nylove.

anna quindlen / mhc speech

2007-07-03T05:21:00.000-07:00

I look at all of you today and I cannot help but see myself twenty-five years ago, at my own Barnard commencement. I sometimes seem, in my mind, to have as much in common with that girl as I do with any stranger I might pass in the doorway of a Starbucks or in the aisle of an airplane. I cannot remember what she wore or how she felt that day. But I can tell you this about her without question: she was perfect.

Let me be very clear what I mean by that. I mean that I got up every day and tried to be perfect in every possible way. If there was a test to be had, I had studied for it; if there was a paper to be written, it was done. I smiled at everyone in the dorm hallways, because it was important to be friendly, and I made fun of them behind their backs because it was important to be witty. And I worked as a residence counselor and sat on housing council. If anyone had ever stopped and asked me why I did those things--well, I'm not sure what I would have said. But I can tell you, today, that I did them to be perfect, in every possible way.

Being perfect was hard work, and the hell of it was, the rules of it changed. So that while I arrived at college in 1970 with a trunk full of perfect pleated kilts and perfect monogrammed sweaters, by Christmas vacation I had another perfect uniform: overalls, turtlenecks, Doc Martens, and the perfect New York City Barnard College affect--part hyperintellectual, part ennui. This was very hard work indeed. I had read neither Sartre nor Sappho, and the closest I ever came to being bored and above it all was falling asleep. Finally, it was harder to become perfect because I realized, at Barnard, that I was not the smartest girl in the world. Eventually being perfect day after day, year after year, became like always carrying a backpack filled with bricks on my back. And oh, how I secretly longed to lay my burden down.

So what I want to say to you today is this: if this sounds, in any way, familiar to you, if you have been trying to be perfect in one way or another, too, then make today, when for a moment there are no more grades to be gotten, classmates to be met, terrain to be scouted, positioning to be arranged--make today the day to put down the backpack. Trying to be perfect may be sort of inevitable for people like us, who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and in its good opinion. But at one level it's too hard, and at another, it's too cheap and easy. Because it really requires you mainly to read the zeitgeist of wherever and whenever you happen to be, and to assume the masks necessary to be the best of whatever the zeitgeist dictates or requires. Those requirements shapeshift, sure, but when you're clever you can read them and do the imitation required.

But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

This is more difficult, because there is no zeitgeist to read, no template to follow, no mask to wear. Set aside what your friends expect, what your parents demand, what your acquaintances require. Set aside the messages this culture sends, through its advertising, its entertainment, its disdain and its disapproval, about how you should behave.

Set aside the old traditional notion of female as nurturer and male as leader; set aside, too, the new traditional notions of female as superwoman and male as oppressor. Begin with that most terrifying of all things, a clean slate. Then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: for me, for me. Because they are who and what I am, and mean to be.

This is the hard work of your life in the world, to make it all up as you go along, to acknowledge the introvert, the clown, the artist, the reserved, the distraught, the goofball, the thinker. You will have to bend all your will not to march to the music that all of those great "theys" out there pipe on their flutes. They want you to go to professional school, to wear khakis, to pierce your navel, to bare your soul. These are the fashionable ways. The music is tinny, if you listen close enough. Look inside. That way lies dancing to the melodies spun out by your own heart. This is a symphony. All the rest are jingles.

This will always be your struggle whether you are twenty-one or fifty-one. I know this from experience. When I quit the New York Timesto be a full-time mother, the voices of the world said that I was nuts. When I quit it again to be a full-time novelist, they said I was nuts again. But I am not nuts. I am happy. I am successful on my own terms. Because if your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all. Remember the words of Lily Tomlin: If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

Look at your fingers. Hold them in front of your face. Each one is crowned by an abstract design that is completely different than those of anyone in this crowd, in this country, in this world. They are a metaphor for you. Each of you is as different as your fingerprints. Why in the world should you march to any lockstep?

The lockstep is easier, but here is why you cannot march to it. Because nothing great or even good ever came of it. When young writers write to me about following in the footsteps of those of us who string together nouns and verbs for a living, I tell them this: every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbirdand A Wrinkle in Time,you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had. And that is herself, her own personality, her own voice. If she is doing Faulkner imitations, she can stay home. If she is giving readers what she thinks they want instead of what she is, she should stop typing.

But if her books reflect her character, who she really is, then she is giving them a new and wonderful gift. Giving it to herself, too.

And that is true of music and art and teaching and medicine. Someone sent me a T-shirt not long ago that read "Well-Behaved Women Don't Make History." They don't make good lawyers, either, or doctors or businesswomen. Imitations are redundant. Yourself is what is wanted.

You already know this. I just need to remind you. Think back. Think back to first or second grade, when you could still hear the sound of your own voice in your head, when you were too young, too unformed, too fantastic to understand that you were supposed to take on the protective coloration of the expectations of those around you. Think of what the writer Catherine Drinker Bowen once wrote, more than half a century ago: "Many a man who has known himself at ten forgets himself utterly between ten and thirty." Many a woman, too.

You are not alone in this. We parents have forgotten our way sometimes, too. I say this as the deeply committed, often flawed mother of three. When you were first born, each of you, our great glory was in thinking you absolutely distinct from every baby who had ever been born before. You were a miracle of singularity, and we knew it in every fiber of our being.

But we are only human, and being a parent is a very difficult job, more difficult than any other, because it requires the shaping of other people, which is an act of extraordinary hubris. Over the years we learned to want for you things that you did not want for yourself. We learned to want the lead in the play, the acceptance to our own college, the straight and narrow path that often leads absolutely nowhere. Sometimes we wanted those things because we were convinced it would make life better, or at least easier for you. Sometimes we had a hard time distinguishing between where you ended and we began.

So that another reason that you must give up on being perfect and take hold of being yourself is because sometime, in the distant future, you may want to be parents, too. If you can bring to your children the self that you truly are, as opposed to some amalgam of manners and mannerisms, expectations and fears that you have acquired as a carapace along the way, you will give them, too, a great gift. You will teach them by example not to be terrorized by the narrow and parsimonious expectations of the world, a world that often likes to color within the lines when a spray of paint, a scrawl of crayon, is what is truly wanted.

Remember yourself, from the days when you were younger and rougher and wilder, more scrawl than straight line. Remember all of yourself, the flaws and faults as well as the many strengths. Carl Jung once said, "If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance toward oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbors, for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures."

Most commencement speeches suggest you take up something or other: the challenge of the future, a vision of the twenty-first century. Instead I'd like you to give up. Give up the backpack. Give up the nonsensical and punishing quest for perfection that dogs too many of us through too much of our lives. It is a quest that causes us to doubt and denigrate ourselves, our true selves, our quirks and foibles and great leaps into the unknown, and that is bad enough.

But this is worse: that someday, sometime, you will be somewhere, maybe on a day like today--a berm overlooking a pond in Vermont, the lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. Maybe something bad will have happened: you will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something you wanted to succeed at very much.

And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for that core to sustain you. If you have been perfect all your life, and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where your core ought to be.

Don't take that chance. Begin to say no to the Greek chorus that thinks it knows the parameters of a happy life when all it knows is the homogenization of human experience. Listen to that small voice from inside you, that tells you to go another way. George Eliot wrote, "It is never too late to be what you might have been." It is never too early, either. And it will make all the difference in the world. Take it from someone who has left the backpack full of bricks far behind. Every day feels light as a feather.

anna quindlen / villanova speech

2007-07-03T04:56:00.000-07:00

It's a great honor for me to be the third member of my family to receive an honorary doctorate from this great university. It's an honor to follow my great Uncle Jim, who was a gifted physician, and my Uncle Jack, who is a remarkable businessman. Both of them could have told you something important about their professions, about medicine or commerce.

I have no specialized field of interest or expertise, which puts me at a disadvantage talking to you today. I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work.

Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator decided not to run for reelection because he'd been diagnosed with cancer: "No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office." Don't ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat." Or what John Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."

You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that none else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree; there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do or a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.

Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account but your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch.

I would be rotten, or at best mediocre at my job, if those other things were not true. You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are.

So here's what I wanted to tell you today:

Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.

Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast? Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red tailed hawk circles over the water or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter. Kiss your Mom. Hug your Dad. Get a life in which you are generous.

Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Once in a while take money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a Big Brother or Sister.

All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough. It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of the azaleas, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color of our kid's eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. I learned to live many years ago.

Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to

look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this:

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.

Well, you can learn all those things, out there, if you get a life, a full life, a professional life, yes, but another life, too, a life of love and laughs and a connection to other human beings. Just keep your eyes and ears open. Here you could learn in the classroom. There the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end. No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office. I found one of my best teachers on the boardwalk at Coney Island maybe 15 years ago. It was December, and I was doing a story about how the homeless survive in the winter months.

He and I sat on the edge of the wooden supports, dangling our feet over the side, and he told me about his schedule; panhandling the boulevard when the summer crowds were gone, sleeping in a church when the temperature went below freezing, hiding from the police amidst the Tilt a Whirl and the Cyclone and some of the other seasonal rides. But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we were sitting now even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them.

And I asked him why. Why didn't he go to one of the shelters? Why didn't he check himself into the hospital for detox? And he just stared out at the ocean and said, "Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view."

And every day, in some little way, I try to do what he said. I try to look at the view. And that's the last thing I have to tell you today, words of wisdom from a man with not a dime in his pocket, no place to go, nowhere to be. Look at the view. You'll never be disappointed.

angelina jolie / vogue 0107

2007-06-19T03:22:00.000-07:00

It's official: "The middle of nowhere" is about halfway between L.A. and Las Vegas, just off Route 40, at a dusty old airstrip in the desert called the Barstow-Daggett Airport—airport being something of a misnomer, a word that conveys a sense of modernity that this place most certainly does not possess. There are two tiny runways and a few long wooden sheds where a handful of single-prop planes are parked out of the life-leaching sun. There are also a couple of humongous empty hangars, built in the 1930s, that were used by the military during World War II and look as if they haven't been painted since. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see a tumbleweed roll right on through or to find the bleached-out skeleton of a years-dead longhorn out behind the toilet. In fact, it is so Land That Time Forgot here that the only planes that come and go all day are the two that belong to the heroine of our story.

Angelina Jolie loves this place. Something about its broken-down beauty and military history speaks to her dual craving for authenticity and manliness. She calls it, simply, "Daggett." As in "Brad and I like to fly in to meet our motorcycles at Daggett. One time we took a three-hour bike ride in the desert to a place where we spent the night alone. And then we rode the bikes back to Daggett and flew back to L.A. to our kids before dinner the next evening." Impossibly romantic, you say? Sit tight. It gets better.

We have all gathered at this remote, intoxicating place—there is a Vogue / Annie Leibovitz crew of nearly 50—because it seemed like a fine setting for capturing the spirit of the post-pregnancy Jolie, the daredevil adventuress insta-mother-of-three who seems to have an unquenchable thirst for the uncharted and off-the-grid. This is a woman who thinks nothing of helicoptering onto the top of a mountain in post-earthquake Pakistan for Thanksgiving when she is three months pregnant. Or of moving to Namibia to give birth to her and Pitt's daughter, Shiloh, in a tiny hospital in a one-gynecologist town. "We aren't completely insane," she tells me. "We looked for places that were not rife with malaria and dengue fever, and Namibia is good for that because it's so dry." Indeed, just yesterday, she flew her own Cirrus SR22 single-engine plane to the photo shoot, the first half of which took place many miles from the airport, in the giant sand dunes near Death Valley, where you could see the red glow from some terrible fire burning in the distance and where the sun blazed and the wind blew and the sand pelted everyone for hours on end. The shoot went too late for Jolie to fly home in the dark, so she, like the rest of the crew, checked herself in to a Ramada, something she seemed to relish. "When Brad and I take road trips," she says, "we love a Taco Bell and a roadside motel."

Today the shoot is all about Angelina and her toys: motorcycles and airplanes. When I arrive, however, the mood is grim. Jolie is famously difficult to photograph; she does not like being styled, because, I think, it forces her to wrestle with the two sides of her public image: tattooed tough girl and insanely feminine sex bomb. Despite having approved of the clothes at a fitting a few days ago, now she is not in a Carolina Herrera or Bill Blass mood. Just after the fitting, back in a hotel room in Beverly Hills, I asked Jolie about her thorny relationship to the photo shoot. "It is always just an awkward thing for me," she said. "I'm not modeling. It's me. I'm a person. And yet I'm selling clothes while trying to promote a movie. It's very odd. And yet, in our world today, it's been a very successful formula. It works. We play dress up. But it's not really us. We've lost all sense of portraiture, and that's too bad."

But here and now, in the desert, she cannot help but fall under the spell of the master. Leibovitz has coaxed Jolie out of her trailer, where she had been quietly stalling, by letting her choose the tough girl/tomboy option . . . for now. She steps out into the sun with big hair. She is wearing a pair of skinny leather pants and a dark trench, like she is ready to shoot Mad Maxine, a remake with her in the Mel Gibson role (note to Hollywood: not the worst idea). After shifting around awkwardly for a moment, she swings a leg over her motorcycle and speeds off in a cloud of dust with a big maniacal grin on her face—happy, at last. And . . . scene. When the curtain goes up a couple of hours later, the star of our show has, like magic, morphed into the other Angelina, the sexy man killer in a pencil skirt, the kind of look that she sports in those fantastic St. John ads. She is wearing a very formfitting white linen Ralph Lauren suit with heels and a great big ol' pair of white-and-silver Gucci sunglasses.

Interestingly enough, and perhaps unbeknownst to Jolie, this side of her packs just as much punch.

As a couple of burly, rough-looking fellows tow Jolie's plane out to the runway and ready it to fly, Jolie flirts and laughs with the ground crew and a few military guys who are hanging around. A young, pimply-faced fat kid appears and sheepishly asks for her autograph. She handles him with such sweetness that I worry that the rest of his life will all be downhill from here. Guys whip out cell phones and pose with her. She looks at ease and in her element: all dolled up, surrounded by men.

I had asked Jolie a few days ago if I could fly with her, and she told me she had never taken a passenger up before but would think about it. When I arrived at the photo shoot, I told her that I mentioned to my mother that I might fly with her and that my mother did not like the idea one bit. Jolie laughed it off. Now, as I am watching her kick off her stilettos (she pilots barefoot) and step up onto the wing of her little white plane, she stops for a second and stares at me standing off to the side. There is a glint in her eye. A big smile spreads across her face. "Let's go scare your mother," she says.

Only as I am jammed in the back next to Leibovitz, bumping along the dinky little runway, does the reality of what I'm doing sink in. I imagine the headline: ANGELINA JOLIE AND ANNIE LEIBOVITZ DIE IN PLANE CRASH NEAR LAS VEGAS. I try to remember who went down with Patsy Cline, but I can't. I am about to become a trivia question. I tell myself this will be a suitably fabulous way to die, and just like that we are in the air, floating above the desert, and my nerves are gone. "I'll do some tight turns," says Jolie. "Maddox likes it when there are g-forces." We swoop to the right and then to the left. My stomach drops. Leibovitz snaps off a bunch of shots, then climbs over into the front seat while I hold her cameras. More swooping. More snapping. And as quickly as we lifted off, we are back on the ground. As we step out of the plane, someone comes running over to tell Jolie that Brad is on his way. He'll be landing any minute.

Two-and-a-half years ago, I had dinner with Jolie at the L'Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills. At the time, she seemed to have happily settled into her post-Billy Bob life as a single mom, after having adopted Maddox from Cambodia in 2002. Jolie was in L.A. to shoot Mr. & Mrs. Smith and had just begun rehearsals. She had known Brad Pitt for only about a week. "Today they were putting us together and trying outfits on us, seeing how we look as a couple," she said to me then. "It's always so silly; you don't know somebody and in three days you're going to be 'married.' But he's lovely, Brad Pitt. He's very sweet."

When I asked her then about the film, she said, "It's a study in marriage and how well you know your partner. There's everything from couples therapy to arguing about the drapes, and you think they're having affairs, and then you slowly discover that the reason they're having problems is because they have very different lives and have secrets from each other." And then she said this: "My opinion of marriage comes from a very cynical place. Do you want to kill your spouse? For me, that's a serious question. And Brad Pitt comes from a place of: What a funny idea, to kill the person you're married to, because he has a happy marriage. So we're actually a very funny combination."

Now it is mid-September 2006 and we are back at the same hotel, sitting in one of the sprawling garden suites that she has reserved so that we might have a little privacy while we eat and talk. (Two-and-a-half years ago, we sat in the lobby and no one said a word to us but the waitress.) She is wearing her uniform: skinny black slacks with black flip-flops and a black sleeveless jersey V-neck. A pair of aviators hangs in her considerable cleavage. There are lots of silvery rings and a black rubber band around the wrist for when she needs to pull back her hair.

Jolie has not given a lengthy personal interview since she and Brad have been together, and when I bring this up she says, "I mentioned that last night to Brad. I said, 'I'm a little concerned. I just haven't done this, having to represent another person.' Usually I just represent myself and I don't worry about it, because I don't care how bold I am. People can think anything they want about me if it makes their time at the checkout counter go a little quicker. I'm all for killing time in the supermarket. But Brad said, 'Well, don't change a thing about the way you've always done it. Just relax and don't worry.'"

This comes as a huge relief. A couple of years ago, when I stuttered and stumbled over a personal question, Jolie looked me in the eye and said, "You can ask me anything." When I remind her of that, she tells me that it's still the case, though I can feel that she is being more cautious, a little self-conscious. I plunge right in and ask the obvious question: What happened?

"Brad was a huge surprise to me," she says. "I, like most people, had a very distant impression of him from . . . the media." She laughs heartily. "I am just as guilty!" And then she wades in, tentative at first, and begins to explain how their relationship evolved. "I think we were both the last two people who were looking for a relationship. I certainly wasn't. I was quite content to be a single mom with Mad. And I didn't know much about exactly where Brad was in his personal life. But it was clear he was with his best friend, someone he loves and respects. And so we were both living, I suppose, very full lives.

"Because of the film we ended up being brought together to do all these crazy things, and I think we found this strange friendship and partnership that kind of just suddenly happened. I think a few months in I realized, God, I can't wait to get to work. Whether it was shooting a scene or arguing about a scene or gun practice or dance class or doing stunts—anything we had to do with each other, we just found a lot of joy in it together and a lot of real teamwork. We just became kind of a pair. And it took until, really, the end of the shoot for us, I think, to realize that it might mean something more than we'd earlier allowed ourselves to believe. And both knowing that the reality of that was a big thing, something that was going to take a lot of serious consideration."

Jolie seems almost relieved to be talking about their relationship. "Not as exciting as what a lot of people would like to believe," she says. "We spent a lot of time contemplating and thinking and talking about what we both wanted in life and realized that we wanted very, very similar things. And then we just continued to take time. We remained very, very good friends—with this realization—for a long time. And then life developed in a way where we could be together, where it felt like something we would do, we should do."

When I ask her what Brad is like, she says, "He's private. He's got a wicked sense of humor. He's a real artist. He's very content to just be alone in a room and create and draw and read and get lost in all of that. He is a great challenge to me. We push each other to be better. Even if it's just a better bike rider or a better pilot. We're constantly in competition with each other. He's somebody I admire based on the way he lives his life. And that's why I'm with him. He'll probably read that and laugh. We still have this funny thing: We were so used to not being together that when I was adopting Zahara and going through the follow-up home study, the woman said, 'How long have you been together? And can you explain your relationship?' And she's obviously not a reporter. She's just a woman doing her job. But we both got hysterical. We couldn't answer the questions. We were like two idiots. 'What do you mean? We're not. . . . We've never had a. . . .' We're like two great friends, and if we talk seriously about the relationship, it just seems odd. I mean, on occasion we are obviously capable of being very adult with each other."

