Interview/Article 1992

Darling Drew

Drew Barrymore is a national treasure. Her precocious performances, as Gertie in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982) and as several other wily or winsome moppets, catapulted her into child stardom. And the cost to her was dear—as if being born into America’s most famous thespian family wasn’t burden enough for any aspiring actress. But Barrymore emerged from rehabilitation for alcohol and drug abuse three years ago with her considerable natural resources intact and, eventually, the desire to continue her career.

In an age of creeping moral cowardice and paranoid image-control, our frightened culture and the movies that reflect it badly need a dose of fearlessness. It is symptomatic of Barrymore’s innate daring and her disinterest in mediating her public profile that for her comeback role she chose not to play a p.c. Pollyanna but a slatternly schoolgirl bent on seducing her best friend’s rich father—and more than willing to prod his ailing wife out of a window. That role, in Poison Ivy, one of the best B movies of the year, gained immeasurably from the actress’s impersonation of sluggish sensuality and casual amorality.

To meet Drew Barrymore, you wouldn’t think there was anything polemical about her. Having weathered the equivalent of a mid-life crisis, she’s an unguarded, affectionate, and spontaneous person whose thoughts swarm like bees from a hive. But not thoughtlessly—she is infinitely more knowing than the average young adult. And then it dawns on you that the candor with which she volunteers the details of her problematic adolescence, and of everything else in her life before and since, is enviable. She possesses not a hint of defensiveness or one notion of kowtowing to the whitewashing practices of the Hollywood publicity machine. She is what she is—and the most impressive thing that she is is trusting and unafraid.

G.F.

Drew Barrymore: [coming out of a kiss with boyfriend James Walters] Sorry. We’re always doing this. But we can’t help it. We’re always trying to be as close as we can. And when we’re with other people individually, all we do is talk about each other. So friends get frustrated.

Ingrid Sischy: What did you two do on your first date?

DB: [laughs]

James Walters: We were both nervous about it. I picked her up at her house. We were going to see the original Beauty and the Beast.

Graham Fuller: The Cocteau one?

DB: It’s my favorite film in the whole world. It was showing one night in L.A., but we couldn’t find the theater.

JW: Se we ended up getting something to eat and taking a walk on the beach. We stayed up all night long, sitting and talking.

IS: Jamie, you’re an actor, too—is that how you guys met?

JW: Yes. We have the same agent. It’s corny, but she set us up! She’d been talking up a storm to each of us about the other for a long time.

DB: But then I was in a relationship and he was in a relationship, so she made us wait, even after we broke up with our boyfriend and girlfriend. She was very smart. Her name is J. J. Harris.

JW: She wanted it to work and not be a rebound thing.

DB: I’ve been with J. J. for ten years, and she knows me better than anybody.

IS: To have been with an agent for ten years is an unusual thing for a young actress. But you’re an old hand when it comes to experience, are you?

DB: [laughs] See, I started in commercials when I was eleven months. But I knew my mom [Ildiko Jaid] wasn’t sure that it was right. Then when I was old enough to talk, I said to her, Acting is my dream. I don’t want you to think that you’re doing wrong by me by getting me an agent. I can’t expect you to be sure about this, coming from a two-year-old, but please, this is all I want. And I was lucky to have a mother who supported me—

IS: [thinking, And she probably was that articulate] That’s what they call knowing what you want to do.

GF: Drew, is your agent like a mentor to you?

DB: I am very independent and I really want to make my own decisions. But it’s very important that I have the word "Go" from J. J. Her input has had an incredible impact on my career. And we hang out with her too—she really is our friend. She’s going to have a baby, and we love to hold our faces to her stomach.

IS: Do you two live together?

DB: Yes. We live in West Hollywood. We’re trying to fix up our house for the time that we live there—next week we’re getting our hardwood floors redone because they’re such a mess—but we want to buy a new place.

JW: We want a yard.

DB: We have a dog, and we want to have lots of grass for her to run around in.

IS: Tell us about the TV series that each of you is doing. They’re both Aaron Spelling productions, aren’t they? Drew, you’re in 2000 Malibu Road, which starts this summer. And Jamie, I understand you play a rock musician in a show called The Heights.

DB: We were both really nervous to do TV.

GF: Why?

JW: In the past it’s always been a big taboo that if you do TV, then you’re not going to do films. But I found that on most of the films I was going for last year, the competition was 100 percent from TV actors: Luke Perry, Jason Priestley, Johnny Depp, people like that.

DB: TV actors get first dibs on films now. It’s amazing!

JW: It’s because the studios don’t want to take risks on unknown people. TV actors are perfect, because everybody knows who they are.

