. Otherwise, it's
all good. "Thirty-nine was really much,
much rougher," Pfeiffer says. "By
the time I hit 40, I was so happy. I had my children, an amazing
husband, work that I love. How could I complain?" Still,
there are moments. "The other day, I
went, 'It's okay ... you're 41."' She exhales deeply.
"It's oh ... kay. "
In Hollywood, a town that frequently exiles actresses of "a
certain age" no matter how well they exhale, Pfeiffer has segued
into what students of her work may one day call? the Dysfunctional
Family Phase (a previous Ingenue Era
began in 1988 withTequila Sunrise,
accelerated into The Fabulous Baker Boys-the
first of her three Oscar nominations-and reached its apotheosis
in Batman Returns, in which she turned
a vinyl catsuit into a marital aid). Recent vehicles like A
Thousand Acres and The Deep End of
the Ocean have emphasized domestic friction over ingenue
frisson. For some of us, the drought of Pfeifferian glamour has
become something of a crisis. "There
are lots of things I can do," she says with a flattered
sigh, "but I don't think I can play an
ingenue; I can't be 20 anymore." It's a cruel world
when Michelle Pfeiffer has to
answer insulting questions about life after 40 while a 69-year-old
Sean Connery can canoodle Catherine
Zeta-Jones, 29, in Entrapment (Connery was a wee pup of 60
when he took on Pfeiffer, 32, in The Russia
House). She should probably be pissed. She isn't. In fact,
she isn't even sure who Catherine Zeta-Jones
is. "I have no idea what's happening
out there," Pfeiffer says with a laugh. "I'm
completely out of touch." Then, turning serious, she
adds: "I'm at an age now where I'm right
to play a mother and have a family; it would make sense that those
things would reoccur. I don't really feel limited, or that I can't
be sexy. I don't. I take projects because I like them. And I can
certainly do a love story."
Which brings us to the love story called The
Story of Us, the latest from Rob
Reiner, director of When Harry Met
Sally.The
Story of Uscenters
on a crossword-puzzle designer (Pfeiffer) and a writer (Willis)
splitting up after 15 years of marriage-or, as it's tagged in the
trades, When Harry Left Sally. Though
the film continues Pfeiffer's dysfunctional phase, it affords her
a little ingenue action, especially when she addresses the camera
in a burnt-orange cashmere V-neck. Story also lets Pfeiffer play
with a Slinky, prepare pad thai, pronounce "Kierkegaard,"
make love on a kitchen table, shriek "fuck
you!" (a task she's excelled at since Scarface)
and-something she's never done before-whisper "fuck
me" to Bruce Willis.
"When we were rehearsing,"
Willis recalls, "I said, 'Look, you've
done more of this romantic stuff than I have, How am I gonna convince
people we've been together for 15 years?"' Willis came
up with an unorthodox preparation: "I
decided to flirt with her every day-with her permission, of course."
In Story Pfeiffer aces the romantic stuff, as always, but the film
truly showcases her talent for physical comedy. "How
hard is it to run screaming down the street with a gun?"
Willis says. "Trust me, comedy is much
tougher."
Reiner first noticed Pfeiffer's gift for comedy in her 1988 film Married to the Mob. "It's
very difficult to find people who can play reality-based humor,"
says Reiner. "You look down the list
and there's not a big selection. Frankly, I think Michelle is so
beautiful, a lot of people can't see past that. But she can literally
do anything." In the interest of proving that she can
do anything, Pfeiffer will follow Story with her first supernatural
thriller, What Lies Beneath, directed
by Robert Zemeckis and costarring
Harrison Ford. After that, the
dysfunctional phase will finish. "I
don't want to go near the human-suffering tragedy thing for a long
time," she says. "I'm spent.
Don't wanna go there."
Let us go instead to Michelle Pfeiffer's
real life: the domestic, nonclysfunctional trilogy of husband, children
and work. The children, Claudia Rose,
six, and John Henry, five, are
healthy. ("Everyone tells you how great
parenthood is," she says. "It's
harder than you ever imagined; it's also better than you ever imagined.")
The work is widely known (consider her leading men: Pacino,
Nicholson, Malkovich,
Gibson, the brothers Bridges,
Connery, Clooney,
Day-Lewis, Redford
and, now, Willis and Ford).