They are not married, and Jolie says they have no plans to be. "We have both been married before, so it's not marriage that's necessarily kept some people together. We are legally bound to our children, not to each other, and I think that's the most important thing." Jolie herself still seems a bit surprised by the turns her life has taken.

"Yeah, life has moved very quickly," she says. "Brad and I have these moments where we look around and suddenly realize we have three kids. The day Shiloh came home, we were in Africa and we had just gotten back from the hospital. We looked around at three sleeping children and each other and thought, My God!" She laughs. "Here we are! This is amazing! Couldn't be happier! But . . . wow. We can't even figure out how to get them all in the car."

It was the children, she says, that really sped up things. "Especially Maddox," says Jolie. "There was a coming together of him and Brad. It's a big thing to bring together a child and a father. It had never crossed my mind that Mad was going to need a father—certainly not that it would be this man I just met. Until, of course, I got to know Brad and realized that he is naturally just a wonderful father. And we left a lot of it up to Mad, and he took his time and then made the decision one day."

How did he express himself? I ask.

"He just out of the blue called him Dad," she says. "It was amazing. We were playing with cars on the floor of a hotel room, and we both heard it and didn't say anything and just looked at each other. And then we kind of let it go on, and then he just continued to do it and that was it. So that was probably the most defining moment, when he decided that we would all be a family." By this time, Jolie had already set in motion the process of adopting another child, and even though it was her signature on Zahara's adoption papers, "we both saw her picture in a file on the same day, and we both went to Ethiopia to see her, and we both had the same fear because she was sick at the time, and we both made the decision that no matter what, we were going to look after her. It evolved in that way where he committed to them as a man commits to a child; it just happens emotionally when you make that internal decision, and you just behave accordingly. He's just naturally there for them."

When I ask about the media maelstrom that resulted from their decisions, and what it looked like from her perspective, she leans back on the couch that she's sitting on and throws back her head. "Oh, God. Um." Long, uncharacteristic pause. "I'm only being cautious because it involves so many people." She bites her lower lip. "I suppose that is the thing that is the most difficult. We all go through these things in our lives—children, divorces, marriages, different relationships—and anybody can have an opinion about what is right or who's evil or what they think is really secretly happening. But the reality is that it didn't help anybody involved—even if it was the person you thought you were taking sides with—to exploit it so much. But that being said, we're all adults and we have come out the other end of it and all of us are good, stable, clear-thinking people who care about each other. So that's the good news: that it didn't cause further unrest between the relationships where it really matters for the future."

Of course, the elephant in the room here with us is Jennifer Aniston. When I finally find the nerve to ask if they have ever talked or met, Jolie says, at first, no. But then, a minute later, she interrupts me. "But . . . so . . . you asked if I have ever met Jennifer and I said no. I did, but it was not a proper meeting. We've, like, passed each other and said hi briefly, shook hands. But not a real sit-down-and-talk kind of meeting."

Do you imagine that happening at some point?

"That would be her decision, and I would welcome it."

Last fall while shooting The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro and costarring Matt Damon, Jolie "fell" pregnant. "It was a busy weekend on the set," she says. "Matt's wife also got pregnant, and we had the same due date." Two and a half months later, the cast and crew were called back for reshoots, and Jolie, who was now starting to show, went to great lengths to keep her pregnancy a secret from everyone, including De Niro. "It was the first time I worked since I got pregnant, and I hadn't eaten for three hours. We were doing a Christmas scene, sitting around this piano singing songs, when the world just went completely black in front of me and I nearly threw up. It was like, cut! They had to move me to the side, get me a nurse. And then I had to say, 'Bob, I think I might be pregnant.' And he was great. He went and got me a banana, I think."

In The Good Shepherd, Jolie plays the wife of Matt Damon, a Skull and Bones member from Yale who gets recruited to work for a precursor to the CIA during World War II. It is essentially a film about the birth of the intelligence service in America, but it is also concerned with the idea of secrets in general and how destructive they are—especially to Damon's character's personal life. Jolie enters the picture a gorgeous, vivacious 20-year-old sorority girl from a wealthy family whom everyone calls Clover and exits it an embittered, prematurely gray 40-something alcoholic rattling around in a big house and insisting that her husband call her Margaret.

De Niro cast Jolie because of a scene he caught of a film, the title of which he can't remember, wherein a guy tries to pick her up in a bar. "She was very good," says De Niro, "and kind of tough, but when I watched the scene it made me laugh. I felt that one side of Clover needed that kind of toughness." De Niro's biggest concern about casting her had to do with the physical aspect of aging. "The way the character is written, she kind of gets frumpy as she gets older. I had this preconception in my head of her literally being heavier and approaching middle age. That she would become this sort of, not quite dowdy housewife, but someone who's settled into and accepted her fate. Angelina did that but in her own way, and I was very, very happy with it. Her instincts are terrific."

Damon is friends with Billy Bob Thornton and has known Angelina socially for years, but they had never done a film together. "With someone who is that kind of a supernova," he says, "it's easy to forget why so many people are interested in them, and so the first kind of big scene that we did, I remember the cinematographer widening his eyes because, he, like everyone else, was just kind of blown away by the power that she has as an actress. It was a reminder of why she's Angelina Jolie."

Jolie tells me that she took the part mostly because she "was just really curious about" being directed by De Niro. "He's fascinating," she says. "I think a lot of people are scared of him. But I ended up liking him so much. He's a real artist. And he respects someone who works hard—even if he thinks you are wrong, he will give you that."

It should come as no surprise that making movies has not been a big priority in Jolie's life lately. What film role could possibly be more exciting—or more sweepingly romantic, for that matter—than her own epic life story? Indeed, when I ask about her future plans, she mentions film almost as an afterthought. "I'll always work with refugees. I'd love to have more kids and continue to explore the world and travel a lot and live abroad. I don't think much about film. But I'm sure I'll do more; I'm sure there will be some projects that I'll get excited about."

The Good Shepherd is Jolie's first film since Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which reestablished her box-office clout—and justified her $15 million price tag—after several clunkers in a row, like Taking Lives and Alexander. Later this year she will appear in Robert Zemeckis's half-animated, half-live-action version of Beowulf as Grendel's mother, and she has also committed to starring in an upcoming production of Atlas Shrugged. And just after I meet with Jolie in Los Angeles, she and Pitt pack up their brood and move to India for three months, where neither actor has ever been and where they are working together—he as the producer, she as the star (opposite Dan Futterman)—on A Mighty Heart, a film directed by Michael Winterbottom and based on the book by Daniel Pearl's widow, Mariane. When Pitt and Aniston were still together, their production company, Plan B, bought the rights to the book, which tells the story of the people who came to Mariane's aid, including an Indian woman and a Pakistani Muslim man, after her husband was kidnapped by Islamic militants. A few years ago, Aniston told me in an interview she was very excited about "nurturing" the project and that she was even considering playing Mariane. "I would love to think that I could. We'll have to see when it happens."

Now it is Jolie's part. In many ways, it makes perfect sense. "We have a lot of things in common," says Jolie. "Mariane worked for many years in radio and journalism in different areas of migration. So, obviously, my working with refugees . . . we have just great discussions about a lot of women's issues and issues to do with children that we both care a lot about."

Unfortunately for the Jolie-Pitts, they were met in India with madness. Through much of October there were constant stories of the paparazzi mob that followed them everywhere they went. One day I got an E-mail from Jolie's longtime assistant, Holly Goline: "We are barely surviving India."

This, as Aniston can attest, is the downside to being Brad Pitt's lady. For some reason, he whips the media into a special kind of frenzy. When I first met Jolie in 2001, she traveled alone to the airport with just a backpack. She had no cell phone, no E-mail address, wore no watch on her wrist. She prized her freedom above all else. Today, she neurotically checks her BlackBerry every few minutes while bodyguards lurk in the shadows. At one point, I ask her what has been the most difficult aspect of the last couple of years. "Having less privacy," she says. "It's only difficult because I love my freedom. I just became that much more public, and it was something I knew would happen, and it was almost a reason to not make the choices I made. I knew I would be sacrificing certain things. And that for the kids is the most difficult. I think about that with Mad. Even when we were shooting Mr. & Mrs., Mad and I would go to the parks and run around, and occasionally someone would follow me home from the set and I'd get photographed. People weren't outside my house every day. We could really go to the park, we could go for walks, we could get a coffee, he and I would go grocery shopping. And now we can't do those things. Hopefully it will all fade away. We're a new family, and soon it will be less interesting."

A week after the photo shoot in the desert I find myself back at the same suite in the same hotel in Beverly Hills. Jolie seems agitated and looks pale. She has a cold, it turns out, and is clutching a wad of Kleenex. In a matter of days, she will be in India speaking in Mariane Pearl's accent. She is hiding out in a hotel room here, studying French. "I've been trying to do it at home for the past few weeks, and it's just impossible to focus. Somebody is always . . . the kids come and go from school, and then Shiloh's having a moment. So I just came here to have a little bit of quiet."

At last, a crack in the armor, a sign that her life can be complicated and that being a mother of three can be downright overwhelming. Because she seems particularly vulnerable today, sitting with her legs pulled up to her chest with her very skinny arms wrapped around them, I ask: Who helps you through difficult moments? "Brad," she says. "He's the person closest to me. That said, I've often been accused of not talking about my personal things. I mean, even with Brad. He usually has to draw something out of me. I have had a lot of people—ex-husbands, et cetera—kind of suggest that they'd be very open to being a shoulder to cry on. If I had the inclination, it would be very lovely if I could possibly let that go. But I have this odd sense of, It's not going to accomplish anything to cry. It's not going to help you to get a hug! I'm not a hugger. People make fun of me. It's something that I have a hard time with. If someone hugs me, I hold my breath. Snuggling, cuddling, hugging, crying . . . all that stuff makes me very uncomfortable."

What about with your kids?

"Oh, I love hugging my kids," she says. "It's a different thing because you feel such a genuine grab from them. Whereas I think adults, we do an odd thing; we tend to just hide in each other's shoulder when we're upset."

Jolie famously hasn't spoken to her father, the actor Jon Voight, in five years, but she is very close to her mother, Marcheline Bertrand.

I ask her, Do you ever call your mother crying if you've had a bad day?

"No. I'm never that person."

Whom do you trust?

"I don't trust anyone."

Really?

"Yeah," she says. "I don't think it's a good thing. This is going to make you think that maybe I should get some therapy, but trust is such a bizarre word. I'd like to say that I trust my mother, but I also don't know if she might do something that she thinks is in my best interest. I trust that Brad will never do anything. . . ." She trails off. "I don't know. I don't trust anybody completely."

Despite this reflexive bit of tough-girl cynicism, it is abundantly clear that Jolie is in a very different place than she was when I met her for dinner at a hotel in Montreal five years ago. As she told me once before, and reiterated, "The reason I was so lost is because I didn't have a sense of a place to put my fight and my passion." When I ask her how she thinks she's changed since we first met, she takes a minute to get it right. "I'm committed to the future now," she says. "I'm committed to life. I think definitely before my son, I was a little nihilistic. But once I adopted Mad I knew I was never going to be intentionally self-destructive again. I'm starting to be able to see being 50 years old with the kids graduating from high school—though in my mind we're in the middle of a desert or a jungle with tutors and some local friends."

Back on the airstrip in the desert a week earlier, I catch a glimpse of this gentler, more loving side of Jolie. Just after she has safely landed her plane and is told that Pitt is on his way, there is a palpable shift in mood. Everyone is all atwitter: Brad is coming . . . Brad is coming. We are standing around, several hundred yards from the runway, when a craft comes into view. As Pitt lands their other plane, an eight-seat Cessna Caravan—the family minivan to Jolie's sports car—we are all asked to stay put as Jolie, still in her white linen suit and heels, begins a long, dramatic walk alone to meet Pitt at his plane. As she gets closer, the propeller kicks up dust and she waves to him in the cockpit with one hand while holding her hair with the other. Suddenly, the door opens, stairs are lowered, and Pitt scurries down and nearly scoops her up. He hugs her tight and then reaches down and grabs her ass. As they walk back toward the group, talking and laughing the whole way, Jolie has wrapped an arm around Pitt's torso, and she has her head on his chest, almost nestled into his armpit. It is the first time I notice how small and delicate she actually is. And then, as they get closer, I notice something else: Jolie has her other arm wrapped around him, too. She is holding on with both hands.

Christina Ricci; W Sept 06

2006-12-25T06:36:00.000-08:00

At the Sundance Film Festival last year, a young director named Craig Brewer was suddenly the biggest new thing in a business built on overnight sensations. His feature Hustle & Flow—a little movie about a small-time pimp and a scrawny geek who burst through the Memphis music scene with their homemade hits—wowed the snowbound crowd and, more important, sold to Paramount for $9 million. That sale instantly made Brewer's next script, for something called Black Snake Moan, the kind of smoking-hot property that gets read on the studio jets back to Hollywood. No matter that Black Snake Moan was a Southern fable about a God-fearing former bluesman, Lazarus, who chains a trashy nymphomaniac, Rae, to his radiator and tries to cure her of what the town's leering menfolk call her "itch." Big-name talent was all over Black Snake Moan like ducks on a june bug, as they say in Brewer's native Tennessee.

The role of Lazarus was preempted by Samuel L. Jackson, but no one actress could immediately lay claim to Rae's teensy blue-jean skirt.

"Everybody was auditioning for Rae," recalls Christina Ricci, one of the actresses who managed to get a copy of the script in early 2005 because her agent, Toni Howard, also represents Jackson. "I read it and immediately fell in love with her."

The response from Brewer and Black Snake producer John Singleton, though, was "No thanks." They didn't even want to meet Ricci. At 26, she has been in studio blockbusters (The Addams Family), indie classics (Buffalo '66 and The Opposite of Sex), critics' favorites (The Ice Storm) and Oscar fare (Monster). But many of those films came out years ago; since 1999's Sleepy Hollow, Ricci has been flying low with mini movies like Pumpkin, Miranda and I Love Your Work and outright duds such as Prozac Nation and Cursed. Television appearances on Ally McBeal and HBO's critically applauded The Laramie Project were, to those in the movie biz, hardly more than consolation prizes.

So Ricci offered to come in and read for the part of Rae—a humble gesture that suggests she knew her place in Hollywood's finely delineated caste system—and the Black Snake team relented. She prepared for her audition as if for the actual movie, bleaching her dark hair, learning to talk like country trash and smearing on some character-appropriate blue eye shadow. The audition scene featured one of Rae's anxiety attacks, a panicky episode that climaxes in a writhing, crotch-rubbing nymphomaniacal frenzy.

"It's a very strange transition to make," says Ricci with admirable understatement. "That's not my kind of anxiety attack."

When it was over, Ricci asked if she could do a second scene she had prepared on her own initiative: a gut-wrencher in which Rae confronts her mother about her sexually abusive stepfather. The actress tapped such deep reservoirs of secret emotion that she couldn't stop crying afterward. The Black Snake team was blown away.

"I could not stop thinking about her," Brewer recalls. "I like women with guts, like Debra Winger, Faye Dunaway, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn. And I put Ricci in that category."

When Brewer subsequently offered her the role, Ricci accepted on the spot. "I had said to my therapist that if I didn't get the part, I would have had to quit this business," she says evenly, as a breeze plays with her bangs poolside at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. "I would have had absolutely no clue what the f--- I was supposed to be doing as an actress."

In the Hollywood universe, Ricci may be considered a lesser star, but she does have the one thing shared by the giants: a unique identity or, as Brewer puts it, a screen persona that could be caricatured with a few deft pen strokes. Ever since she was in her teens, Ricci has embodied not just a physical type—tiny and ripe—but also an entire worldview, one that is defined by the outcast's droll distance from normalcy. She is, at just over five feet tall, a sexpot for losers.

"You know, I was kind of weird when I was a kid," she admits. "And I've been told that as an adult I can be very unsettling. And I know that the way I like to look is not normal too. But I kind of like it. At a certain point you have to say, "This is who I am and this is how I'm gonna look."

Ricci says that she doesn't exactly feel typecast but that she often has to argue for the chance to be who she is, as an actress and as a person: "I'm really sorry to disappoint all the people in my life who would prefer that I was a little bit more commercial or a little bit easier to package or easier to pin down or explain."

The implication, of course, is that if she hasn't aligned herself with industry expectations yet, it's not going to happen now.

Ricci hasn't had any training as an actress other than what she's absorbed on sets starting with the 1990 film Mermaids and The Addams Family the following year. Director Don Roos asked her to audition for The Opposite of Sex some five years later based on what he remembered of those two movies, and he was initially surprised by the self-assured reading she gave for Dede, a teenage runaway who goes to live with her gay brother and then swipes his boyfriend. Ricci's sense of the character was sharply different from Roos's, and she flatly declined his suggestion to make the character more endearing.

"She said, 'I don't want to give a handjob to the audience,'" Roos recalls. "'I'll play it straight, and they'll like me or they'll hate me.' She wasn't dimpled. She did it her way. I found that with Christina, it's best to follow her. She's very perspicacious. She scared me, naturally."

Many critics would say that Ricci did her best work in 1997 and 1998, when she brought memorable roles to the screen in Buffalo '66, The Ice Storm and The Opposite of Sex, all of which were made during a moment when independent cinema was flourishing. Today, Ricci contemplates her indie period with the wistful air of an industry veteran looking back on some long-past golden era.

"You can say 'low-budget' these days, but you can't say 'independent,'" Ricci says, noting that even movies that begin outside of the studio system today are made to appeal to studio buyers. "So you're still playing by the rules of the studio."

Black Snake Moan, she notes, is the rare example of something different that slips through, if only because it has been "packaged the right way" with a stylized look that disguises the film's otherwise unpalatable storyline. The film is set near Memphis in the 1970s, a world of humid, rural melancholy taken straight out of William Eggleston photographs. Ricci had never spent time in the South before she showed up for the shoot last summer, but she fell for the idiosyncrasies of Southern culture, like the way the Lord kept popping up in conversation.

"Everybody was talking about Jesus," recalls Ricci, who identifies herself as a Christian but nonetheless prefers to keep conversation about faith between herself and her creator. "All these sayings just become part of the day, like 'God bless' or 'Bless her heart.' It's the common language. You end up talking about Jesus too."

Of course, old-time religion coexists with the devil's own music, and Black Snake Moan deals with both. Brewer took the name from a Blind Lemon Jefferson song, and he calls it his "blues movie," as if it were part of a grand musico-cinematic scheme begun with Hustle & Flow. For Brewer, the central metaphor, a clanking chain that ties Rae to Lazarus's radiator, represents the healing power of home, family and faith.

As the movie opens, Rae clearly needs some kind of saving grace. She swishes her tail in front of every horndog in town, and the audience is asked to endure three sex scenes in the first half hour, only one of which is with her boyfriend, Ronnie, played by Justin Timberlake.

"I think I've had enough sex for the next two years of my career with this movie," admits Ricci, who has declined other roles in the past because she found their portrayal of sex "disgusting." "I know that I have a very simplistic, childlike morality, but I believe I can feel somebody's negative intentions in the writing, and if I do, I can't be a part of it." What makes Black Snake acceptable in her view is that it attempts to seriously plumb the emotions of a damaged young woman some might dismiss as a "slut."