DB: I was closed off to the idea of TV until [director and executive producer] Joel Schumacher started telling me about 2000 Malibu Road and I read the first two episodes. Our writer is Terry Louise Fisher, who writes women so well. I play a struggling actress who comes from the Midwest with my sister. Through the course of the series I become one of the most famous stars in the world and my sister becomes the biggest agent in Hollywood. Usually, when you watch TV, you see everybody going farther and farther downhill, but in this series they get better.

GF: What makes a well-written woman’s role?

DB: You read a lot of scripts and the women are just screaming and squealing for the boys, or very afraid, but in reality some of us are very daring.

JW: Most of the time the scripts are written by men.

DB: The way women’s dialogue is written by men is often pathetic! They make us say things we would never say. But men are getting a better understanding of women. I like transitions, and my character in the show starts scared and the becomes very strong—women aren’t usually written that way.

IS: Being true to life is finally being risked by the smart and the brave in the entertainment business. Before, the idea was the movies and television had to go for an idealized picture of people. That has its charm, but what especially interested us in you, Drew, is how willing you are to touch real life, whether it’s personally or in your acting.

DB: A lot of the respect I have for my character in 2000 Malibu Road is that she doesn’t take shit and she speaks her mind—which is very much like me. I want to have real relationships, and I like to see them portrayed. In my show, my boyfriend does something that’s not even really wrong, but I tell him what I’m not prepared to accept.

IS: Because you’re been so honest about things that have happened in your own life, I can imagine that your candor has been misused, to your detriment. When you first started talking about your childhood addictions, was it against advice?

DB: Well, after my recovery, I slipped back a couple of times. Now it’s three years, on July 3, that I’ve been sober. And toward the end of one of my hospital stays, a person from the National Enquirer broke into the hospital and saw me there. And it was he who created the story. When it broke, I was told, "These are your options. You can completely deny it, or you can admit it and go on with your life and never talk about it again. Or you are in a position of power to speak your mind and help other people." I said, "I think you all know what choice I’m going to take." And they all looked down and were like, "I had a feeling she would say that." When you go through rehab, the biggest part of it is being honest—but still, I didn’t expect the I would have to be honest about it to the whole world. I was fourteen. The reason I continue to talk about it all it because I want to make a difference with people. That’s why I wrote Little Girl Lost.

IS: What gave you the idea to write the book?

DB: Well, what they had said about me was that "America’s Apple Dumpling, the Girl from E.T.," was a cocaine and booze addict.

JW: They love that shit.

DB: When I did admit what was going on with me, it was not to prove to people that I was O.K. and to take me back into the industry. What was important to me was my recovery. I think that people are constantly covering up for what they’ve done, and I didn’t want to be like that. I didn’t want to be a coward and say, "I made some mistakes, but everything is fine." As soon as I began to tell the truth, everybody was like, "We’re proud of her for being honest, but what about her career?" I wasn’t interested in that whatsoever. I didn’t even go on an audition for another year and a half. Then all these different publishing companies call—it was buzzing. They were going, "She’s got recovery, she’s got time, she’s got a great story—please, let us write her book." The reason I chose Simon & Schuster as my publisher was that they were more interested in what I had to say than what they wanted me to say. Of course, since I am not an author, I had to have a co-writer, and they were very flexible about who I would use. When it came out, I was very nervous. For the first two days I stayed in my house. Then a couple of weeks later my publisher called and said, "I just wanted to congratulate you on being best-selling author." I don’t give a damn that I’m a best-selling author. Who cares? The point was that I reached tons of people. People would come up to me and say, "I just read your book. I’ve been honest to my parents. I finally told then how I felt about them." That is all that mattered. When my passion for acting came back, it was difficult, because people were like, "Whoa. How can we trust you?"

GF: Is that still the case?

DB: Not as all. But in the beginning, people at auditions had this attitude of, "You should be so grateful." I already was. They knocked me down over and over again. I would go home and cry. Eventually I got Poison Ivy, and other offers started coming in and it began to snowball. I did this film called Guncrazy, which I’m gung ho about. It’s been described as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde meets Badlands, and it is.

IS: Let’s go back to your girl-finds-best-friend-and-seduces-her-father-and-kills-her-mohter part in Poison Ivy. Seeing you act that role so fiercely, so generously, impressed us.

DB: Ivy was the kind of girl who in reality you would never want to become, but maybe when you were younger you even knew a girl like Ivy who made you say, "Why can’t I be that free? Why can’t I just do the things she does, even though what she does is wrong? At least she has the guts to go and do it." I loved Ivy so much for that and wanted to play her regardless of whether it was a good career move.

