Interview: What Lies Beneath

Michelle Pfeiffer

BENEATH THE SURFACE

The star of What Lies Beneath is deeply and talented, profoundly beautiful and well-married. What else is there? Plenty

By Todd Gold

Sitting across from Michelle Pfeiffer, you can't help but think "So this is what it's like to look absolutely perfect." In person, she's remarkable; actually, she's flawless. She nearly glows. Her hair, a shoulder-length tangle of gold and light brown, is slightly mussed. Her skin is unblemished and lightly buttered by the sun. Her jeans and T-shirt fit as they would on a mannequin, and her tummy -the sexy little bit that's exposed- is toned and flat. It's obvious that here is a woman who never gets up in the morning, as so many of us do, and gasps at the sight of a pimple or struggles to button her pants because of last night's pizza.

So when Michelle Pfeiffer sits down and spills a good portion of her lunch -a plate of salmon and tossed green salad- on the sofa, you think "Thank God, she's human," and that's perfect, too.

In truth, the mishap elicits a chuckle from Pfeiffer, whose thoughts are elsewhere as she takes a moment to mentally exhume herself from a just-completed photo shoot to promote her new movie, What Lies Beneath, a thriller costarring Harrison Ford. "I hate having my picture taken," she says. "Oh, there are worse things in life. But it's hard for me."

Pfeiffer, 42, has an easier time making the transition from movie star to mother. Getting on the phone, she negotiates a doctor's appointment and checks in at home, where she is given an update on her two children. From the sound of the conversation, the rest of Pfeiffer's afternoon is pretty ordinary. So ordinary that, upon hanging up, she playfully raises an eyebrow and asks "How are you going to make this interview interesting?"

Nonsense. This is simply Pfeiffer's reluctance to expose anything more intimate than her smile. She would rather live her life privately, away from paparazzi and premieres; she would rather drive carpools than walk the red carpet. The surest sign she means this is that she recently passed up a prize just short of an Oscar: courtside seats for the Los Angeles Lakers' world championship game. While her boyishly handsome husband, TV and film producer-writer David E. Kelley, cheered Shaq, Kobe and the rest of the team with Jack Nicholson, Denzel Washington, Steven Spielberg and Brad Pitt from a $1,200 sideline seat, Pfeiffer elected to stay home -and not because they couldn't get a sitter. "I've gone to games, but it's become quite the scene," she says. "I think that might diminish the fun for me."

One place Pfeiffer clearly got her kicks these days is behind the high gates of the $15 million, traditional-looking six-bedroom Brentwood, California, home where she and Kelley are raising a daughter, Claudia Rose, 7, a son, John Henry, 6, and their menagerie of dogs, cats, rabbits and goldfish. "She has an enviable situation," says Michael Hoffman, who directed Pfeiffer in A Midsummer Night's Dream and One Fine Day. "At this point in her life, I think her family has become a more intriguing, creative issue than making movies."

Certainly there are issues. One, in particular, amuses her right now, as her fingers deposit the last morsel of salmon in her mouth. "Do you know what my kids are doing this afternoon?" she asks. "They're cleaning out the rabbit cage and doing chores around the house so they can earn extra money and buy a toy they really want. Some little robot that costs maybe $6."

Commanding between $10 million and $15 million per movie, Pfeiffer doesn't worry about money. But the woman who morphed from supermarket cashier to three-time Oscar nominee does fret about everything else. "I recently asked David what he would change about me, and he said my perfectionism," relates Pfeiffer. "He doesn't mind it so much, but he sees what it does to me and how I get crazy over things. It's just that he'd like me to relax a little bit."

Of course, this is not a major concern. "I have few complaints," says Pfeiffer, who claims not to worry about the inevitable droops and sags (probably because she doesn't have any) that come with age. "I don't really think about it, but maybe I should," she says. As for her looks-the mesmerizing beauty that Floyd Mutrux, who directed Pfeiffer in her 1980 feature film debut, The Hollywood Knights, remembers as "a million-dollar ticket to movie stardom" - Pfeiffer says, "There are days when I think, 'Oh, I look pretty good.' And then there are those tiems when I think I've lost it."