"It's about identifying a behavior that I don't think is explored all that often in the proper way," Ricci continues. "I have read a ton—a ton—about child psychology. I have a kind of bizarre fascination with true crime. And I've done a lot of thinking about these sorts of traumas."

Rae's spree of casual sex ends when she mocks the wrong guy's equipment and he retaliates with his fists. Her healing begins when Lazarus finds her beaten body and takes her home to recuperate. Because she tries to flee his ministrations during a fevered nightmare, he locks 20 feet of chain around her waist. Rae fights it with such demonic fury that Lazarus thinks she is possessed—and the audience starts to worry about Ricci's physical well-being.

"She insisted on using the real, 80-pound chain," recalls Brewer, who adds that he pleaded with her to use a plastic dummy chain instead. "There's only so much that a young woman of her size can do, and daily Christina would exceed it, to the point of vomiting after takes."

When things got too hard, Ricci turned to Jackson, whom she calls her "Big Daddy," for comfort. "I'd be like, 'Sam, I don't know if we should do this,'" she recalls. "And he'd be like, 'What's wrong, baby? Come here. I'll take care of it.'"

"I found myself being her protector because she's so willing to try things," explains Jackson, "that sometimes I said, 'No, you can't do that. You can't run out the door blindly with this chain around you because you don't know what that chain is gonna get caught on. That's why we have stunt people.'"

Ricci says she adored working with Jackson—"I could not admire that man any more," she gushes. "When I was 14, I wanted to be Sam Jackson." She also praises Timberlake's performance, and when she makes the point that his work ethic reflects the sterling habits of a former child actor, she might well be speaking of herself. Ricci was born in Santa Monica, the youngest of four children, all of whom were approached to be child actors. Her mother, a former model, resisted until Ricci had her turn. By then, the other siblings were old enough to "bully" their mother into giving Ricci a chance, she recalls.

It's ironic, given the teenage sex queens she would go on to play, that the one role Ricci didn't snag in her early days was as the most famous jailbait of all, Lolita. It was a disappointment that, in retrospect, looks like a lucky break, since she didn't then understand what she almost got herself into. ("I just reread the book two months ago," she says, "and I was horrified by things I don't even remember reading when I was 13.")

Asked whether her parents objected to her auditioning for such a role, Ricci says that both were huge movie fans who would have understood the film's artistic merit. "My mother, especially, thought nothing was ever going to damage me," Ricci explains. "I was never really shielded in that way."

In the past Ricci has openly discussed her struggles with anorexia as a teenager, and one wonders if growing up in the film business didn't lead to her distorted body image. Ricci is almost protective of the movie business—she refers to "this industry" with a fondness most reserve for their hometowns—and she refuses to blame it.

"I was 12 or 13," she recalls. "I was in puberty. It was a horrible time. I saw a television movie, and I was like, Somehow, what Tracey Gold is doing right now is something I'd like to do. So obviously there was something wrong with me." She says she pulled herself out of the self-destructive behavior because she realized it could end her career.

Over the past few years, when fewer screen roles have come her way, Ricci has satisfied that hunger for work with television roles. This year she guest-starred on Grey's Anatomy, an appearance that won her an Emmy nomination announced on the morning of this interview. ("I guess I feel mature now," she deadpanned.)

"This is a girl who spent most of her childhood on a set," says Roos, who has remained close with Ricci since they worked together. "She loves the action, the activity, the focus and the attention. She likes to be around the camera—in front of it, behind it or beside it."

Ricci is also self-aware enough to admit that she sometimes likes to knock the socks off her TV colleagues, who don't have the luxury of the long rehearsals and countless takes that movie sets provide, by whipping out her biggest acting moves, like crying on command. "I'm kind of a show-off sometimes," she confesses. "Acting is the one thing in my life that I actually think I'm good at. In every other area I'm totally retarded."

Ricci's next screen appearance will likely be in Penelope, a modern-day fairy tale about an unfortunate girl from a wealthy family who is born with a pig's nose but learns to love and be loved in the end. (Black Snake Moan was originally slotted for a fall opening but was recently rescheduled for early 2007, when it might benefit from a buzz-building premiere on the festival circuit.) Penelope will no doubt have its place as wholesome entertainment for teenage girls, but Ricci presumably is doing such fluff for financial reasons. She admits that her salary is modest by industry standards and that she has an expensive habit to support: fashion.

"I was told by my business manager that I have to stop buying clothes," Ricci admits. "I'm not allowed to buy any more fur. No more jewelry. I spent a lot of money."

Her ultimate fashion goal, she explains, is to buy enough clothes so that she'll never have to shop again, so that her closets would be like a costume house or a wardrobe trailer, "where I could go in and find anything." She recently removed the books from the shelves of her home library and put her shoe collection in their place. "I have more shoes than books," she reasons. "At first I was so embarrassed I didn't want anybody to come over. And then I was like, 'I'm obviously not an idiot.' So I painted it bright pink."

Ricci favors prim little-girl looks or proper old-lady outfits, with a special fondness for Chanel suits—"Karl Lagerfeld always seems to make the perfect small clothes," she says—and anything in sherbet colors. Although Ricci generally dislikes the ruckus of the front row, she has attended the couture in Paris, and Lagerfeld once made her tingle to her toes when he judged her "très mignon" in one of his designs. Ricci also walked the runway for Louis Vuitton in 2004, the year that Marc Jacobs cast her for the brand's ad campaign.

"It was terrifying," Ricci says. "But it was something I'd always wanted to do. And I'm five feet tall, for Chrissakes, so when else am I ever going to be in a runway show?"

For this interview, Ricci wore a simple sundress and, around her neck, a rose gold anchor with the initials AG. It's a gift from boyfriend Adam Goldberg, who is now on-again after a serious split when the couple sold the house they lived in together. Ricci isn't thrilled that the subject comes up, but after a long pause she decides she will at least explain why they got back together.

"Because I love him and I feel like we were meant for each other," she says through clenched teeth, before adding in a more relaxed mode, "It sounds silly, and he hates it when I say this, but I believe that things are fated. It drives him crazy."

Ricci deflects a question about marriage, saying that it takes two to decide, but she acknowledges that her life is more settled than ever before. She has finally accepted L.A. as her hometown after years of feeling more comfortable in New York, and she feels less professionally flighty as well. Two interesting projects a year would be ideal, she figures.

"I just want to be able to do things that I don't have to lie about later," she says, with the kind of candor one rarely hears in interviews. "I want to do movies where I don't have to go to the press junket and lie, basically. That's my only goal, to be able to say honestly I like what I've done."

Cameron Diaz; W Dec 06

2006-12-25T06:33:00.000-08:00

It takes a lot to ruin Cameron Diaz's day, but on this sunny Wednesday in October, after the actress has spent two hours stuffing herself with crabcakes and Coke, giggling and wisecracking and breezily dishing out the California-girl charm that has helped make her one of the highest-paid actresses in the world, she sees something that really bums her out. Diaz has just wrapped up a lunch interview at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica and has agreed to go to the beach and take a little walk. We get into her gray Prius, which is littered with half-empty bottles of Fiji water, and drive a few blocks to a beachside lot, where, within five seconds of leaving the car, she spots someone with a long-lens camera lurking behind a utility pole.

"Paparazzi," she says, getting back to the car and motioning for me to do the same. When she sees the photographer slink into a silver SUV across the street, Diaz considers making a getaway but then decides she's in the mood to face the enemy. What follows is a chilling lesson in the realities of celebrityhood, circa 2006.

Diaz pulls up next to the SUV, in which the paparazzo, a young woman in a white T-shirt, is crouching in the driver's seat. The woman tries to stay hidden, so Diaz toots her horn and rolls down the window.

"Hi!" Diaz says. "How's it goin'? Did you get a good shot?"

The paparazzo grudgingly sits up and offers a sycophantic smile. "I'm sorry," she says. "If I can get one shot of you, I'll leave you alone for the rest of the day. Otherwise there are going to be like 10 people coming."

"Why?" Diaz asks.

"Because...that's just the way the industry works. But if I just get one shot, I swear on my life that I'll leave you alone."

"So you're saying that if you don't get what you want, you're going to just sic 10 other people on me?"

The photographer, who introduces herself as Danielle, tries to strike a sympathetic tone. "Honestly, I usually get sent on news stories," Danielle says, adding that she's here reluctantly, under pressure from her agency. Some tipster apparently spotted Diaz with me—a guy who's not Diaz's boyfriend of three and a half years, Justin Timberlake—and called it in. "Can we work out just a little deal?" Danielle pleads. "I mean, I'm just doing this to get ahead in my career."

Diaz, who has stayed coolly polite thus far, can't help but burst out laughing. "This is no way to get ahead!" she says. "This is, like, the bottom!"

"I know, but I just moved to L.A., and it's like, I'm from Connecticut," Danielle offers lamely. "I'm going to get in so much trouble, you have no idea."

After listening to a few more entreaties, Diaz patiently explains why she won't cooperate. "It's a principle thing," she says. "I can't live with myself if I pose for you."

"Please, please, please? Honestly, the agency will kill me." "Oh, Danielle," says Diaz finally. "I'm sorry. You should not be doing a job where you're suffering this much. I hope another celebrity comes down here and cooperates, and I hope you get ahead in your journalistic career." Diaz puts the car in gear and gets ready to speed off. "See you later, I'm sure!"

As she drives away, Diaz keeps glancing in the rearview mirror. "Awesome," she says. "Now I get to spend the rest of the day with 10 motherf---ers on my back."

Life wasn't always quite this complicated for Diaz. In the top tier of Hollywood actresses, she was the blond babe who made everything look easy, the self-mocking klutz with a crooked grin who earned up to $20 million per film with little discernible effort. A native of Long Beach, California, Diaz began modeling in her teens and got into acting essentially by accident, after she auditioned for the 1994 film The Mask on a whim and—oops! —landed the lead role. As she racked up megahits including There's Something About Mary and Charlie's Angels, she gained a rep for being a lot savvier than she seemed: Who else but Diaz could manage to make only one movie a year, cash a fat check, grab her snowboard and fly away in search of fresh powder with Justin Timberlake in tow? She sat for the occasional magazine interview, as required, but had a knack for disarming even the most cynical writers so that her press coverage was devoid of the thinly veiled resentment that often clings to such icy icons as Nicole Kidman or Gwyneth Paltrow. When asked what motivated her career choices, Diaz inevitably replied, with apparent sincerity, that she mainly wanted "to have a good time."

As Diaz tells it now, life was indeed pretty awesome until about two and a half years ago, when something "really, really got to me." That something was a group of people like Danielle. "I wasn't the best version of myself for a couple of years," Diaz says. "Something happened in our industry, in our society, and there was an explosion of this really aggressive group of people. I don't even know if they're people—these paparazzi." It was around this time that Diaz became known in tabloid circles as a kind of female Sean Penn, a proud tigress who'd bare her claws when provoked, most famously in 2004 on a dark street up the road from the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. After she and Timberlake were surprised by two photographers jumping out of the bushes, Diaz grabbed a camera from one of them and, he claimed, struck him in the neck and tripped him. The photographers sued Diaz and Timberlake for assault, and the case was settled in 2005.

"I'm a very private person, and I've never really sold my life to the public," Diaz says. "There was this overwhelming pressure from all sides, and I just didn't know how to handle it. My dad taught me how to fight when I was a kid. When somebody comes at you, you defend yourself." Pausing to consider how unbecoming it can be for an actor to gripe about the burdens of celebrity, she emphasizes that this is not your standard pity-the-poor-movie-star whining. "Everybody says, 'You're famous, deal with it.' Well, you know what? I had been famous for a good 10 years and had never had to deal with anything like that before." With a crowd of photographers permanently camped out in front of her house, Diaz remained in perpetual fight-or-flight mode. "I just could not take it. I just said, 'F--- off.' Everywhere, across the board."

It takes some effort to reconcile this combative image of Diaz with the person sitting in the gray leather booth at the Viceroy. When she's talking about her niece, her movies, breaded chicken—anything except the paparazzi—Diaz, who's wearing a light gray T-shirt and slinky dark jeans, comes across as a kind of improbably sexy Lucille Ball. At one point a sip of Coke prompts an unexpected burp; she exhales clownishly over her shoulder, then starts blowing bubbles through her straw.

"Now I've made peace with it," she says of being trailed by strangers daily. "I realize that I can't change it. That's a part of what society expects of people in my position—to catch our lives in certain moments. And I want to make movies, so I will participate on a certain level."

One way to participate is by doing a magazine cover story to promote her latest film, which in this case is The Holiday, a romantic comedy written and directed by Nancy Meyers (Something's Gotta Give). Diaz plays an uptight Hollywood marketing exec who catches her boyfriend cheating and decides to swap houses with a British journalist (Kate Winslet). Once in England, after making her way to Winslet's Surrey cottage, Diaz gets a late-night visitor in the form of Jude Law. You can guess how things play out from there.

Diaz is not an actress you'll ever catch discussing her "craft" or putting on airs about the dramatic process. Her preferred thespian technique? Following the director's orders. "Really, after so many years, I like to be told what to do," she insists. "And I want the person telling me what to do to know what they're doing. Nancy knows."

"Cameron very much likes direction, but I think that's true of all really good actors," says Meyers, who wrote the script with Diaz in mind. Meyers adds that Diaz serves as a kind of human antidepressant on film sets, with a talent for cheering up even the surliest crew members: "There's always laughter around Cameron." (Diaz returns the compliment, in her own way: "I love Nancy Meyers! I adore her. I just want to pick her up and, like, eat bits and pieces of her.")

Typically for a Meyers film, The Holiday is set in a glossy world of perfectly styled living rooms, and audiences won't be looking for much in the way of realism. One screwball sequence has Diaz running through the snow in four-inch heels; neither Meyers nor Diaz was bothered by the fact that blizzards in Surrey are about as rare as rain in Timbuktu. "The English were like, 'It doesn't really snow here,'" says Diaz. "We're like, 'But we're from America. We think of England as countryside, full of snow!'" Movieland conceits aside, however, Diaz finds her character, Amanda, compellingly lifelike. On the rebound from another failed relationship and slouching into her 30s, Amanda uses her callous facade to distract the world, and herself, from the fact that true fulfillment is eluding her. "She's not quite sure how life works, like all of us," Diaz says.

When asked about the pitfalls of aging, Diaz, who turned 34 this year, begins with a typically off-color revelation about her digestive tract. "I used to be able to eat anything I wanted and then go right to bed," she says. "Fried chicken, onion rings, half a bottle of wine. But as you get older, your insides rebel. You've asked so much of them for so many years, and then they just go, 'Uh-uh, bi-atch! Gonna eat cheese fries? See how you sleep!' And you're tossing and turning all night." Even more demoralizing, Diaz says, is the fact that she's missing out on one of the few alleged benefits of aging: pimple-free skin. "I'll look in the mirror and go, 'Damn. Where did that come from?' Seriously. I'm 34 years old! When is this going to stop?"

Overall, though, Diaz, who is close to many of her aging relatives, insists that she likes getting older. "I just want to be strong and healthy," she says. When she broke her nose for the fourth time a few years ago, the doctor wanted to straighten it, but Diaz wouldn't let him. Now she wishes she'd consented, because she has trouble breathing. "So I'm over it. I'm getting it fixed. I can't take it. I cannot breathe at all. One side of my nose is totally shattered—my septum is basically like a train derailed." With a mock-ditzy laugh, she declares, "It's amazing how much a lack of oxygen can affect you, all across the board."

Though the latest nose injury occurred while surfing, Diaz is not quite the lifelong boarder she's often made out to be. In fact, she caught her first wave less than four years ago, while taking private lessons on Oahu. The daughter of working-class parents, Diaz did spend a lot of time on the beach as a kid, but, she says, "it took two hours to get there on the bus. You stayed all day, ate corndogs. It wasn't the 'California Dreamin'' thing." Diaz and her friends bodysurfed rather than hanging with the surfer kids on the other side of the pier, because they couldn't afford their own boards. "We had only $2 for a joint."

Today, though she says surfing is "like a religious experience" for her, she never hits the waves in Southern California. Why? Danielle, that's why. As our aborted walk on the beach makes clear, Diaz may have made peace with the ubiquitous presence of paparazzi, but that doesn't mean she can ever forget they're there. And the legal clashes continue. A few weeks ago Diaz called the cops on some shutterbugs after she was ambushed at night, just like in 2004.

"It was the exact same scenario," she says. She and Timberlake were at a friend's house in the Hollywood Hills, and Diaz walked out to her car. "This guy jumps out of the bushes in the middle of the night and starts chasing me down the street. I'm like, 'Holy s---! Holy s---!' I don't know what's happening, and I'm literally screaming. And Justin's coming out of the house. He thinks his girlfriend's getting assaulted." The photographer got in his car and, Diaz says, sped toward her, missing her by inches. She and Timberlake filed a police report for assault with a deadly weapon. (The case is under investigation.)

It's hard to say what effect, if any, these run-ins are having on her career. Diaz herself is convinced that there's absolutely no relationship between box-office success and weekly column inches in Star magazine. "Tabloids don't sell movies or help anyone's career," she says. "If that were true, every Lindsay Lohan movie would open to $80 million." She acknowledges that by dating Timberlake she's surrendering any hope of being left alone. But when asked if she's ever wished her boyfriend were, say, a waiter, her response is quick, firm and serious. "No," she says. "I wouldn't change it for the world."

On the day of our interview, Diaz had planned to be in New York, starting production on the comedy A Little Game, opposite Jim Carrey. But the front page of today's Variety announced that the two stars had abruptly withdrawn from the film. "The studio decided last minute, after three months of revisions on the script, to rewrite the thing completely," Diaz explains. "I was just like, 'This isn't the movie that I thought I was doing.'"

While her decision left Focus Features reeling, Diaz, who has been mostly free since she wrapped The Holiday in June, doesn't seem overly upset to find herself with a few more months of spare time. "I wasn't really looking to work anyway," she says, adding, "It's almost snowboarding season."

Incidentally, word has it that Diaz likes to get a little reckless on the slopes. If Danielle dares trail her to Mammoth Mountain, she should be prepared to eat some snow.

Sienna Miller; W Jan 07

2006-12-25T06:31:00.000-08:00

Sienna Miller has unfastened the safety pin holding her short Zara skirt closed and is squeezing the tummy fat around her belly button into the shape of a bagel. "Press it," she says, giggling goofily. "You can really squish it in!"

It must be said that, for a girl hired to play the role of a bulimic and drugged-out Edie Sedgwick, Miller can gather an impressive amount of dough. Then again, the temporary tubbiness might have something to do with the Magnolia Bakery cupcakes and bottle of Pinot Grigio that we've been sharing. Although Miller's publicist has insisted that this interview last only an hour and take place over tea in the cordoned-off bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel, things have taken a slightly different turn. Soon after meeting and deciding that the tea would have to wait until the morning, Miller suggests that we head upstairs to her suite to listen to original recorded conversations between Andy Warhol and Sedgwick. Clearly, she's not the type to worry about protocol. "They're going to kill me for having invited you up here," says the actress, lighting a cigarette and resting her feet on my chair. "But I'd rather have someone judge me honestly than try to create some sort of image."