Martin Scorsese once proclaimed
her "the best we have." Reiner
calls her "a thoroughbred-the Rolls Royce
of actors."
But there remains intense curiosity about relations with the Husband.
As virtually any living being can tell you, Pfeiffer is married
to lawyer-turned-television-producer-turned-zeitgeistwrangler David
E. Kelley. During the first three of their six years together,
Kelley was sometimes dismissed as Mr. Pfeiffer. Then he created
Ally McBeal and The
Practice and became a media warlord, which made him fresh
meat for his own tabloid frenzy. While Story was filming, rumors
swirled that Kelley and Ally McBeal
star Calista Flockhart were having
an affair (a nicely timed if entirely fictitious complement to the
real-life hemorrhaging of Willis and Demi
Moore's marriage). Knowing this, I propose a limit of two
conjugal questions in exchange for full disclosure. She is not appeased.
The hands start fidgeting between her knees again.
Q: You met David on a blind
date. How can Michelle Pfeiffer have a blind date?
A: Is
that your second question?
Q: Urn, it was a two-part question.
A: That's
still two.
Q: All right, three questions.
It turns out Pfeiffer and Kelley's first date wasn't technically
"blind," the way your Uncle Lenny might go on a blind
date. "A friend fixed me up,"
she explains. "And I invited the world.
It was a group thing. We all met and went bowling."
In the period before Kelley was famous (pre-Ally
McBeal), his civilian detachment (bowling?) helped Pfeiffer
reconsider fame's burden. "He's always
been amazingly patient with the sordid nature of being a celebrity,"
she says. "Sometimes you can be with
someone who kind of resents you a little bit. David was never, ever
like that." I take this as a not-so-subtle reference
to her threeyear relationship with actor Fisher
Stevens, but she won't bite. What does Pfeiffer think of
Kelley's turn at the rumor mill? "It
does sort of liberate me a little," she admits, but
don't think she's dispensing pointers. "He
doesn't really need advice from me. If anything, I could take a
few tips from him."
In the encyclopedia of success, there are few entries as formidable
as Power Couple, and few power couples
fiercer than Pfeiffer and Kelley. At least until this past summer,
when Kelley got a little dirt under his Midas fingernails: Lake
Placid, his big-screen script about a giant crocodile that
terrorizes Bridget Fonda, came
up luggage at the megaplex. Pfeiffer's been through this disappointing
game herself, most conspicuously in Dangerous
Minds, One Fine Day and The
Deep End of the Ocean, all produced by her production company, Via Rosa. One
Fine Day, with George Clooney,
was expected, in particular, to be huge. The film wound up grossing
a not-especially-humongous $46 million.
"One Fine Day was the first time I allowed
myself to get caught up in numbers and expectations,"
Pfeiffer says. "I don't usually do that.
I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop." She
gets up and pours a cup of tea. "When
that happened, it was such a shock. I learned I was right not to
buy into hype. But as a producer, it's hard to detach."
Which is precisely why she has detached from producing, forever.
"I feel more peaceful with acting; that's
where I get my reward," she says. But now, after What
Lies Beneath, she will give acting a (brief) rest as well. "I'm not going into hiding like Greta
Garbo," she insists. "Besides,
I can't -my husband's famous, what am I gonna do?" Instead,
she'll spend a little time making sure her family grows up right.
"People have this notion that Hollywood
is sort of wild and crazy and amoral, but it's tame compared to
what I see going on in some of the neighborhoods I grew up in."
In Kurt Andersen's novel, Turn
of The Century, the main character (a television producer
not unlike Kelley) calls Michelle Pfeiffer
his "fantasy wife," which strikes me as a pretty fair
assessment of how the average American male appraises her. ("Because
she is tastefully gorgeous rather than bimbo pretty,"
Andersen tells me. "She seems intelligent,
but she also played Catwoman.") But unlike some other
big-screen icons, women worship her, too. And therein lies her greatness.
At a screening ofThe
Story of Us,
a few days after we part, I overhear two hardened New York media
harpies gulp midsentence when Pfeiffer first appears.
"She's gorgeous," one says.
"It's unbelievable," says
the other.
Even Bruce Willis was impressed.
"I was truly excited to work with her,"
he says. "When you talk about the great
screen goddesses of all time, you gotta talk about Michelle Pfeiffer.
And, you know what? She turned out to be really cool"
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