Many women would pay big bucks to look like her on an off day; Pfeiffer has simply matured. Motherhood has, she says, made her feel better about what she does onscreen. "I enjoy work more now than ever because it used to be everything," she says. "When it's everything, there's also a slight desperation. I would obsess about it. It was my whole life. And now it's not my whole life. It's freed me up."

Then there's her almost-seven-year marriage to Kelley. "I couldn't be happier or want anything more," says Pfeiffer. "We make time for each other. We like each other. We have a good life together. We do normal things. We spend a lot of time together as a family. We're very fortunate."

OK, as long as Pfeiffer's amendable to talking, it's worth asking about the only bit of gossip she can't seem to escape: What about the periodic speculation in tabloids that Kelley has a roving eye and appears to cast women who resemble Pfeiffer in some of his productions? "Who prints such nonsense?" she asks, bringing the conversation to a frosty halt. "I'd like to know."

Suddenly, Pfeiffer is as stiff as steel. "She can be stubborn," says Hoffman, who remembers her warning him prior to the start of One Fine Day that she is a Taurus. "You don't encourage her to dig her heels in."

Perfect, eh? "Did she tell you about the claustrophobia?" asks Harrison Ford, sounding slightly amused, as he refers to the physically and emotionally challenging underwater scenes he and Pfeiffer shot while making What Lies Beneath.

Yes, as a matter of fact, Pfeiffer did go into detail about what she calls "a couple of harrowing moments for me" during filming of the suspense-filled thriller about a woman whose seemingly ideal marriage is literally haunted by her husband's long-ago betrayal. Shot on location last August in Vermont, and later on a soundstage in Los Angeles, the underwater scenes-which are integral to the movie's nail-biting climax-meant spending up to 14 hours a day in huge tanks that were cramped, uncomfortable and, of course, waterlogged. "She wasn't a happy pup," says Ford.

Pfeiffer doesn't dispute this. "There are two things I hate more than anything," she says. "I don't like the water, and I don't like being cold. I spent about two months wet and cold, worrying that I'd panic while holding my breath underwater. It was definitely a problem. I'm also a little claustrophobic, so I had to get over that, too."

Bingo.

"But she acquitted herself well," adds Ford.

"I made it through," sighs Pfeiffer.

Actually, as her fans will see, Pfeiffer does far more than make it through this film, which, from the moment she read the script, appealed to her own fondness for scary movies. In characteristic fashion, she also reacted to the challenge of a moviemaking process that was unfamiliar to her. "Up till now, she hasn't done this type of cinematic, edgy, visual film-which can be intimidating until you get used to all the high-tech cameras and complex camera moves," says Beneath director Robert Zemeckis. "But Michelle did everything I asked, no matter how complicated, and that's a real film actress."

Ford, who met Pfeiffer for the first time when they read the script together for Zemeckis, calls the months they spent on location "a real vacation for me. What can I say about her?" he asks. "She's extraordinarily talented-and not bad to look at."

But she was visible on-set for only a specified number of hours daily. In a measure of her star power, Pfeiffer's contract contained a "hard release time" at the end of each day, ensuring she could "get home in time tot make dinner for my kids." "I was very impressed," offers supermodel-actress Amber Valletta, who spent nearly two months on location for her key role as a Pfeiffer look-alike. "Her kids came to the set. She took care of them. She's a mom. Though she's got a job that puts her in the public eye, she didn't let it change the fact that she's a real person."

Pfeiffer's realness, even if it's often obscured by her radiant exterior, stems from a tinge of imperfection, the inner tension she hints at, what Ford describes as "an attractive vulnerability." Perhaps it's also the memory of when, back in the beginning, she was one of us. Raised in Midway City, California, a working-class town half an hour south of Hollywood-but light-years away in terms of glitz and wealth-she was the second of four children of an air-conditioning contractor father and a homemaker mother. Besides her surfer-girl beauty, she was a tomboy-wild and adventurous. "I was a real piece of work, and my dad reminded me of it all the time," she says.