Starting in late December, the whole world will be judging Miller, honestly or not. In the much buzzed-about film Factory Girl, directed by George Hickenlooper (Mayor of the Sunset Strip), she has her first major leading role, as Sedgwick, Warhol's tragic muse during the heyday of the Factory. Even before its release, Factory Girl has attracted plenty of bad press, including reports of last-minute shoots to fill holes in the storyline. Indeed, after this interview, Miller and Guy Pearce, who plays Warhol, will drive up to the Connecticut home of Harvey Weinstein, whose company is releasing the film, for a late-night strategy session, to be followed by a week of intense shooting. But despite its alleged problems (the movie wasn't ready to be screened at press time), Factory Girl is set for release a month earlier than originally planned, in order to be considered for the Academy Awards. The reason, insiders say, is that Miller's scene-stealing portrayal of Sedgwick has her in line to be a legitimate Oscar contender. (Weinstein took out "For Your Consideration" ads for Miller in the trade press even before the film was finished.) Either way, the movie will catapult the 25-year-old from being known primarily as the fashionable girlfriend of Jude Law, whom she's dated on and off since 2003, to an actress with serious star potential.

Miller bears such a strong physical resemblance to Sedgwick that it would seem to be a role she was born to play. In fact, Factory Girl producer Holly Wiersma decided she wanted Miller for the part after noticing her in a fashion layout in this magazine two years ago. "I saw a photo of her in a tub with a bottle of champagne and thought, That's Edie," says Wiersma, who immediately flew to London to meet the actress. Miller auditioned and snagged the part on the spot—but holding on to it wasn't so easy. Though the film was scheduled to start production in early 2005, there were problems with financing, and in May of that year Miller, anxious to work, accepted an offer to play Celia in a West End production of As You Like It. Katie Holmes was subsequently cast as Sedgwick, before the role went back to Miller once the play ended. (The tabloids ran with the explanation that Holmes's new boyfriend, Tom Cruise, persuaded her to drop out of the potentially risqué film. Of this, Miller says, "I'm not really sure of the ins and outs.")

What had begun as the most exciting year in Miller's career devolved into one of her most traumatic when, in July 2005, Jude Law publicly admitted to cheating on Miller with his children's nanny. The affair sparked a tabloid frenzy that only intensified a few months later, when the actress decided to take Law back. "There were times when I felt like it was all just too much to deal with," she recalls, declining to share the details. (Miller admits that she's tried therapy, but after angrily calling the therapist a "cow" in response to a particularly difficult question in the first session, she was told she was still in trauma and not ready for analysis. She has not been back since.) The media, Miller adds, "is just a bigger animal than I will ever be. It just becomes this soap opera. And I guess I had a pretty good few episodes."

Today, Miller is unsure about how she wants to publicly define her relationship with Law. While her engagement ring is long gone, she's wearing an Irish Claddagh ring on her middle finger, with diamonds in the center heart. It was a gift from Law. If a woman wears the heart facing inward, it is said to mean that her heart is taken. If facing the other way, her heart is still open. When it's pointed out that Miller has the heart facing in, she takes it off and holds it sideways against her finger. "What does it mean if it's like this?" she says, jokingly, before explaining further. "I'm wearing it because it's a beautiful ring, and he's a very close person in my life."

Although Miller is well aware that dating Law, whom she met on the set of Alfie, has overshadowed her somewhat limited film career (Casanova, Layer Cake), she says she has no regrets about their involvement. And while it's obvious that being with the actor has elevated her public profile, she insists that wasn't her plan. "I was just never desperate to be famous, which I know sounds clichéd and probably like a lie, but it is, in my case, very true," she says. "And that's the irony of my situation. It was always about acting, and now it's all about everything but that. I fell in love with someone very, very famous, and that's beyond all of our control. Strategically I probably could have analyzed it at the time and thought, This could potentially be very damaging, but that was a very beautiful period of my life."

With Factory Girl, Miller hopes that people will finally be able to see her as an actress and not just as one half of a celebrity couple. "I know that I have a lot to prove to a certain degree, but it's fine," she says with a shrug. In preparing for the role, Miller, who claims to be a voracious reader, spent months poring over books about the Warhol era and biographies of Sedgwick, studying not just Edie's brief reign as the toast of downtown New York but also her isolated childhood in Santa Barbara, California, and her depraved post-Andy fall from grace, culminating in her 1971 fatal barbiturate overdose. Likening herself to a detective, Miller says she particularly loved delving into that moment in history, studying not just the cast of characters during the Factory days but also the political and sociological climate of the mid-Sixties. Miller also spent time with some of the key people in Sedgwick's life, including Brigid Berlin, who generously gave Miller a handful of crystals that Warhol carried around with him during his last days, as well as Michael Post, who was married to Sedgwick when she passed away. In addition, Miller studied Sedgwick's voice with recordings on loan from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Because she had such a distinct speech pattern—"It's almost English," says Miller. "There's nothing nasal or twangy; it's sort of old-fashioned, upper-class American"—the actress felt it was essential to get it right. (Judging from the recordings, she succeeded.)

While Miller dismisses any facile comparisons between her own personal qualities and Edie's self-destructive character—"She just walked this fine line of extinction. And it's sort of fascinating, because that's not who I am. But I empathize with her"—her director and costars found the similarities impossible to ignore.

"I think it's startling how accurate Sienna is," says Hickenlooper, who has directed several leading ladies at the start of their careers, including Naomi Watts and Renée Zellweger, and considers Miller far and away the most talented. "She evokes the same kind of emotional response that I imagine Edie did. She's got so much charisma and effervescence. When you meet her, it's like being hit by a strong wind."

"Sienna is kind of naturally Edie," adds Pearce. "She's got a bit of a mad quality about her, though I'd assume that she's much more stable than Edie. She can be distracted easily—which is not a bad thing. She's got a lot going on in her head, and she has a great amount of energy and emotion. It makes her performance unpredictable and lively."

Adds Weinstein in an e-mail, "Sienna's performance is unbelievably convincing and definitely has awards potential. Her sophistication and style are irresistible and rarely seen onscreen."

Physically, the role demanded one significant transformation: Miller had to get down to a size zero. Bagel belly notwithstanding, she is already skinny by most people's standards, but Sedgwick bordered on gaunt, thanks to a trifecta of drugs, depression and an eating disorder. Miller credits Hickenlooper with helping her slim down. "I'd order an omelet and he'd make it an egg-white omelet," she says, laughing. "I thought, Okay, I'll drink vodka instead of wine because it has less calories. George would come along and actually snatch bagels out of my hand!"

Since Factory Girl wrapped, in early 2006, Miller has been diligently building her repertoire. She's shot four films, most of them small indies, including Interview, a drama in which she plays a soap-opera star opposite Steve Buscemi, and the dark comedy Camille, in which she's an unlucky-in-love newlywed on her honeymoon, with James Franco as her husband. But it's the Edie character that has been hardest for her to shake. "I was left feeling a little bit lost afterwards," she says. "You work so intently on something, and then suddenly it's over. What do you do with the information? What do you do with the way that you were smoking at that time, the way she smoked? You're suddenly left with all these mannerisms that you've perfected. It's weird. I forgot how to dance like I used to dance."

At the moment, Miller is far from sure about what the future holds. Beyond spending Christmas with her mother and a close girlfriend in Africa, she has few definite plans. On a lark, she's launching a women's fashion collection, called twenty8twelve (a reference to her birthday, December 28), with her older sister, Savannah, a designer who formerly worked for Alexander McQueen. She describes the line, slated to debut in the fall, as part Patti Smith and part "back alley Jack the Ripper," with items like long masculine coats that sweep the floor. London stores such as Harvey Nichols and Browns have already expressed interest, but Miller insists she has no entrepreneurial aspirations to capitalize on her celebritydom in order to build a megamillion-dollar business. "It doesn't matter if it fails or if it doesn't," she says. "It just seemed like a fun thing to do," primarily because it allowed her to work with her sister, with whom she is extremely close. (Miller's British mother, a former model, and American father, an investment banker, are divorced. Although she was born in New York, she moved to London when she was one year old and, at the age of eight, was enrolled at Heathfield, a posh boarding school in Ascot.)

Come January, she will be moving into the first home that she's purchased with her own money. It's a three-story "old spitfire bomber building" in London that she plans on decorating herself in "decaying grandeur" style with antiques found at local markets. Of late, Miller says, she's been forced to neglect her family and friends in favor of her work, and she has already dreamed up a very specific fantasy of a perfect day in her new house. "On Sunday, I'll get up at 11, get the Times, have my tea and feed my dogs, put a chicken in the oven," she begins. "Then all my friends will come over, and we'll sit around and watch football and eat roast chicken with potatoes. Then we'll have leftovers at 8." Miller stares off wistfully, before adding, "God, I sound like some bohemian lovey. I'm actually pretty rock 'n' roll as well!"

One thing Miller certainly isn't is a typical Hollywood starlet. Despite her history of paparazzi run-ins, she prefers to do without personal security guards. The same goes for an assistant. "I just think the more you live your life like that, the more attention you attract," she says. The vast gulf between Miller and her American counterparts becomes particularly apparent during her extended stints in Los Angeles, where Miller, who has no driver's license, says her existence has sometimes been lonely. And forget about Hollywood nightlife—she insists that she's been to only one L.A. nightclub, once, for 30 minutes: "I can't sit and pose with a glass of champagne, especially at those places where you know there's going to be a photographer, and all those girls are posing with each other, looking like they're best friends, when they've just met."

Miller finds it ironic that she's perceived as a party girl, since she claims to go out less than other young actresses; to hear her tell it, she's just the one who gets caught. It's been the case ever since her boarding-school days, when all the girls would smoke but the headmaster would inevitably catch her in the act. (Her family nickname is Gizmo, after the devilish gremlin.) Miller does, however, live up to her reputation tonight, when, after her meeting with Weinstein, and well past midnight, she heads to Bungalow 8. Unlike Sedgwick, whose excessive partying went hand in hand with mental instability, the actress says she just likes to have a good time. Socializing over alcohol is simply how she was raised. "I was brought up in a culture where, when you're 12 years old, you're given a glass of wine at dinner—it was never a novelty," she explains. Of a childhood spent at the constant side of her less-than-conservative parents, even at cocktail parties, she says, "I grew up being put to sleep upstairs in a spare room, and you're sort of half awake and you can hear the laughing and smell cigarettes and booze, and then they carry you home and you pretend to be asleep. You can smell wine and cigarettes on their breath. That's like mother's milk to me."

Of course, it's also easy to capture the attention of the paparazzi when wearing high-fashion getups worthy of a runway show. Her wardrobe, in fact, landed her in the fashion magazines way before anyone could name any of her films. Miller, who still doesn't employ a stylist, says she is perfectly capable of shopping for her own clothes, though she does have a closetful of freebies. Today she's dressed in basic black, accessorized with knee-high gold python Devi Kroell boots and a bondage harness from Coco de Mer strapped across her chest. Much has been written about how Miller became a model before taking up acting, which she says is a hilarious overstatement: "I'm five foot six! I did Abercrombie & Fitch and the Pirelli calendar, but I wasn't doing high fashion," she insists. "I was the little one with the personality who got booked because everyone thought I'd make them laugh on set."

That strong personality has also landed her in a bit of trouble as of late. Recently the tabloids ran a story about the actress throwing a temper tantrum outside of a Pittsburgh bar after she was denied entry for not having an ID. Miller says it never happened. "I don't feel any more important than anyone else because of what I'm doing," she explains. "That's why it really riles me when I hear these stories about me screaming that I'm famous. It's absolutely not my perception of myself or the way I live my life."

It's after 7 p.m. now, and Miller, who has been talking candidly about herself for three hours, seems to be growing bored of the subject. She stubs out a cigarette, downs the last drop of her wine, throws on one of her trademark fedora hats and heads down to the lobby to meet Pearce. The two haven't seen each other in almost a year. When she finds him, she jumps into his arms and wraps her legs around his waist, wildly kissing him on the cheek. From afar, she looks just like Edie.

Angelina Jolie; Vogue Jan07

2006-12-25T06:24:00.000-08:00

Lindsay Lohan; W June 06

2006-06-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

It's late afternoon at a photo studio in New York's Chelsea, and Lindsay Lohan is carefully reviewing a little stack of Polaroids at the end of a day in front of the camera. She is pleased with the results, although she does fret about the influence on younger fans of one picture of her with a cigarette. "A girl with asthma, smoking," she says. "Great." Of the bunch, her favorite image is the one on the cover of this issue. It shows Lohan and Meryl Streep, her costar in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, in an intimate embrace that Lohan likens to that of a mother and child. The double portrait was, in fact, an idea that Lohan herself pitched to the magazine, and she marvels at the contrasts it reveals between herself and Streep—"the old and the new," she says. One could also say elegance and sex appeal or SPF 40 and Mystic Tan.

Suddenly Lohan looks up at the W team.

"What are you going to call the story?" she asks, pausing just a moment before she offers her suggestion. "Lady and the Tramp?"

The line gets a big laugh—it's funnier than she seemed to expect—if only because it perfectly captures this moment in Lohan's rather exceptional career. The former moppet just recently graduated from the Disney academy (last year's Herbie: Fully Loaded was surely her last kiddie role) and here she is playing Streep's daughter in a film by one of America's most esteemed directors.

To date, Lohan, still just 19, has notched up commercial success (Herbie grossed $144 million worldwide) and released two albums, but she is arguably better known as the hottest paparazzi bait among the generation of actresses too young to drink legally. (Not that the law seems to have slowed her down.) If every teenager believes that her personal dramas are matters of national import, Lohan knows that hers actually are, whether the subject is her jailbird father, her boyfriends or her weight. She is understandably ambivalent about her kind of fame and seems anxious to arrive at some future stage in her career when she will look back on these days from a safe distance.

"I'd love to be in Meryl's position," she says. "I want people to know me for the work that I'm doing, not for this party girl image, which is just vile and disgusting and not fair, because I work so hard. Maybe someone will look at my life one day and say, 'Why don't I do a cover with Lindsay Lohan?'"

In years to come, A Prairie Home Companion will likely look like just the right film at just the right moment. It not only launches a new, grown-up phase—her next role will be in Bobby, the story of Robert Kennedy's assassination, with Anthony Hopkins—but also introduced her to an important role model in Streep.

"Lindsay hung on Meryl almost like a mentor," recalls Altman, a director known to love actors and barely tolerate the media. "And she was very respectful of all the people she worked with. It's the press that makes news of all that other stuff. But I think she's great and I'd work with her again. She's a great talent with a really sexy voice."

The day after the photo shoot, the two actresses plan to meet for lunch at Nobu, with Streep arriving first for a short solo interview. She enters dressed in an ample cardigan and wearing plastic glasses that obscure her nose's Renaissance splendor, as if she intends to pass herself off as an artsy New York mom. (The 56-year-old actress has four children, ages 14 to 25, with sculptor Don Gummer.) Streep says she was convinced Lohan would be "perfect" for Altman's film, even before meeting her. "I think I'd seen Freaky Friday maybe seven times," she says. "I have three daughters, and it's the Lindsay Lohan fan club at my house. I thought—I think—she is a terrific actress. It's something that you could see even when she was little-bitty."

A Prairie Home Companion is a congenial film adaption of Garrison Keillor's long-running radio show of the same name. The movie's storyline, such as it is, ambles backstage at the Fitzgerald Theater as the show's cast and crew, including Keillor himself, prepare for their final broadcast. (It's a fictional conceit: After 30 years, the NPR radio show is still going strong.)

Among the film's most vibrant characters are Streep and Lily Tomlin, who play the two surviving sisters of a famous singing family. Lohan, blond on film for the first time, is Streep's daughter, a sulky teenager who writes poetry about suicide but who eventually shines through as the face of a new generation—and a pretty reliable hope for the future, at that.

Streep, as if adopting her maternal screen role, is mildly defensive when asked if Lohan's party exploits ever interfered with her work on the set.

"Lindsay knew her lines better than we did," she says firmly, then continues in a slightly more indulgent tone. "She's very young. It's a great sort of coin to have, a wonderful time in somebody's life. I'm aware of the tabloid stuff because my kids tell me—but I don't read it, and frankly, I couldn't care less. When they say 'Action,' Lindsay is completely, visibly living in front of the camera, and that's all anybody really cares about."

She compares Lohan with, of all people, Cher as a young performer. Both actresses have a brazenly confessional manner that leads them to fling away intimate secrets. And yet, Streep says, both are unexpectedly self-contained, and Lohan's psyche, like Cher's, has deeper contours than some would expect—guarded places that serve as her storehouse of creativity.

"She's in command of the art form," Streep says with high seriousness. "Whatever acting is—I don't know what it is—she's in command of it. I think she could do anything she puts her mind to."

A few minutes past the appointed hour, Lohan arrives in a rush and Streep calls out to her: "Hi, Peanut!" But Lohan is agitated and breathless when she plops in her seat, and pulling a knit cap farther over her hair (dark again now), she tells how she was followed from her hotel to the restaurant by paparazzi. Streep gets as flustered as a wet hen. "This is outrageous!" she snaps. Her maternal ire calms Lohan somewhat, but still she doesn't eat, claiming she had gorged on a late breakfast. (Later, after Streep leaves, Lohan will say that her recent confession of bulimia in Vanity Fair was "not true, or taken out of context or whatever it may be.")

On the subject of A Prairie Home Companion, Streep says that she has been listening to the show for years, and she heartily endorses Keillor's effort to keep live radio on the air, even if individual shows may be, in her judgment, "hit or miss." Lohan, on the other hand, had never heard of Prairie Home when she got the part; she called her grandmother for a quick rundown.

The radio show, a spoof of small-town Midwestern life, is broadcast from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where, according to the Prairie Home mythology, "the women are strong, the men are good-looking and the children are above average." The movie that Keillor wrote for Altman is like much of the director's earlier work in that it is less concerned with pushing forward a plot than with allowing actors to play off one another. Keillor says that he adopted the "last broadcast" structure because it was the simplest storyline he could imagine. "It's a movie that's not about the story," Keillor says. "It's about all these little acting turns, a variety show made into a movie. We're aware of the story as much as we need to be: It gives us the ending."

The biggest character on set was perhaps Altman, who is now 81. The grand old man had hired director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) as his day-to-day assistant—one who could finish the film if he became indisposed—and found humor in exaggerating his decrepitude, Lohan says. "The first thing Robert said to me when we met was, 'I'm probably going to croak any day, so this is Paul Thomas Anderson,'" she recalls, adding that she was speechless until she realized he was kidding.

Both Streep and Lohan thought the director was kidding again when he announced that he intended to shoot 10 pages of script in the first day on set. The idea seemed preposterous, Streep explains, since a page or two a day is the typical pace on most shoots. But Altman commenced with Prairie Home's juicy opening scene, in which Streep, Tomlin and Lohan sweep into their dressing room while talking a blue streak. "We didn't have time to have any nerves," recalls Streep. "We were just scrambling for our lives. And when we couldn't remember our lines, we would just make something up."

"I remember saying, 'Oh my God, I don't know if I can do this,'" chimes in Lohan, as she sips ice water. "I was scared to death. But all of these things that weren't scripted in the scene happened, like when we ended up crying in one of the takes. I have never been happier than after that day."

Lohan pauses, then deepens her voice as much as a 19-year-old girl can to imitate an 81-year-old male director.

"That's adequate," she croaks.

Streep bursts out laughing and does her own imitation—slightly more credible—and explains that "adequate" is Altman's highest praise.

Despite the director's crusty ways, both actresses gush about the experience of working with him, and Lohan, especially, was thrilled to be part of an ensemble cast that includes Tomlin and Keillor, as well as Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Virginia Madsen and Woody Harrelson. But Lohan especially credits Streep for showing her how an actress ought to comport herself.