GF: Was there any kind of risk, in playing her, that you would be typecast as, in quotes, "Bad"?

DB: Once people started seeing a little bit of footage from it, J. J. got all these calls, like, "We’ve got this role for Drew as a Lolita-esque nymphet." And people were coming up to me on the set, going, "How does it feel to be a sex symbol?" I was like, "Me?!" I might be a sensual person, but I don’t look at myself in the mirror and go, "Yeah, baby, you’ve got it goin’ on."

ID: Movies have so perpetuated certain taboos that it’s obvious people will be really excited when they’re broken. Look how many people were titillated by Basic Instinct.

DB: Although personally I’m very into stability, commitments, and domesticity now, I appreciate films that step over the industry’s boundaries. Also, I think that people sometimes mistake what the real message of a film is, and that’s why the industry is so limited. But fuck that.

IS: In Poison Ivy, a major part of the plot is Ivy’s friendship with Cooper [Sara Gilbert]. In your own life, have you had really tight relationships with your female friends?

DB: It’s funny you ask that question, because the usual question is the matter of the supposed lesbianism between the two characters, when it really has nothing to do with lesbianism. In this case, making out with Cooper was actually one of Ivy’s tricks. But they do have, a very strong, loving friendship in the beginning, which a lot of girls really want to have. I love to cuddle and giggle in bed with my friend Melissa. She is always supportive and gives great advice, but she’s very distant affection-wise, and sometimes I get frustrated with her because I want to put my arm around her and hug her and do all that girly stuff.

IS: Since you were such a baby star was it hard to make friends?

DB: Definitely. But I’m very lucky now. I have an incredible group of friends, very small, but people I would do anything for and who would do anything for me.

IS: You grew up alone with your mother?

DB: Yes and I had a different childhood from anyone I knew. I listened to Jim Morrison rather than Sesame Street, and I read Charles Bukowski. I thought that it was normal, until I was ten years old, talking about Bukowski to a thirty-five-year-old, who reacted, "How the hell do you know that?" It was just me and my mom. She didn’t have many friends, and neither did I. We lost the ability to communicate for a couple of years, and once we gained it back, she became my best friend. We live two blocks away from each other now.

The next day, our interview team of Joe McKenna, Richard Pandiscio, and Ingrid Sischy travels with Drew Barrymore and James Walters by car to the photo shoot with Bruce Weber in Bellport, Long Island.

IS: So Drew, you’ve been to a lot of schools, haven’t you?

DB: Yes. I went to about twenty-three different schools. I never really gave of myself in school, because I didn’t want to express myself to the teachers, who would just put me down for it. The only subject I was good at was English. But I would turn in a book report on, say, Henry Miller, and they would give me an F because they didn’t consider him a proper writer. But he wrote literature, and they shouldn’t have been closed off to certain authors because of what they wrote. I’d love to go back to school at some point and learn more about film, because I want to direct a project inspired by a movie I grew up with, The Red Balloon.

IS: Is that because you have a longing to be on the other side of the camera?

DB: I’m enamored with the other side of the filmmaking process; I’m always trying to bond with my directors. But I don’t know how I’m going to respond, actually, to telling people what to do, because I’m not very good at that. I have an assistant and I let her do her own thing—I can’t even tell her what to do!

Richard Pandiscio: I read that you guys went to the Cannes Film Festival. What was it like?

DB: We hated it.

JW: And we got kicked out of Chanel. [laughs]

DB: I have these favorite shoes by Karl Lagerfeld. They’re little, open-toed, crisscross with a thick heel. They’re very Marilyn Monroe…

Joe McKenna: Yeah, I know the ones. They have them at Barneys.

DB: Well, we went into the Chanel shop looking for them, and [laughs] they just walked us right out ‘cause they thought we were going to shoplift. They’re very nice to us at Chanel in L.A., but in Cannes, God forbid you should go in there in a pair of Levi’s.

JW: Or with tattoos.

DB: In my TV show, I start out wearing old baseball shirts from thrift stores and end up wearing Chanel.

JM: That’ll be a good scene!

JW: The best part of going to Cannes was that we had this layover in Paris, and we ran into [model] Linda Evangelista and played Game Boy with her for about three hours in the airport.

DB: It was really early in the morning, and we were sitting in the VIP lounge. Jamie said that I was staring at her to a horrible degree. And I felt really bad because it was a cross between, Oh, there’s Linda Evangelista, and being so tired that I couldn’t move my eyes in another direction. She looked up at me and held out her Game Boy and went, "You wanna play?" That was the highlight of our trip to Cannes: going head-to-head with Linda Evangelista.

From Interview, July 1992.