After a year at Golden West College, Pfeiffer dropped out to pursue acting, though she admits that stardom seemed distant while working the cash register at a supermarket. "At the time, I only thought about being able to make a living," she recalls. Next is the stuff of Pfeiffer's legend-how she entered a beauty contest hoping to meet an agent and was named Miss Orange County. But, as she remembers it, "they crowned a whole bunch of people, so it wasn't like I was a big winner. It was more like a joke."

Nonetheless, she soon landed a part on Fantasy Island. "I was terrified," she says. "I showed up and my name was on the dressing room-there was actually a star on it." She plugged away on TV flops like Delta House and Aaron Spelling's B.A.D. Cats, following with small movies. But Hollywood didn't pay attention until she puckered up as Al Pacino's mistress in Scarface in 1983. "That movie was one of the hardest things I've ever done," she says. "The last thing I'd done was Grease 2 and suddenly I was working with De Palma and Pacino, real heavyweights. I felt like I was always proving myself."

From then on, she racked up an impressive mix of roles in odd, challenging and commercial movies that paired her with Nicholson, Gibson, Bridges, Connery, Redford, Clooney and Willis. Except for Batman Returns, she has never had a runaway smash at the box office, at least not like Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock has. But her choices, from sexy movies such as 1989's The Fabulous Baker Boys to serious endeavors like 1997's A Thousand Acres to comedy-dramas like last year's The Story Of Us, have given her, as Zemeckis says, "a body of work that immediately tells you she is a great actress."

She had a harder time making her personal life work out as smoothly. She separated from actor-director Peter Horton in 1988, following seven years of marriage (they officially divorced two years later), then dated actors Val Kilmer -who dedicated poems to her in his book, My Eden After Burns- and Fisher Stevens. Despite finding herself single at age 33, she decided to start a family, "something I always knew I wanted," explains Pfeiffer, who also knew "for many years that I would adopt a child one day." Enter Claudia Rose. "I realized I didn't have to be married to start a family," she says.

Coincidentally, while she was in the process of adopting her daughter, Pfeiffer went on a blind date with Boston lawyer-turned-producer Kelley, whom she recalls as "cute and real quiet." "Actually, neither of us was looking for ward to the date," he once said. "From my standpoint, I did not think there was any upside to it. Either we were not going to get along-or even worse, we were."

It turned out to be the best worst-case scenario in dating history. They turned Claudia Rose's christening into a double ceremony by marrying in 1993. "I think that her presence is actually one of the things that bonded David and me," Pfeiffer recently told Redbook. "If Claudia hadn't been around, I might have messed up my relationship with David, which, of course, thankfully also brought me my son." The addition of John Henry a year later eclipsed all expectations. "Having children has been a remarkable experience," she says. "From the start, it turned everything upside down. There's been constant discovery. It's made me more balanced. Definitely more vulnerable. More fearful in some way, and fearless in others ways. It's very fulfilling got me."

Just wait, she is told, until your kids ask for help with math problems.

"Are you kidding me?" she replies. "My son's already bringing home· well, you know, you try showing them how you do it and they look at you like you're from Mars."

After you've spent time with her, perhaps what is most likable about Pfeiffer is that she's completely aware of how good she has it these days. "The only drawback in my life right now is that I don't have enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to do," she says. Time permitting, she likes to draw, paint and sculpt. "I can really get lost in those solitary things," she says. But she's just as occupied by certain essentials. Like running some four to six miles ("I try to do it every day, but I never make it," she admits), sticking to a carpool schedule during the school year (Kelley drives in the morning, she picks up) and keeping her trim figure by following a low-fat diet (she keeps a lid on wheat, dairy and sugar). "I feel healthier than ever," she says.

Still, Pfeiffer isn't the kind of food fanatic who deprives her kids of life's treats (like macaroni and cheese) or says no to her own cravings, such as on those special "date nights" when she and Kelley say good night to the children and go out to the movies by themselves. "I get popcorn, my Coke and my peanut M&Ms and sit and have an evening of it," she says. "It's one of my favorite things to do."

Maybe everything isn't perfect for Pfeiffer. There's always a chance. So, fishing for something-anything-that might get her to complain, you ask her about watching television at night with Kelley. Who holds the remote? "He does," says Pfeiffer, who, without missing a beat, adds, "But he'll give it up."