"One of the main things that I noticed is that she's so appreciative of everyone who is on set," Lohan says. "Just the way she interacts with people, always smiling, always laughing, always with good energy. When Meryl comes on the set, it sets the tone for the crew and everyone that day."

Streep, who has received a record 13 Oscar nominations and two statuettes, groans under the weight of this praise as if she can't stand any more.

In a funny twist of fate, Streep's next role will take her to a place about which Lohan might teach her a thing or two—fashion's front row. Streep will play a powerful fashion editor in the screen adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's tell-all The Devil Wears Prada. Streep did not enjoy being in the fashion world, she reports, least of all dressing the part every day.

"I just found it exhausting," she says, "all the attention to details that might as well have been jet engine parts, for all that I cared. Which bag? Which shoes? Which ring? Which earrings? How does it all look?" A more surprising revelation is that Streep does not model her performance on Vogue's Anna Wintour, who is transparently the titular she-devil in Weisberger's book, a work that Streep holds in low regard.

"I thought it was written out of anger," she says, "and from a point of view that seemed to me very apparent. The girl seemed not to have an understanding of the larger machine to which she had apprenticed. So she was whining about getting coffee for people. If you keep your eyes open [in that situation[, you'll learn a lot. But I don't think she was interested."

Streep adds that what fascinates her is the "special venom" that society reserves for powerful women—women like Wintour, Martha Stewart or Hillary Clinton. "The culture wants to cast them as cold," Streep says, "as if somehow they've lost their maternal bearings, their essential womanhood, to occupy this space. As if they've had to cut off their…whatever it is…to succeed."

In Lohan's next screen appearance, in Bobby, she plays a young Vietnam-era idealist who marries men to keep them out of the draft. One of her screen husbands is Elijah Wood, who earns the immortal distinction of sharing Lohan's first cinematic make-out.

"His girlfriend was there," recalls Lohan. "I felt really bad. And my [12-year-old] sister was there, and I made her walk off set. She said, 'Ewww! I saw you kissing!'" Lohan's nine-year-old brother, however, was thrilled to know that Sis got busy with "the guy from Lord of the Rings."

After Bobby, Lohan is slated for another heavy role, as a girl molested by her stepfather in Garry Marshall's Georgia Rule, with a cast that tentatively includes Felicity Huffman, Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine. Lohan's character can't get past the pent-up anger because she doesn't tell her mother what happened. Still, Lohan promises that it's not a "depressing movie."

"It's witty and quick," she says. "There's swearing in it and everything, but it's like what a real family would be. If I were to win an award, I could only hope that people would recognize me for this type of film."

With such statements, Lohan may sometimes let her ambitions run ahead of her accomplishments, but she can be forgiven for believing that she has been groomed to receive Hollywood's golden baton. Her agent, CAA's Richard Lovett, also represents Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. In the lead-up to this year's Oscars, she met her hero: Madonna.

"I met her at Bryan Lourd's," Lohan reports, referring to the A-list pre-Oscar party given by the CAA superagent. "When I first met her, I was in shock and I didn't know what to say. I looked at her and was like, 'I love you so much. Can we be friends?' She's so cool and down-to-earth and normal, like Meryl. Madonna is someone I would love to tour with."

That same week she took Donatella Versace with her to Teddy's, and lately she and buddy Natalie Portman are working on a movie idea they would like Streep or maybe Anjelica Huston to direct.

Lohan admits her head is spinning pretty constantly, and she insists that she will not let anyone dampen her giddy highs. "I just want to enjoy every moment of it," she says, winding herself up into a defense of her night life, "whatever way that comes across to people. I'm just doing what I really love."

As for the ongoing drama with her father, Lohan acknowledges that she hasn't spoken to him. He did, however, make a bizarre attempt to contact her recently. While she was on the set of Bobby, Lohan reports that her father managed to send an envelope to her—via her stand-in. When she opened it, though, there was no letter, just a return address. The pain caused by the broken relationship with her father is something she tries to suppress.

"I use it when I'm singing or acting," she says. "That's when I let it out. It's one thing that I've learned to hide. Because my father's a grown man and I'm his daughter and I can only do so much. You can only worry about someone so much before you've washed your hands clean. He's got to learn that on his own. He's a big boy. When he's better, I'm sure it will be the right time for him to come and make amends, and we'll see what happens."

As a final thought on the subject, Lohan wonders why it is that so many young actresses come from dysfunctional families. She says that not every one of them is "mental" but admits that the gypsy life of the film business only exacerbates most actors' "schizophrenic" nature.

"I've become such an indecisive person," she confesses, "to the point where [in a restaurant] I order water, regular soda, tea and a drink. I never know what I'm feeling like, and I want to get everything because I'm so used to being so many different people. It's strange. You go into this movie for two months and you change your whole existence."

At such moments of confusion during the shooting of Prairie Home, Lohan would sometimes find solace with Streep, who seemed to intuit when the younger woman needed a little burst of motherly concern.

"She'd pull me aside sometimes and say, 'Are you okay?'" Lohan recalls. "And I'd say, 'I'm okay, but I'm dealing with some personal things.' I'd talk to her about guy issues. And she'd say, 'You know what? Don't think about it right now. And if you think about it, use it for how it will help you in the scene.'"

But why, then, given the level of trust between Lohan and Streep, doesn't the older actress take a more active role as a mentor, counseling her, for instance, to skip the parties, stop reading her own press and to think about the long haul?

Streep casts a pitying look across the table when the question is posed to her. As a mother of three daughters, she says, she knows that any sentence beginning with the phrase "You should" will lead a young woman to do the exact opposite. And teaching by example has its limits, too.

"You just try to live your life," Streep says. "If they care to look, they care to look. And if they don't, no amount of browbeating is going to help."

Kate Bosworth; W July 06

2006-06-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

Like many Hollywood stars whose rises to the top have been reduced by the media to a few short anecdotes, Kate Bosworth has nuggets of lore that follow her everywhere she goes. First, there is the physical oddity: She has heterochromia iridium, meaning that her eyes are two different colors—one hazel, one blue. Then there are her Schwab's Pharmacy-tinged beginnings. A horse lover at 13, she scored the role of Scarlett Johansson's best friend in Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer (the character is killed, naturally, in the film's first scene) after she brought a family Christmas card featuring her photo as her head shot to the audition. Then came her Flashdance moment when she decided, against the wishes of her father back in Cohasset, Massachusetts, to defer her acceptance to Princeton University in favor of going after a part in the surfing confection Blue Crush, which—lucky lady—made her a star. Now we can add another yarn to this already well-knit biography. Bosworth actually tried to persuade director Bryan Singer not to cast her as Lois Lane in this summer's much awaited blockbuster, Superman Returns.

On June 28, Bosworth enters the annals of comic-book and film history as the latest incarnation of the fast-talking, cigarette-smoking, nose-for-a-story journalist. This time around, Lois has a child, who may or may not be the son of the Man of Steel. "Well, that's the million-dollar question," Bosworth says, giggling, as she sits in the lobby of the Mercer Hotel in New York, digging into some French toast. Compact and petite with perfect skin, Bosworth seems softer and less painfully thin than she has in recent photographs.

When I suggest that it's more like the $200 million dollar question—the reported budget for Singer's adaptation, the first Superman film since 1987—Bosworth recoils in mock horror and covers those piercing eyes and glorious cheekbones.

"Don't say that to me!" she exclaims. "It freaks me out!"

Bosworth has a lot riding on Superman Returns, even though she believes her name on the marquee will have little bearing on the film's success. "It won't be because of me," she says. "It'll be because of Superman." But, like Spider-Man did for Kirsten Dunst, Superman has the potential to turn the former lacrosse-playing, bubbly blond girl next door into a worldwide star. Bosworth will undoubtedly be trailed by comics-obsessed dweebs for years to come, adding to the attention already generated by her four-year, on-and-off relationship with British dreamboat Orlando Bloom. The prospect has filled her with dread ever since Kevin Spacey, who plays Lex Luthor in the movie and directed her as Sandra Dee in his 2004 Bobby Darin biopic, Beyond the Sea, proposed her for the role of Lois Lane.

"When I met with Bryan, I was really freaked out because I had never been in anything so big," recalls Bosworth. "I didn't know if I'd be completely giving up my privacy. I sat down with him and I said, 'I think you're going to make an amazing film, and I'm such a huge fan of yours, but I don't really feel like I'm ready for something of this magnitude, so good luck and thank you very much. I appreciate your time.'"

Singer (X-Men, The Usual Suspects) convinced Bosworth to sign on by emphasizing that the characters were more important to his story than the special effects. "That said," says the director, "it's a little strange and overwhelming—the scope of these films, the sets and the rigs and the army of people involved. It's intimidating. But I call Kate the Machine—the Acting Machine. She turns it on, and suddenly she's a working mom and a fiancée with a long-lost love who's Superman. And the moment we're done, she becomes a 23-year-old girl again."

On set in Australia, where she lived on her own for a full year during the shoot, Bosworth says her uncertainty continued. "Up until I had two months in the can, I was waiting to be replaced," she insists. (She had to dangle from the rafters, free-fall and fly in a harness while looking "romantic and idealistic for hours, even when everything starts to go numb.") "When there's so much money involved, and so much pressure, you sort of wonder, When is the real actress supposed to come in and take over?"

It's hard to believe that Bosworth, who has spent nearly a decade in the business, would be so self-doubting, especially opposite newcomer Brandon Routh, who plays Clark Kent and his alter ego. But in contrast to the transparent false modesty that celebrities often use to mask their outsize egos, Bosworth's insecurities seem real, and she confides that they're exacerbated by the interview process. "You're being asked things and you're wondering if you're sounding somewhat eloquent or like a complete idiot," she says. "I almost envy people who say whatever they want. They don't give a s---. They don't have any guards."

Bosworth herself has plenty. At one point she says she loves to be "passionate." About what? "I knew you'd ask that, and all of a sudden I don't know." Later, I ask her where she goes from here, and she begins discussing her flight back to Los Angeles. When I tell her that's obviously not what I'm asking, she says, "Well, it's easier to answer it that way."

According to Spacey, Bosworth is anything but withholding, at least while she's on the job. In Beyond the Sea, he says, "she was completely open, she was trusting, she f---ing delivered. I think she's going to be around for a long time."

If there's a thematic thread in Bosworth's recent crop of films, it's the harsher realities of stardom. In Beyond the Sea her Sandra Dee is all perky onscreen, but, having been sexually abused by her father, she's a box of neuroses. And in the gritty Wonderland Bosworth was cast in her darkest role to date, as Dawn Schiller, the drug-addled girlfriend of the infamous porn star John Holmes who is caught in a murderous, downward spiral. Even in the innocently sardonic comedy Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! Bosworth was depicted as all-smiles supermarket clerk Rosalee Futch, mesmerized by an actor who in real life is not the romantic hero he plays in the movies.

"Hollywood is not a place that's particularly easy to navigate," Bosworth offers. "But I don't think life in general is easy to navigate at 23. And to be in a position where everyone's watching you live your life is even harder."

One perception that distresses her is the idea that her role in Superman Returns proves she has finally "made it" in the industry. "The thought of that is so alien to me," Bosworth says, sipping her mint tea. "Then what? You're Lois Lane, you've made it, where the hell do you go? Or you fail and everyone hates you, so now what?" She still feels she has to work hard to score the roles she wants. "There's never been a part that people have said, 'We want you for it.' It's always been, I want to be involved, and I'm about to fight for it. And I feel that's probably how it will be for a long time." (Even for the role of Lois Lane, Bosworth wasn't necessarily Singer's one and only choice: The director also reportedly considered Claire Danes, Keri Russell and Lost's Evangeline Lilly.)

Bosworth adds that she's tired of playing wide-eyed and wholesome. "To be honest, it's really annoying," she says of the occasionally milquetoast roles she's offered. "I hate it. I don't want to be seen as wholesome. I feel like I'm a good person, but I'm not that."

John Stockwell, the director of Blue Crush, was initially concerned that the actress looked too flawless for the role of Anne Marie Chadwick, who, at one point in the movie, is referred to as Malibu Barbie. "I thought other girls wouldn't be able to access Kate, that she's too unapproachable," Stockwell says. "But my daughter is mixed race and told me, 'I want to look like that.' Every girl wants to be her."

Not so when Bosworth was growing up. She admits without prodding that high school wasn't a particularly easy time for her. "My parents were amazing and wonderful, but there was a lot of pressure to do my best and in every way possible," she says. "I grew up in a small town where everyone wanted to be the same or look the same and was afraid to be different." On the set of The Horse Whisperer, however, "there wasn't that fear. That was very freeing for me as a 15-year-old-girl. The people interacted in such a close-knit, caring way." After finishing the movie, Bosworth, with typical self-effacement, ruled out school plays. "I just felt like I'd probably get crucified, setting myself up to be criticized on a huge scale." Instead, "I played sports. I wasn't very good, actually."

Being in Australia, on her own and "out of my comfort zone," she says, helped her to overcome some of those insecurities. "I learned a lot about myself," she says. "I learned being perfect is complete bulls---. You're going to fail; you're going to succeed. You've got to just live your life and keep doing what you want to do. If you get too caught up, you're really going to f--- yourself."

The production also took place while her friends were graduating from college, something that made her particularly reflective. "It's interesting to think I could have gone one way or another," she says. "But I've done so much in that same period." When she visited Princeton after being accepted, she stayed with a student who was studying nuclear physics. "I thought, Oh, my God, what am I doing here? I felt so intimidated. Thinking back on it, I'm kind of glad I didn't go because [Princeton] was too similar to the way I'd grown up my entire life."

Bosworth recently took another step toward growing up: She bought a house in Los Angeles. At the time of our meeting, her best friend from high school, Ary, was about to move in with her and begin a job at PMK/HBH, the public relations firm that represents Bosworth. "When you're away for so long, there's something about wanting to really nurture things at home," Bosworth says. "I've been feeling really domestic lately." While some of her friends are about to marry, Bosworth, who stays mum about her relationship with Bloom, isn't sure she's ready. "It's certainly on the horizon, but I'm not engaged, let's put it that way," she says. "I do know that I'm happily in a relationship, and there's nobody else I want to be with. We're both equally supportive of one another, which I think in any relationship makes things easier and seem less daunting."

There have been reports that Bosworth has been dabbling in Bloom's adopted religion of Buddhism; she remains unspecific when she refers to philosophies she has been studying to figure things out. Whatever they are, however, they seem to be helping. "You have to have confidence. You can't be someone who's so insecure that she's a basket case," Bosworth says. "It's a hard line to walk. That's why I always say that you have to have a strong heart, a clear mind and a tough skin. And that's a lot to try to maintain."

Keira Knightley- Vogue 05/06

2006-05-21T03:12:00.000-07:00

Grand Bahama Island is a curious hybrid of pastel-painted toy-town architecture, great wastes of mangrove forests, and highways with romantic names like Doubloon Road, Spanish Main Drive, and Midshipman Road. These conjure a piratical past that comes disquietingly to life when the tattered skull-and-crossbone standards of old galleons can be glimpsed through those banyans. In fact, these are the props for the continuing saga of Pirates of the Caribbean—now filming parts II and III—and the broken masts belong to The Black Pearl, The Empress, and The Flying Dutchman, hulking ships out of fairy tales conceived by a febrile team of Disney "imaginers".

On a balmy March morning, Keira Knightley, the 21-year-old heroine of these swashbuckling romps, is recovering from the movie wrap party the night before, which she describes as "a thank-you to the island for putting up with us all this time!" and during which she made "a rousing, Joan of Arc-esque speech" that she was delighted to observe brought tears to the eyes of at least one hardened crewman. However, Knightley "bailed early"; the shooting schedule has been a grueling one. The episodic Pirates movies have now been in production for more than a year—long enough for Knightley to have laid down roots in a charming lilac-and-ocher shack with a deep-aqua veranda that commands dramatic views across the peroxide sand to the bright-blue Caribbean.

When Knightley first came to look at the cottage, a storm had washed up so much detritus on the beach that "it sort of looked like Dunkirk," but this was soon swept along and Knightley decided to stay, to be awed by the constantly changing seascape. "I've never lived by water before, and what's beautiful is that it's kind of terribly dramatic," she says. Before Hurricane Wilma hit in October 2005, Knightley remembers, "the water was glass—like a millpond. It was the most amazing calm-before-the-storm kind of stillness."

Inside the cottage, a cozy, feminine disorder prevails. The coffee table spills with dog-eared copies of Pablo Neruda and the glossy London style magazine Dazed & Confused. The sound track of In the Mood for Love plays as Knightley washes mugs in which to serve coffee. Her hair is messy and sun-bleached; her bare feet are dusted with sand. She is wearing a turquoise bikini under a pretty pale-blue butterfly-print dress. She has tied a ribbon of old golden lace at the waist and wears simple gold hoops in her ears. She can't remember who made the dress, so she yanks at the nape of her neck to find the label; it's by Laura Lees—or, as Knightley puts it, "I think it's called 'Sale at Selfridges'!"

In her island closet, Jimmy Choo strappy silver movie-star high heels lie tumbled among the beach sandals, and a brace of sparkling beaded flapper dresses by Matthew Williamson (" 'cause he's a friend") hangs alongside the exquisitely made pale-pink corset from the first Pirates movie, created by the distinguished costume designer Penny Rose. "After wearing it so much, I wanted to burn it!" says Knightley. ("I gave her an eighteen-inch waist, and there isn't a woman in the world that isn't delighted about that!" laughs Rose, who notes that Knightley is dressed as a boy in subsequent episodes. "She definitely perks up when I stop squeezing her into taffeta!") Knightley cites Katharine Hepburn as a role model, and there is something of the legendary actress in the way she wears her luminous beauty so lightly. "She doesn't vamp at being a sex goddess," says Vera Wang, who dressed her for the Academy Awards this year. "What makes her so attractive and appealing is the tomboyish aspect to her. To be so beautiful and yet be so unaware of it I find incredibly modern."

"At school I was a grunger—I think I still am," says Knightley. "I can't be that bothered, although I can look at clothes and go, 'Yes, I completely see how that's a piece of art.' Matthew Williamson's are fairy tale-esque; they're like dreams. But I find something beautiful in men's suits. I like to see structure. I like when it's quite clean. I suppose I do like that fifties look."

Knightley laughs off the suggestion that she might be a fashion influence. "Sienna Miller really did pioneer a style, which was quite extraordinary," she says. "I can't see myself ever pioneering a style, partly because I want to be different people every day and never want to be myself. So I don't think I would ever have a style to copy. I would love to be—not to be a style icon, just to be able to say, 'Yes, this is my style, and this is who I am.'"

But if Knightley shies from the fledgling fashion-icon role that her increasingly high-profile appearances have foisted on her, she cannot escape the thick-lipped, wide-eyed beauty that draws all eyes. She might have told The New York Times, with characteristic English self-effacement, that "when I smile at certain angles, I can look like I've got a broken nose like a boxer," and she might lament her spotty forehead, but as the acerbic A. A. Gill noted, the camera reacts to her face like "a besotted puppy" who "just licks her all over in an ecstasy of devotion." In Pride & Prejudice, director of photography Roman Osin filled the screen with her compelling features—the animated mouth set in perpetual motion between a pout and simper and the all-knowing sloe eyes twinkling with silent amusement—but it isn't just cameramen who love her looks. Global cosmetic brands are fighting over her image, and the rumor is that Chanel has been hotly pursuing her to embody Coco Mademoiselle (a fragrance that she happens to wear), to follow in the footsteps of Vanessa Paradis and Kate Moss.

When she is not traveling for movie projects, Knightley, who was brought up in the leafy suburbs of southwest London, now lives north of Hyde Park in a sun-filled Georgian apartment that she bought two years ago and furnished with cool modern pieces. She shops for clothes at the sales and at Topshop; for vintage finds she trawls Portobello Road.

Knightley does dress up, however, for a night at the fin de siècle Grill Room of the Café Royal (the onetime haunt of Oscar Wilde), where London's young fashion students, actors, and socialites strike a pose and dance the night away to big-band sounds. Here Knightley dresses "as my grandmother, basically, in a very, very tight pencil skirt, a DKNY polka-dot secretary shirt, and my hair back-combed into a beehive." Her vintage-maven flatmate provides the accessories, and "we've got a friend who's a makeup artist, and she does the red lipstick." Knightley cuts a dramatic figure on the handkerchief-size dance floor but sheepishly explains that "there's one guy who can really dance—and he just whirls me around. I don't even know his name!"

For Knightley, this "is always what I want clubbing to be; I want it to be that glamorous, and usually it never is. It's always quite sordid, and I don't want that—it doesn't fit in with my story. It's always got to have a story behind it."

Knightley's "stories" affect her red-carpet appearances, too. She concedes that the only time she went "as herself" was for a London screening of The Jacket, for which she was unprepared. "I wore my Chloé top or something and some jeans and my own necklaces, but I won't go to anything bigger as me. Never. No! I'd rather keep some protection up, don't you think?"

Knightley's fashion role-playing has paid off in unexpected ways. For Elton John's 2003 Academy Awards party, Penny Rose found her a Michael Kors dress to wear, "a beautiful river-green, Guinevere-inspired dress." Knightley bumped into Antoine Fuqua, the director of King Arthur. "I had already been to the audition but absolutely hadn't got it," she says. "I got offered it very soon after. That's why it's important to go as characters to these things; it's all in a dress!" The maverick director John Maybury, who cast her in the futuristic thriller The Jacket, "wanted me to turn into Edie Sedgwick," she remembers. "He was convinced that I should cut my hair off and dye it gray—I did cut my hair but didn't go as far as dyeing it. But Ciao! Manhattan was kind of a huge inspiration for The Jacket."

Lately, Knightley has been channeling Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot. "Not that anyone would know or be able to tell or anything like that," she says. "It's just in my head—and a bit of a wiggle!" A vintage, second-skin Hervé Léger dress and a Roland Mouret added to the illusion, "because I certainly don't have the assets!" For the first Pirates movie, the makeup department took 45 minutes to paint on Knightley's buxom cleavage, so her new tomboy persona in parts II and III has come as some relief—although this time, she laughs, "they just love to tan me up, which is hilarious. I look like an Oompa Loompa!"

Working with photographers Mert and Marcus on a campaign for Asprey "was the start of the Brigitte Bardot thing," explains Knightley. "It's all about the transformation. I had really short hair, and they put this amazing Bardot wig on me and then asked, 'Do you mind being naked and we will just drape things over you?' But I went, 'Yes, absolutely, why not?'"

Knightley's propensity to remove her clothing began at the tender age of seventeen—with the steamy love scenes shot for British television's epic retelling of Doctor Zhivago, in which she bravely took on the role of Lara that Julie Christie had made her own in David Lean's 1965 version. It has continued to her notorious Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair Hollywood-issue cover this March, produced by and featuring Tom Ford, on which she and Scarlett Johansson posed naked. The guileless Knightley, however, has a giddy English naïveté about American puritanism. "The thing about taking my clothes off," she notes wryly, "is that I think people will start paying me to keep them on soon!"

Knightley is engaged by the transformative power of costume, too. On Pride & Prejudice, costume designer Jacqueline Durran helped create her character. "We had an obsession with Lizzy Bennet and stripes," she notes, "but they were always scruffy stripes. There's something terribly honest about a stripe; it's not frivolous." For Vogue's shoot, fashion director Tonne Goodman referenced the exquisite Marie Laforêt in René Clément's 1960 Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), who famously wears a polka-dot bikini as she cavorts with Alain Delon on his boat in the Mediterranean. And when hairdresser Jimmy Paul scissored Knightley's hair—newly relieved of its Pirates extensions—into a breezy Christopher Robin-length bob, Goodman sensed the birth of a New Age Jean Seberg.

"If I've got a character, I am all right," explains Knightley. "It's not like I would be dressed in gowns walking down the street. You get other people to do your hair and makeup, it's a dress and jewelry that you don't own, and it's a character like any other, I suppose. If I look at it like that, then I don't get quite as nervous about it, 'cause then it's not me."

Knightley, who began acting at seven, has astutely juggled projects of artistic integrity with commercial blockbusters (Pirates has so far raked in more than $650 million at the global box office). When she began shooting the first Pirates movie, Knightley was just seventeen. If she felt any trepidation about working with Johnny Depp, it was soon replaced by awe at the nuances and refinements that he daily brought to his screen characterization. (Depp "is such a nice bloke," she has said, "and a fucking genius.") Knightley has fond memories, too, of the Pride & Prejudice set—with its similarly youthful cast and a London director who "gets terribly passionate and cries when you do a good take!" Knightley claims that she had "always kept to myself on film sets." For her, "this was the first time that friendship and work coexisted. It was a very special experience. We're all still very close and there's a big family vibe about it."

Before being cast by Maybury in The Jacket, she had admired the director's Love Is the Devil, about the tortured final years of artist Francis Bacon. She also thought highly of Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright's rollicking historical romp for the BBC, Charles II: The Power & the Passion. However, as the actress is the first to admit, neither had initially wanted her for their movies, and they told her so. Knightley insisted on reading for Maybury and completely won him over. Wright, too, now has nothing but praise for her talents. While being honored at this year's BAFTA ceremony, the director credited her for bringing "so much life and love to this film."

Knightley's breathless performance garnered her a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards, an honor that brought a whole new set of phobias into her life. "First days on set are nerve-racking," says Knightley, "especially if you are working with people you really respect, and in the last couple of years I really have. But the most nervous I get is on the red carpet—it's the most terrifying thing in the world. Well, obviously not the most terrifying thing—but it terrifies me. I was watching Rebecca the other day and realized that I always feel a bit like Joan Fontaine walking into Rebecca's house—there's an R on everything, and she looks at the clothes and feels that's how she should be. I always think that I should be acting in a certain way. I always feel clumsy and think that I am not looking right, and I just don't know what to do with myself. I freeze up. I stand there a bit like a lemon. And I get really cold or really sweaty palms as well—it's really embarrassing. I know, I'm sorry; I can't even get the temperature of my hands right!"

To calm her Oscar-night nerves, Knightley decided to channel the notorious and vain Parisienne adventuress Virginie Gautreau, subject of John Singer Sargent's portrait Madame X, a painting that caused a scandal in the Paris Salon of 1884 for the sitter's brazen attitude, her plunging black dress—and especially its jeweled strap, slipping off the shoulder in a gesture of shocking abandon. "The Vera Wang dress wasn't the one I thought I was going to wear," says Knightley, "but it was the first one I tried on and I just loved it and that was it. It was so over-the-top that you felt you could never wear it for anything but the Oscars. I was trying to go subtle, but it's the Oscars—why would you try and go subtle?"

"Keira wanted to be sophisticated; she didn't want anything too girly," says Wang. "She wanted to be glamorous in her own youthful, quirky way." Taking her inspiration from a thirties Vionnet gown, Wang wanted to create "a deconstructed dress—very raw and random, as young as I could make a ball gown." ("It was great apart from the fact that I couldn't really sit down or stand up!" laughs Knightley.)

Having established that this was The Dress, Knightley decided that "rocking it up was the way to go!," so her stylist, Rachel Zoe, helped her accessorize with Brian Atwood heels and a Roger Vivier evening purse. (Her minaudière contained "Wet wipes just in case I dropped anything down myself, and tit tape—-because I had a tit drama at a New York premiere [of Pride & Prejudice] and I didn't want to repeat that! Insoles for my shoes . . . and some lipstick. Oh, and my passport because you can't get into the Oscars without having photo I.D.!") The pièce de résistance, however, was a vintage sixties necklace of cabochon rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, commissioned by the shah of Iran, which Bulgari had acquired for their archives. While the necklace was "just so attractive," she says, it was also "so tight that when I took it off it looked like someone had been trying to garrote me! I had a horrible ring around my neck!"

At the ceremony, she was seated between Jack Nicholson ("one of my favorite actors of all time") and her brother, Caleb. "I really hope they don't call out my name," she remembers thinking, "because I don't have a speech prepared and I'd end up looking a complete twit! So it was a relief when they called Reese. It's the reaction shot that's funny, because you've literally got a cameraman in your face, so laughing seemed the best option. It was a really weird, weird, weird moment!"

After the siren call of Pirates, Knightley feels that she "would love to do some theater—that's what I grew up with." (Her father is actor Will Knightley.) "I'll never think I'm a real actress until I've been on the stage. So I shall have to do it. It will scare the shit out of me as well, and I always think that is a good idea! What I love about acting is moving on quite quickly," she adds. "It's ships passing in the night, this profession, which is kind of romantic. I became an actress to change as much as possible, and that's what makes it fun."

Jennifer Anison; Vogue Apr 06

2006-03-24T20:48:00.000-08:00

The Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel is just about as old as old Hollywood gets. Though it is still a place where power breakfasts are played out and celebrities meet their agents for lunch, it is also undeniably anachronistic and tourist-trappy, especially during the dinner hour. The pink-and-green color scheme, the perfumed ladies with facelifts and set hair, the meticulously elaborate settings of crystal and silver—it all screams bygone era. It is not hard to imagine that Debbie Reynolds came to this very room to nurse her wounds while projecting chin-up determination after that minx Elizabeth Taylor stole Eddie Fisher away. So I am not a little perplexed when Jennifer Aniston decides that this is where we are to meet one Thursday afternoon for lunch in early February.

When I arrive at the maître'd station at the appointed time and announce that I'm here to see Aniston, I am whisked away to table 46—the table—a large, round corner booth all the way in the farthest corner of the room. So this is J.A.'s secret hideout. Ingenious! Who would ever think to look for her here? Still, I am puzzled. It is a beautiful, sunny day, and sitting in the dark swank of a hotel bar is not exactly Aniston's style. The first time I met her, in May 2002, she showed up in cutoffs and a tank top, flip-flops, and toe rings. Despite the lurky presence of paparazzi, we window-shopped on Beverly and ate pizza at some random little Italian joint. The next time we met, in the fall of 2003, we sat out on the patio of Il Sole, a supercasual hipster spot on Sunset, smoking cigarettes and drinking too much wine while, again, photographers lay in wait for her. Has the woman who famously loves cheap Mexican food and margaritas grown up and gone fancy? Or perhaps she's taken her new role as divorcée a step too far. I half expect her to make an entrance in a fur coat and Laura Biagiotti sunglasses.

Just then, I see Aniston breeze past the window as she is being led through a ripple of whispers and head-turns to a table… outside. She's wearing tight, low-cut jeans, black boots, and a long black sweater over a dark-green T-shirt. I gather my things and head out to look for her, and as I'm walking across the patio toward her table she lights up with a big smile and waves. Phew. Despite the fact that she is just getting over a four-week-long bout with the flu, she looks fantastic—tanned and fit and youthful—and is in an ebullient, expansive mood. I, too, am in an inexplicably good mood, and she notices it right away. "Why are you so chipper?" she says with mock suspicion. "How long has this mood lasted, and what are you taking?" She laughs. "I'm teasing." She orders an iced tea-lemonade concoction. "I am in a good mood today," she says, "but I have not been in a good mood lately." It is right here, at this comment, that we begin our little dance, talking in ever-smaller circles around the elephant in the room. Not once during our two-and-a-half-hour lunch are Their names ever mentioned. Which is not to say that we don't, in some strange way, talk about Them. Or that thing that happened to all three of them last year.

Aniston is resolute about not getting specific. She will not give those weekly gossip rags another sound bite or plot line in the never-ending saga that plays out like some kind of tacky telenovela, week in and week out, on their covers. Not a single scrap will go to the vultures! I mention to Aniston that my mother happened to call me on my cell phone just before I came to meet her and asked what I was doing in L.A. I'm interviewing Jennifer Aniston, I said. "Oh, that poor girl," she said, and then, regretting having said that: "It's just awful to be the person that everyone is feeling sorry for." When I tell Aniston this, she shoots me a withering look. "I agree with your mother," she says. "There's nothing worse. I hate it. It makes my skin crawl." Here she slips into the simpering tone of fake sympathy. "How's Jen doing? Please! Don't feel sorry for me. Don't make me your victim. I don't want it. I'm so tired of being part of this sick, twisted Bermuda Triangle. As long as it's scandalous, it's a story. And that's kind of what it's been. It's just stupid. It's ridiculous. There's nothing to do about it. All I can do is go on and live my life. But like I've said before, these are human beings. And it's not a show and it's not an article and it's not a headline. It's real and it sucks."

One of the things that have troubled Aniston most about this whole episode is that it has robbed her of her ability to just be herself. The quality she projects on the screen and in real life that has always mitigated the envy that her previous, seemingly perfect life—complete with wealth, fame, great hair, and the sexiest husband alive—inspired is her ability to remain, relatively speaking, just a regular gal. Despite the intense, bizarre amount of attention that has been focused on her over the years, she has always remained pretty much the same: plucky, frank, a little neurotic, and very, very funny. Largely because Friends ran for ten long years, millions of people projected all manner of desire and wish fulfillment onto her. She is pretty and sexy—but not scary or mean. Good company.

Though the media have always taken a particular interest in Aniston, her somewhat tortured relationship to the paparazzi really began as she and Brad Pitt were planning their wedding in the early part of 2000. Because she was one-half of the so-called Hollywood golden couple, any picture of her or, better yet, the two of them doing something couple-y seemed to hold endless fascination for the public. By the time Friends was nearing its end, just as Aniston and Pitt had moved into what amounted to a castle, a French Normandy mansion in Beverly Hills, the media interest in her was stoked again when the couple began to talk publicly of wanting to start a family. There was constant speculation about whether Aniston was pregnant, even as she was embarking on a movie career that promised to breathe new life into the romantic comedy. Again, any photographic proof of her existence, no matter how mundane, held strange value.

But as soon as the rumors started piling up in late 2004 about Brad and Angelina having an affair during the filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the media's and the public's interest in Aniston morphed into something entirely different, and ultimately suffocating for Aniston. By the time she and Pitt announced their separation in January 2005 and then filed for divorce two months later, the die was cast: Aniston would be forced to play the part of wronged woman, the heartbroken girl crying in her Malibu hideaway, as Brad and Angelina flew around the world to troubled hot spots, saving the children or respectfully listening to world leaders. When Aniston famously said last August that "there's a sensitivity chip that's missing" after a 60-page spread of Brad and Angelina ran in W depicting them as a married couple with a brood of children, it only served to ratchet up the public sympathy for her as the most humiliated woman in America.

Only once before in my 20 years as a magazine journalist have I ever received so many phone calls about the breakup of a famous couple: Donald and Ivana Trump. I had written a lengthy profile of Ivana for Spy magazine, and when her marriage hit the skids because Donald was caught cheating with Marla Maples, my phone rang off the hook. It was as if every television producer of every crappy TV show had that copy of Spy tucked in a desk drawer. When the news broke, they all needed someone to fill up airtime, and I was just young and stupid enough to think it was a good idea to go on TV and pontificate about the couple's demise.

When Aniston and Pitt split up, a very similar thing happened. This time, I couldn't get off the phone fast enough. But something else peculiar happened in this instance, something that did not with Donald and Ivana. Nearly all of my friends, family members, people at parties, everywhere I went, everybody wanted to talk to me about Jennifer and Brad and Angelina. Otherwise thoughtful, intelligent people, folks who would never normally gossip about celebrities, had all suddenly turned into Jann Carl from Entertainment Tonight.

Not surprisingly, Aniston is nonplussed when I bring this up. But in her attempt to figure it out, she does not exempt herself from her indictment of the American public. "This is what I think the problem is: We have such an obsession with reality TV. That's the majority of television. What happened to a great half-hour sitcom? It's all Dancing with the Stars! Knitting with the Stars! Building a Home with the Stars! Living in the Homes of the Stars! And then ripping people to shreds. Humiliation. Degradation. What is going on? It's so much instant gratification, and we want it real. It's bizarre. I don't watch TV anymore. Nothing. I have no interest in that Idol shit." She takes a deep breath and then acknowledges that her personal life has become just one more distracting reality show. "Unfortunately," she says, "the world is in such a state with this war and everything else, and it's easier to go and look at the triteness of a celebrity breakup. It's like, Ahhh, relief. It's an escape, like a daytime soap opera."

One of the unintended effects of all the media scrutiny—and Aniston's heart-wrenching interview in Vanity Fair, about which she says she has no regrets—was that it made Aniston seem as if she were wallowing in self-pity. Meanwhile, Brad and Angelina began to seem faintly ridiculous as photographs were published of the couple sitting on a couch with Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan. This aspect of the whole sordid affair comes up accidentally at one point during our lunch. Just as Aniston is telling me that she was a little worried about doing this interview because "there's nothing left to talk about and I'm sick of everything about myself," an older woman approaches our table. She has a Zsa Zsa Gabor accent. "Excuse me, Jennifer?" she says while walking toward us, still several feet from the table.

"Hiii," Aniston says, sounding both friendly and suspicious. The woman explains that the two were "supposed to meet" regarding Aniston's becoming the chairperson of an organization to do with abused and fostered children. "Your PR people were going to set up a meeting because they said you were interested in being the spokesperson or something."

"Oh?" says Aniston.

"You don't know anything about it," says the woman.

"No," says Aniston. "I'm mortified. That's terrible."

"Oh, it's OK," says the woman, and then she goes on to detail the work they do around the world, including one particular event held in Israel that brought together 5,000 Palestinian children and 5,000 Israeli children. "After that was in the newspaper," she says, "your PR people called and said you were interested. And then nobody ever followed up."

"Oh, great," says Aniston, who at this point clearly does not believe this story. The woman presses a card into Aniston's hand and says, "All right, well, thank you very much. Nice to meet you." As soon as the woman is out of earshot, Aniston turns to me and sends the entire awkward moment up:

"Well. You said you wanted to save the dying children?"

"Mmmm. No. I don't recall that."

"Yeah. They said so. They called and said you were interested and then you just decided never to call again. But the children are dead now, so it's OK. The window has passed. But it's good to meet you in person!"

Laughing, she puts her head in her hands and says, "Oh, God. It's just too much." She pauses for a moment, still shaking her head in amazement. When we finally stop laughing, I ask her how she feels about being asked to do those sorts of things.

"You know there's stuff I've done in my career.…" She trails off and then says, "This is such a delicate subject." Here, for the first time in any conversation we've had, she starts to say something that sounds canned, a bit rehearsed. "I think it's an amazing thing for people to do, and we as actors have the platform to go out there and bring awareness and bring people together and make things happen. It's one of the great perks of what we do." Long pause as she realizes she's beginning to wade into Brad-and-Angelina territory. "And everybody participates in their own way, whether it's political or economic. I think we all do our part. I'm more … I like to be … I get really nervous about public anything when it's making a declaration. I should probably become more opinionated about certain things. But you know, I just don't like … I see a lot of.… See, this is where I don't want to get too into this, because, you know, I want to be very delicate about … actors going out there and … being … politicians. Or representatives of this or that. Which I find.… It's just not my thing. It's not what interests me. I commend anybody who goes out there and does it. And when the moment happens and it's authentic for me, I'm sure I will."

Before meeting me for lunch today, Aniston went to a yoga class with her friend Mandy Ingber. "After feeling sick and not really doing anything," she says, "going back into yoga, your muscles come back and you feel strong. Inner strength. I love it." She started doing yoga religiously in the past year or so because "it came out of a time of necessity, and it was very healing." After her yoga class, two women came to her house to give her an acupuncture treatment, also to aid in her recovery from the flu.

Aniston is not immune to what many think of as the flaky-spiritual aspect of life in California. For example, at one point she says to me, "They say there's certain times of the night or the morning when you're more open to receiving information—if there is information to be received—if you're one of those New Agers who believe that stuff, which I've been known to do. I love that stuff."

It is a bit of a contradiction because Aniston doesn't need the crutch of New Age foolishness. She is actually very smart and articulate about herself and her emotional life, perhaps in part because she saw the same shrink for many years. When I ask about her therapist, she says, "My shrink died." At first I think she's kidding, but then I quickly realize she's not. How terrible, I say. "Yeah, she actually died a year ago this past December." As I do the math, it slowly dawns on me that her therapist died the month before she and Pitt separated. "And here's the thing," she says. "I will cherish this woman forever. It was very sad because I thought she was a very smart, wise woman and unbelievably helpful to me. So it was devastating." But then she starts to laugh. "When your shrink dies, you just go, 'Really? Is this some kind of cosmic joke?' I will never forget that moment. I was like, 'Wow. Well. OK. Let's put your money where your mouth is and walk through this.' Because that December, I knew that everything was sort of … coming. And then I was like, 'Oh, right. You did retain it. It does work.' And you do build strength if you're really committed to the work." She pauses for a moment and then says, "Is it weird to say that my shrink died? One part of me is thinking that that's something I should keep to myself. But another part of me thinks it is, in an odd way, funny." She starts to laugh again. "Just as I arrived at the threshold of this grand door. So, are you in therapy? No, she died. It's very funny. I mean, this is the thing: Isn't it all funny? Thank God we can have a sense of humor. Good God!"

Though Aniston said at the beginning of our lunch that she did not want to talk too much about her personal life, it is obvious that she just can't help herself. She is so exquisitely calibrated for emotional openness that it would be a near impossibility for her to keep a lid on it. When I ask her point-blank about how she is doing re: the breakup, she says, "Here's the one thing I can say without divulging anything or going into the boring headlines of 2005: Ain't nothing broke! Life goes on. There's nothing to see here, folks. Just move along. The beauty of human resilience is that you do bounce back. And comparatively speaking to what people walk through, this is nothing. I haven't lost my home to some freak natural disaster. My son or my daughter is not in another country getting bombed. People just need to redirect their focus. It's like a little dark cloud that I'm just waiting to get out from under." Her leg is pumping up and down, shaking the banquette we're sitting on. "What more does one person have to do or say?"

She takes a deep breath and leans back. "But it's also a positive thing. There are really powerful things that happen out of this sort of loss. That's the stuff that life is made of. If you don't have appreciation for it—if you haven't sat in the dark depths of sadness and pain—you can't appreciate feeling good. It's like when you're really sick and all of a sudden you have that day when you wake up and finally feel great. You're like a kid in candy store. I can't believe how great I feel! At the end of the day, it's just yourself, your own work, your own resilience, and your faith in yourself. I really believe that everything is meant to be. You can't ask, 'Why is this happening to me?' It's happening to you! Life's tough. Get a helmet."

Unfortunately for Aniston, her personal life has, at least for now, eclipsed her films. There's a perception out there that her movie career is somehow in trouble, when in fact she has made one terrible film (Rumor Has It) and one not-so-great but, I think, underrated thriller (Derailed). There's not a single actor working in Hollywood today who hasn't made a couple of non-starters nearly back-to-back (can you say The Stepford Wives followed by Bewitched?). When I ask her how she's feeling about her film career these days, she says, without any defensiveness, "I feel like I'm doing OK. I'm happy with where it is. Derailed didn't shine. It kind of … derailed. Thrillers are tough. I'm glad I did it, but I don't need to do those kinds of movies. It's kind of like caviar. I don't need to have it again."

When I bring up Rumor Has It, she looks at me with an exaggerated pained expression and says, "Oh, we don't need to talk about that, do we? The worst experience of my life. The worst experience, the worst film. It sounded like a great idea, an interesting backdrop for a romantic comedy. But it was never fleshed out, never fully realized. And for me, personally, I was going through a horrible time. I wasn't at my best as an actor. I was unmotivated by it." She pauses for a second. "Oh, why talk about it? We can let that little train go by."

Fortunately for Aniston, she was a busy girl last year and made two more films that have the potential to wipe the slate clean. First there is Friends with Money, a talky little movie directed by Nicole Holofcener that opened the Sundance Film Festival. The film, which debuts in theaters on April 7, stars a great cast of women—Frances McDormand, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener, and, of course, Aniston—and is essentially about the marriages, love lives, and money issues of a circle of friends who live in Los Angeles as they reach middle age and deal with their own mortality.

Aniston plays a character who has quit her job as a teacher to become a cleaning lady. She is perpetually broke, a depressed pothead, and the only person in the story who is not in a relationship. Though her character here is not as finely drawn, there are echoes of her brilliant performance in The Good Girl, in which she played another depressed loser. Aniston, who is not afraid to strip away her comic shtick and cuteness, seems to have a special talent for playing forlorn women. In Friends with Money, all of the other characters are either upper-middle-class or just plain rich. "I think she related to her in some ways," says Holofcener. "I imagine that she has friends like the character that she plays. Jennifer is so wealthy. What friend could ever have as much money as she has, and what's that like? It must be really hard. And of course she knows what it's like to be depressed, even if her personality is generally cheerful."

The shoot, which lasted only three weeks, started just a few days after Aniston and Pitt announced their separation last January. As Aniston says, "This was not a vanity piece by any means. And it was a bizarre time when the vultures were descending. The paparazzi were getting pictures that were less than flattering to support the miserable person that they wanted to paint me as at the time." Holofcener remembers one day when they were filming at the Farmer's Market when Aniston "had to blow her nose or something and the makeup woman said, 'Here's a tissue,' and she said, 'No, if I hold a tissue they're going to take a picture of me and print that I'm crying.' And she wasn't crying. She was fine. She was completely composed and professional and seemed OK. She might not have been a barrel of monkeys because of what was happening, but she still had a really good vibe." Says Aniston, "It was great. A great group of women. I've never worked with all women. It was like camp. Actor camp. I felt very supported."

Later this year, in June, Aniston's other film, The Break-Up, comes out. It is likely to be a much bigger movie than any of her previous three, partly because it returns her to comic form but also because there is the curiosity factor of watching the chemistry between her and Vince Vaughn, her costar and the man she started dating not long after the film finished shooting. Interestingly enough, the movie was Vaughn's idea, and he spent the better part of a year working on the script with two writers. Aniston, whom Vaughn had in mind all along, signed on to The Break-Up last February, just after she and Pitt… broke up.

The director, Peyton Reed (Bring It On, Down with Love), describes the film as "a comedy that we tried really hard to ground in reality, so that a lot of the arguments this couple has as they are breaking up are very real. Working opposite Vince, Jen gets to flex her comedic muscles, which are formidable, but she also gets to do a lot of dramatic work in the movie. She just knocked it out of the park."

During filming in Chicago last summer, Aniston's personal-life drama had reached a crescendo. "Had I not gone to the newsstand and seen the tabloids," says Reed, "I would never have known something of that magnitude was going on. She was able to come to work and dig in and just make it a joy every day. Only Jen can speak about her process, but her performance in the movie, when it hits those notes of the pain at the end of a relationship, has an immediacy that I was just blown away by."

Aniston is genuinely thrilled with how the film turned out. "I love this movie," she says. "I have a good feeling about it. It's beautifully balanced and surprisingly emotional. I don't think anyone has really seen anything quite like it." When I ask Aniston about Vaughn, she says, "He's very funny. He's brilliantly funny. He's hilarious. He's unbelievably ferociously talented and has a work ethic that is inspiring. It was pure fun." I had been told by more than one person that the two have amazing comic chemistry together, and Aniston agrees. "It's great when you can have that thing where you can have a good volley with someone." When I push her a little further to talk about their relationship, she demurs. "He's a good friend," she says, with a big smile. "First and foremost he's a really good, loyal friend. Fiercely loyal."

When I first met Aniston, she and Pitt were living together in a little house way up at the top of one of the Hollywood hills. It was a house that she bought years earlier, when she got that first big Friends paycheck. I met her there one beautiful afternoon in May four years ago, and she was very obviously proud of the home and its contents—her things, her taste. At the time, she gamely showed me a framed black-and-white shot from her wedding day, which she referred to as their "Mrs. Robinson photograph" because it evoked the movie poster from The Graduate. As she gave me the tour, we went outside to look at the view from her small, grassy backyard and said, "It's teeny, teeny, tiny, but it's my favorite place in the world, up here. When the sun is setting, I have five little bunny rabbits that sit out on the lawn, and there are quail and hummingbirds. It's a really special spot." When I interviewed her again a year and a half later, the couple had moved into their mansion in Beverly Hills, and Aniston was pained about the idea of having to sell her beloved bungalow.

Just before we meet up at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I read somewhere that she and Vaughn were now living together—in a little house in the Hollywood Hills. At one point during our lunch I ask, Did you never sell that house?

"Where we met?" she says.

Yes, I say.

"No, I'm living there now," she says. "I never sold it. I couldn't let it go."

You must be glad now, I say.

"Yeah!" she says, laughing. "Phew! Thank God for the sweet little things."

How are the bunny rabbits? I ask.

"Those fucking rabbits," she says, laughing but not kidding. "They were cute at first. Look at the bunnies! And now there are 500 of them and you walk onto the grass and it's just crunch, crunch, crunch. There's rabbit shit everywhere. Those bunnies are the bane of my existence. I don't know what they do, how they have the strength to gnaw through the wire we put up to cover the holes. It was like a National Geographic out there: the quail, the bunnies, my dog, Norman, killing all the birds."

When I ask Aniston what her plans for the future are, she answers me in a way that makes me realize she cannot think too far ahead. "I'm going on a ski trip with some friends in a couple of weeks. And then I'm going to do a little traveling, not sure where. Then I come back and I start promoting Friends with Money and The Break-Up. And then hopefully I will have a greater idea of what I want to do work-wise."

When I push her to talk about her bigger future she says flatly, "I'm not going to talk about grand dreams, because those are mine, and if I don't fulfill them then I'll be really disappointed that I didn't and that I stood on a soapbox and was like, I'm going to direct! And I'm going to produce! That's why I don't make New Year's resolutions. I have a lot that I want to do, though." She pauses and then levels me with a look. "I do more than shop." More seriously, she says, "I have to find a house. I have to find a home. I'm really looking forward to whatever that is. If I'm not settled, if I don't have my home base, I can't ground myself. It's a good springboard, having a solid home. It's one of my most important things—more important even than doing another movie is creating my home. Whatever that means. Whether it's my family, my friends. Home."

Aniston has recently been making noises about the fact that she might have to get the hell out of Dodge—leave L.A.—if she is ever to rise above the circus that her life has become. "There is no Raid that has been invented to get rid of the paparazzi," she says. "But I think it's going to hit a peak and then it will start to equalize. It just has to. Isn't that sort of the laws of something? Physics? What goes up must come down?" But even as she says this, she knows that it might be wise for her to move away for a while. "I want to get out of here because I walk around and I feel like I should just have the word chum written on my shirt. There's something weird about the energy of this town. Don't you just feel a little film of some kind that coats everything?"

Where would you go, I say?

"I don't know," she says and then grows quiet. "I don't know. But it also makes sense for me to leave. I can. I don't have a day job. I don't have Friends to go to. So I could live outside Los Angeles and fly in for work. That's the freedom of what we do. It's kind of exciting. There's a menu of options."

As our lunch comes to an end, our waitress, whom Aniston knows from coming here and whom she seems to delight in, comes by to tell us that someone paid for our meal. Some two-bit talk-show host whom Aniston was interviewed by once years ago on a press junket. "Is he still here?" says Aniston. No, says the waitress, he left about a half-hour ago. "How odd," says Aniston. "It's very odd. I don't know how to take that. I don't know what to do with something like that. I don't know him."

Maybe you do need to leave L.A., I say.

"When you have virtual strangers buying your lunch," she says, "yes, I think it's time."

Sienna Miller; Vogue Jan 06

2005-12-28T20:02:00.000-08:00

1. THE TEA PALACE, LONDON W11.
It's late September 2005, and it's Miller time, only I'm drinking sencha and waiting for Sienna. Around me are tranquil, hip, and very bourgeois tea connoisseurs, a strangely decadent spectacle that makes me think I am witnessing the final, filigreed twist in the rise and fall of Notting Hill. Kate Moss, the physical incarnation of the neighborhood's glamour and dark side, is in exile after the cocaine-snorting fiasco, which itself followed the swinging allegations/revelations of Pearl Lowe, a musician and lace-curtain-maker (her handiwork is de rigueur in any self-respecting rock chick's window), involving Lowe's boyfriend (Supergrass's Danny Coffey) and Jude Law and the latter's then-wife, Sadie Frost. It's a tarnished, telling time, I'm thinking; and then Sienna enters and announces, from across the room, "Just got to go for a wee!," and I'm immediately struck by her freshness and confidence, even though she herself is a recent veteran of tabloid scrutiny. Let's say it now and be done with it: There was the engagement, there was the nanny, and there was the aftermath. Sienna, who's 23, says, "We're not the first couple to deal with infidelity in a relationship. Lots of couples go through it. He's my best friend. I'm his best friend. I, personally, can't cut someone out of my life, even if he's hurt me. It's a process."

She's drinking a "detoxifying" brew recommended by the tea sommelier (she's come from a heavy weekend at her sister's wedding), and she's wearing black skinny Superfine jeans, a white tank, an oatmeal embroidered pashmina, a tiny black jacket, various cords and charms and slender hippie-ish medallions, and black squashed ballet flats. She carries a black snake Luella bag containing a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (and, I later discover, a passport snap of Mr. Law in her wallet). It looks effortless, hip, and quirky. The pashmina—so out it's in—is a particularly brilliant rethink.

We talk about various things. Sienna is excited about prepping for her role as Edie Sedgwick in George Hickenlooper's Factory Girl. She's been reading the books and watching the films, and she can't wait to meet the actual survivors of the Warhol gang in New York. She's also going to chop off her hair; she hasn't had a short do since she was fourteen and inspired by Winona Ryder. "I looked like a small boy." (She wore a wig for Casanova and doesn't want to do that again.)

We also talk about where to shop in London. She says Matches ("The last thing I bought there was Marc Jacobs boots"), Browns ("They have really good buyers"), and Euforia, where she likes the "quite Hoxton, Japanese-y style clothes" and has picked up ankle boots by Annette Oliviera.

We drink up and jump into the black car waiting outside. There is another car waiting, but it contains paparazzi, and we don't jump into that one.

2. PORTOBELLO ROAD, W10.
We scurry from the car into Duro Olowu's tiny shop, OG2. Sienna has never been here before, and immediately zeroes in on the most extraordinary items in the store: a vintage rubber coat by Cristobal Balenciaga, a Cardin-feeling black topper piped in colorful silk by Olowu. Sienna looks great in it, but she chooses to buy a Versace-esque vintage red belt with lots of gold, which counterintuitively she tightens not around her waist but under her breasts—just as when she tries on bangles, they are pushed up to her biceps, and when she tries on a long African necklace she slings it over a shoulder like a gun belt.

This, famously, is her modus operandi. As her sister, Savannah Miller, recalls, "There was a Cartier polo match in England, and it was the first time she had been out since the whole Jude episode. She was staying in the country and had no clothes of her own. She borrowed from her friend's closet a black skirt and wore it around her boobs with a cardigan from the dressing-up box and some size 8 shoes with her mom's gold jewelry. And every newspaper in the country was asking how she does it." Every newspaper in the UK and increasingly in the States follows Sienna's every outfit. "I've thought about wearing really disgusting clothes," she says, laughing, "but that would be a story in itself."

Sienna dashes out of OG2 and into the black car—she seems to have shaken off the tail—and drives away to look at rental apartments. Jude's Maida Vale pad is no longer quite the ticket.

3. MONTAGE SEQUENCE: NEW YORK, LONDON, MOROCCO, PARIS, DEVON, ET AL.
I don't see Sienna for a month, but I see a lot of her nevertheless. There's the picture of her at 26-year-old Savannah's Devon wedding in a Burberry floral dress and a vintage vest, her long hair twisted back like something out of Thomas Hardy. Then there's a Vogue shoot at which, I receive word, she chops her own hair and directs Vogue's hair wizard, Christiaan, as to the remainder: She's on her way to Edie. When I'm in L.A., I overhear another hairdresser saying, "Sienna Miller's cut her hair. I wonder if all the girls are going to go short now?"; by "the girls" he means young, impressionable A-list stars like Lindsay Lohan who watch Sienna's every move. Then, on a different note, I read in the tabloids about a night on the town (London) with Daniel Craig, and another night on the town (Paris) involving Salma Hayek, Sean Penn, Jude, and the elevator at the Hôstes. Oh, and I hear that she went to Morocco with a friend for a break.

4. JIN SOON NAIL SPA, EAST VILLAGE.
Sienna Miller is standing on East Fourth Street, having a morning cigarette. Her hair is short, superblonde, and she wears skintight rocker jeans by Siereks (Polish friends of hers from London), a white tank, an ecru tee (a new buy from Barneys Co-Op), a teeny-tiny leopard knit shrug (also Co-Op), a heavy gold-link chain ("probably cost $1"), and her signature Burberry navy wool fisherman's cap. She wearily makes a statement about the Paris brouhaha. "We met to talk about things in some place that was neutral and not crawling with paparazzi," she says. "I'd been in Morocco; he'd been in Spain. We had a really nice dinner. After dinner we went to Man Ray—Sean Penn is our friend, and he owns it. Salma Hayek is a friend of his, so she came. I spoke to her all night; Jude barely said a word. And the next day we had lunch. There was no scene, no crying at tables, no nothing. I was there for the whole thing. It's like, it's extraordinary. At the end of the day it's laughable, because I would never, even if I wanted to, go into a public place and start screaming and sobbing. And then he apparently dragged me into an elevator! I would tell you right now, I would laugh at myself if I had." As for the Daniel Craig gossip: "We did a film together three years ago and have been great friends ever since—and apparently you're not allowed to have male friends." She stamps out her cigarette with her Marc Jacobs flats. "Tough break, Sal; gotta be thick-skinned." She heads back into the salon to pick a color. Shell-pink.

Before the thick skin on Sienna's soles can be removed, the actress has to skip out of her Siereks denims because they're so drainpiped they can't be pushed up. No problem: She slips off her jeans, revealing Agent Provocateur undies with long black satin ribbons at the hips, and settles down in a towel for her milk-and-honey foot treatment. It's a real treat since, as befits an English rose, hers is a very low-maintenance beauty.

We talk fashion and films. As to fashion, Sienna's look is undergoing revisions. There's the matter of the new hair, which "makes you feel a bit hard-core, which is nice. No more boho chic! Those two words make me sick now. I feel less hippie. I just don't want to wear anything floaty or coin-belty ever again. No more gilets"—she means vests—"or cowboy boots!" Part of this stems from her immersion in all things Edie, but another large part is a reaction to the mass imitation of her look in chain stores everywhere. "I have all this beautiful stuff from the sixties and seventies that I collected and love—and now someone can get it for like £10 in River Island"—a British high-street store—"and there are twelve-year-olds wearing exact perfect replicas of my mother's Moroccan belt. It's bizarre."

So what, I ask, is she adding to the wardrobe? From Barneys, flapperish satin hairbands, and from Colette ("the best shop") "fantastic Lanvin red velvet Minnie Mouse shoes, and Terry de Havilland wedgies. I normally don't like wedges, but they're really snaky, really rock-'n'-roll." She's also picked up a man's striped oxford by Thom Browne/Libertine, a denim tailcoat from Superfine, and blue ankle boots from Marc Jacobs on Net-a-Porter.com. The engagement ring is gone. The cocktail ring she's wearing is a beautiful diamanté-encrusted blue stone she got "in some old antique sale. It's a good one, though, a proper knuckle-duster. You could do some damage punching someone with that if I were screaming in a restaurant in Paris."

We return to the real drama. Casanova was fun and "very different. Nothing to do with being sexy. Nothing to hide behind. I'm looking forward to being seen as something other than a young naked wannabe actor." Which is not, actually, how she is viewed by the men she has worked with. Lasse Hallström, Casanova's director, is impressed: "It's rare to encounter such confidence in a young actor." Her costar Oliver Platt says, "I'm very excited for her because when people see the movie, it will take the focus off her off-screen activities. It was incredible how still and mature her performance was. She has the innate knowledge of letting the camera come to her." She's also a lot of fun on set—"a dice-playing, joke-telling vixen," in Platt's words.

The thing about Sienna, as I'm discovering, is that she's a very game, very upbeat, very companionable sort. She's also very smart, very clued-in—she can talk at length about contemporary fiction, Blairism (Tony, not Linda), and her desire to work with the likes of Alfonso Cuarón and Walter Salles—as well as amazingly levelheaded about the phenomenon that has been constructed around her. "There's just a huge market for celebrity, and I fell in love with someone who happened to be a famous actor but happened to be a million other things to me."

5. ESITH & DAHA, LOWER EAST SIDE. LUNCHTIME.
We arrive at the extremely unpretentious vintage store just as the co-owner Edith is unlocking the store. She looks at us as if she's just been mugged. "Can I have a few minutes?" she stammers. "I'm sorry, but this morning.…" Of course, we say worriedly. Sienna asks, "Are you OK?" The girl looks more stricken than ever. "I'm just so honored to have you here," she quavers to Sienna.

Sienna and I nip into Economy Candy to give the poor thing ten minutes to adjust. Then we head back to the store. She buys: two belts, the first another tacky knockoff Versace ("gotta be done"), the second a straw-and-leopard-print number ("more eighties than me; I think it will be fun"), a slinky black jersey halter evening dress, a beaded black fifties V-neck shell, and a pair of thigh-high, zip-crossed suede boots with sections of fuchsia, yellow, orange, and red. Sienna walks out of the store in the boots, and into…

6. PROENZA SCHOULER'S CHINATOWN LOFT. MID-AFTERNOON.
Sienna has never met Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, but they quickly bond over dogs (she has two mutts; they have a Newfoundland and a miniature something), over star tattoos (she has one on her lower belly; they each have one behind an ear), and over Edie Sedgwick (their fall 2005 collection was all about that bad, bad Chelsea girl). The three play dress-up, Sienna displaying her ex-model's lack of inhibition about getting undressed. They discover a shared sense of proportions; Sienna loves the mid-calf lengths the guys have done for spring, as well as the smocky top, which she wears with her Agent Provocateur. "I'm sorry I'm flashing my stretch-marked ass," she says with brazen charm. I remember something Roland Mouret said about the actress, whom he dressed for the Venice Film Festival: "Sienna is what happens every decade in London; this real new person that represents a generation. She has all the ingredients of what a British girl is about in the twenty-first century: She's from a nice family but down-to-earth, is incredibly charismatic but doesn't believe it, and has this idea of quality but is down-to-earth. She's not playing the game. She's just being herself."

7. THE CHELSEA HOTEL. LATER THAT DAY.
Sienna wants to hear Edie's voice and has been told that the brilliant artist René Ricard might have rare film footage he shot back in the day. Sienna is familiar with the hotel: Her father's guru still has a practice on the seventh floor.

I take Sienna behind the front desk and introduce her to the legendary proprietor, Stanley Bard. "You look like Edie," Bard says delightedly. "What was she like?" she asks. Bard shrugs. "When she wasn't using, she was fine. But she was a drug addict. I remember Nico, I remember Ultra Violet.… It was like a cult." He directs us to Edie's old place on the first floor. "It probably hasn't changed since she left," he says, and he may well be right. Sienna, squinting as she surveys the room, says, "This is where she had the fire. This is where she crawled on her hands and knees." Back at the front desk, she asks Bard what caused the fire. "Candles and cigarettes," he says with the stoicism of one who has endured more than a few youthquakers in his time. "The usual."

René Ricard, meanwhile, is not answering his phone. Nevertheless, the consensus is that he's: a) upstairs and b) too volatile to be approached directly by Sienna. "You can't go up there," Bard says. "He's paranoid." He turns to a passing hotel resident. "This is the girl who's going to play Edie," he says. "Can you take her up to see René?" The tenant edges toward the elevator. "No, man, I just got back from Europe today. I can't. He's crazy." I ask another. "Don't ruin my day," he replies. "He's crazy." Finally, another painter—a young Texan in a cowboy hat who sits all night in the lobby working on a picture of the lobby—strides over and says to Sienna, "I'll take you up, ma'am. I can do this."

We go up to Ricard's floor. "Stay here," the cowboy says. We sit on a bench near the elevator and watch him disappear behind a corner in the hallway. We hear hammering on a door. Then we hear kicking of cowboy boot against door. Then we hear hammering, kicking, and yelling all at the same time: "Reneee!" The cowboy returns. "He's not in. Or he's not answering."

"I love this place," Sienna says. "I want to stay here."

8. THE APARTMENT OF BRIGID BERLIN. TWENTY-SIXTH STREET. LATER STILL THAT DAY.
Brigid and Sienna have been collaborating to ensure that Edie, an icon of unknowability as much as anything, has some psychological substance as a screen character. Berlin, Sedgwick's friend, says, "Sienna's very brave to take this on"—not least, in Berlin's view, because capturing Edie essentially involves capturing a very fleeting moment in time. When Sienna frets about getting Sedgwick's elusive voice right, Berlin reassures her. "You're just dealing with somebody who didn't have a long life. It's the press. They make it out now—it's 2005—like she was this great superstar. It doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have much to work with." Berlin doesn't think Miller need lose a pound to play the sylph, although the actress has told me privately that she will: "If you are going to do that character, you have to go there. And she was skinnier than me. She was scary-kinny." Berlin passes on one vital tip: "Edie didn't take off her false eyelashes. She just put more on."

9. 60 THOMPSON. SOHO. THAT NIGHT.
When Sienna and I alight from her car, she is attacked by a swarm of paparazzi the likes of which I have only seen once before (with David Beckham and family). It's horrifying and relentless. It fills you with a kind of awe for Sienna Miller's resilience. "She's doing the best that she can," says her friend the designer Matthew Williamson, "and holding her head high. She's a smart girl, and she's going to be fine."

10. EPILOGUE. NOVEMBER 2005.
I call Sienna, who's in London, to check in. First of all, the hair? "I've cut off more of the wee bits at the side, and it's got a bit of a fringe." The wardrobe? She's wearing the Lanvin shoes all the time, notably to a Tuesday-night club night at the Café Royale. The black shell has made an appearance with black leggings and one of the flapper hairbands. And, you know, him? "Jude and I will always be the best of friends. We're still incredibly close. We're trying to work our stuff out. It's the same as it's been for the past few months, and we're sort of together at the moment. I don't know where we'll be at in three months. We have stuff we need to talk about." Privately, that is.

Shaun DeWet; GQ Jan 04

2005-12-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

Soon you'll be seeing male model Shaun De Wet everywhere - in magazines, on billboards, on television and on runways. He'll travel the world, become rich and land any woman he wants, all before his twenty-second birthday. Nice work, if you can get it by: Michael Paterniti.
He walks through strobe and electric air, wearing silk suits and 1950s tennis outfits, chain-mail vests and, once, unbelievably, a cashmere diaper. His is not to question why. His is not to ponder too deeply the cashmere diaper, let alone the ugly, frozen planets at the edge of existence or the huddled, tattered-shoed masses. He sometimes walks wearing $1,000 loafers of the finest calfskin and then, the next moment, walks barefoot.

He's neither waif nor muscled lunker. He never works out, does very little except occasionally relinquish himself to the hands of a masseuse or manicurist to keep up appearances. But he walks a lot, through purple-lit alleys walled with people who want him - or, more precisely, who want what he wears. He walks the runways in Paris, Berlin, New York, Milan - wherever the money's best. In front of hundreds, sometimes thousands of admirers, he has walked to a soundtrack of women groaning in erotic ecstasy, and he has walked to street-thug boasts about the thrill of capping cops. He's the bullet and the G-spot.

No matter what the venue, the walk is virtually the same. It's nothing he learned deliberately and it's nothing he's had to practice. He bends slightly forward, head leading, mouth fastened, serious-looking to the point of menace, but a kind of empty menace, an unmenacing menace defined at its center by a blankness onto which others project their own ideas about sex, power, money and culture. He is merely a movie screen. A bauble. Pez. When he appears before the crowd, his blue eyes gaze straight ahead, receiving and reflecting nothing. His face is its own landscape, one of planed surfaces that change with the light, the mood, the dress. He has small ears, full lips, a strong, straight nose. He has high cheekbones and a forehead that has a kind of Cro-Magnon power. And yet he seems delicate somehow. He's better looking than Keanu Reeves, the person people have said he vaguely resembles. He thinks he looks like his dad.

Mostly, people don't care what he thinks - or even what his name is. Despite being one of the world's top models, despite having had contracts with Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein, he's only a face, a shell. Even as he looms on posters in store windows or appears in magazine spreads, even as he walks the runways of the world, few people pause to wonder whether he believes in God or wants kids someday or even if he had a heroin problem years ago. He decorates our culture, is being used up by it, and he knows this. He was born beautiful, be he wasn't born dumb. If people condescend, that's their problem. He's 21 years old and owns a car and a house in South Africa, rents a swank apartment on Gramercy Park in New York with his model girlfriend and travels the world, partying with other beautiful people and drinking Cristal. Nice work, if you can get it. By the way, his name is Shaun De Wet. You've already met him thirty, forty, fifty times without knowing it. He was the wordless one, lurking there in your closet. He was the one who wore your coat, your suit, your checked shirt, your striped socks, even your cashmere diaper.

And that's why you bought it.

*****

"This place is crisp," says Shaun, lounging in the lobby bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Milan. He arrived from Paris last night for the most important biannual event in men's fashion, the five-day run of shows known as Fashion Week. Fashion Week is the official rollout of the spring line for many of the world's most famous fashion houses, including Gucci, Armani, Prada, Versace and Calvin Klein, as well as smaller houses like Neil Barrett, John Varvatos and Romeo Gigli - each fighting for it's slice of a $52 billion industry. During this time - and another five days in winter - the fashion world freezes in one place to admire, pillory, gossip, condemn, imbibe, inhale and celebrate the newest sartorial confections. Shaun first came to Milan in January 2000, which makes this his eighth season walking the runway. In both dog and fashion years, he's a middle-aged man, even though, sitting here between casting calls and a fitting, he has the lithe, man-boy appearance that is de rigueur at the moment. He is six feet one, 160 pounds with a thirty- one-inch waist, and he seems mostly devoid of body hair except for the coppery mane on his head. He wears several gold rings and slouches a bit as he slurps San Pellegrino and takes a few bites from a chicken club sandwich. Though he's staying at another hotel - one favored by models that is decidedly more hip and reasonably priced - he admits he could get comfy here, glancing around the lobby, a spectacle of industry power brokers and stars like Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones who are in town for the shows and the Versace party. "These are good fucking potato chips," he says.

Though the shows begin tomorrow, Shaun has received only a few confirmations. This is not unusual, even for the top male models. And so the week begins with a rush of casting calls and pent-up anxiety. Once a model is picked - usually between fifteen and thirty are chosen per show - there's a fitting the day before and then a call time, two to three hours before the show itself, during which the models are prepped and dressed. Because of his elite status, Shaun doesn't have to suffer the indignity of waiting with 100 other models for hours on a baking sidewalk, but even in prearranged auditions, he's subjected to the same scrutiny of those who choose - often a designer and his or her lieutenants. Each meeting becomes a kind of quorum, contest and validation of something that Shaun doesn't entirely control: his "look." In his case, that look is ever pliable and easily manipulated, and it's exactly what designers have counted on to sell millions of dollars of clothes.

"I'm happy to be what other people want me to be, as long as I'm being paid for it," Shaun says. "I'll do pretty much anything for the right pay - wear fur, pose nude. I haven't posed nude yet, but if it was tastefully done, I would."

Because everything unfolds so quickly here, Shaun is a slave to his cell phone, jumping to attention each time it rings. "This is Shaun," he says, answering. It's his agent Natalie, telling him he's on for the Laura Biagiotti show.

"Wicked," says Shaun. "Peaches and cream. Got it... Okay. Ciao."

Shaun has a smoky voice with the slightest Afrikaner inflection, nearly passing for British. Every once in a while, he runs into a word that seems to cause a synaptic misfire, a half-second stammer. In that most fleeting of moments, he appears not so much a model-god at the center of some charmed, white-hot hipness, but a sweet nervous kid who hopes people will continue to like him.

For Shaun, despite the frisson of the Four Seasons lobby and the glamour he adds to it, Milan is yet another moment of reckoning for him. With the clock ticking, he's not yet been picked for Gucci, Prada or Calvin Klein, all important "gets," both for the money and for the prestige, and because they may then lead to an exclusive contract. Contracts are what separates the made from the unmade models. With his contract for Hugo Boss, Shaun earned roughly $200,000 for five days of actual work.

"We're waiting to hear on a lot of stuff," says Shaun, his legs bouncing nervously beneath the table. And what if everyone says no? Is this the beginning of the end? And how weird would it be to have this celebrity life and then, suddenly, be washed-up at the age of 21?

*****

Truths about male models:

1. In a business where the designers and stylists are predominantly gay - and where many assume that male models are, too - the majority of male models seem not to be gay at all. "I know everyone," says Shaun, "and only two models that I know of are gay."

2. Summing up male-model attitudes towards their female counterparts, one male model named Damien says, "Most girl models are social-climbing bitches who won't talk to you unless you're loaded. You see 18-year-old girls with 50-year-old wankers all the time." Gisele ranks high on the list of those they dislike. Another model says, "She travels around with this little fucking white terrier named Vida, and sits there either talking about herself or her dog. One time, I did a job with her, and we were there for hours sweating it out in suits, waiting for her to show up. When the limo pulled up, she got out with Vida and said, 'What are you standing around for?' and another guy turned to one of the stylists and said very loudly, so Gisele could hear, 'Will someone tell Gisele to shut the fuck up?'"

3. On the other hand, most male models love Christy Turlington.

*****

On the second afternoon of fashion week, Shaun is trying on outfits at a fitting for the designer Romeo Gigli, a smaller fashion house run by Romeo Gigli himself. The confirmations have begun to roll in, and Shaun is here with another male model named Jeremy Hassol, a guy who, like Shaun, has had past good luck in Milan, especially with Gucci, the biggest payday of the week. If picked again, Jeremy stands to make $15,000 for one walk down the runway. "Gucci is basically what I'm here for," says Jeremy.

Though seeming opposites, Shaun and Jeremy are best friends. They have both lived at the highest echelons of the male-model world for four years now, which means they gross somewhere up to half a million dollars a year - before doling out 20 percent to their agents and then covering expenses. When not specifically travelling on contract work - and for nearly every model, runway work isn't contract work - models pay their own way, or take a loan from their agency on a gamble that this season's runway work will prove lucrative. So Shaun and Jeremy split a room. Besides that, there are the bar tabs and room service and their ever cheerful driver named Stefano. After Milan, there's the trip to Paris for more shows, the hotel in Paris, the clubs in Paris - and finally, the flight home to New York.

Whereas Shaun projects a kind of assumed, if not actual, fair-haired refinement, Jeremy is all id and swagger, with a scar on his neck and a king's crown tattooed on his shoulder. He's leaner and taller than Shaun, with dark hair, thick brows, startling hazel eyes and a mouth that doesn't stop moving. Sometimes, when he passes Shaun in the strobes of the runway, he'll mutter something under his breath just to see if he can goad Shaun into laughter. Shaun and Jeremy dress in a downstairs room before wall-length mirrors, attended by three young women who pick clothes from a rack and dress the models. Romeo Gigli's clothes are carnivalesque: jarring combinations of stripes and bright colors. Trying on a pair of oversize shoes, Jeremy says, "I feel like a fucking clown." As one of the women kneels before Shaun to pick up a pair of shoes from which he's just stepped, he simultaneously strips to his white Skivvies. In another context, it might be the prelude to sex, but both the woman and Shaun wear impassive expressions. "I got used to the naked stuff a long time ago," says Shaun. "It's hard to be a model if you don't."

When the outfits seem right, Shaun and Jeremy are sent down a hallway and up a flight of stairs to where Gigli sits wearing white beach floods and a sheer pink tank top. He smiles at the models but then turns deadly serious as he evaluates their various ensembles. Standing before Shaun, Gigli pouts in consideration, adjusts a lapel, twists a tie liminally to the right, then sends Shaun up and back, and then Jeremy, in wild-striped suits. When he is pleased, he has them photographed with a Polaroid, and then the photos are pinned beside pictures of other models in their outfits on a bulletin board that will serve as a blueprint for the show. The two models head back for another outfit. On the way, Jeremy notices a young blond woman in a white shift who sits with her tan legs crossed at a downstairs table for visitors. She is the very pretty girlfriend of a male model who has just arrived, and Jeremy can't keep his eyes off her.

"Man, do you see her checking us out?" Jeremy says to Shaun. "She doesn't mind looking, does she?" He keeps leaning, looking through the door at the woman.

"She's a little too big to be a model," says Shaun, meaning she's not stick thin.

"But she's hot," says Jeremy. And then, as if to explain why he's looking back, he says with a touch of both utter bewilderment and longing, "Dude, I haven't gotten laid in a month."

Later, out on the street, Shaun and Jeremy linger in the orange glow of a slow-setting sun, waiting for Stefano to come around. A light wind, the temperature of hot tea, luffs the leaves of a nearby almond tree. Shaun's cell phone rings: Natalie again. He listens intently, looking serious, then grins. "Wicked," he says into the phone. "I'll be there. Ciao."

After hanging up, he doesn't say what the call was about. He has two fittings and another casting call to get to, while Jeremy, whose phone isn't ringing and who's still waiting to hear on a number of shows, is heading back to the hotel. This must be model etiquette, or one friend protecting the other for a moment. But later the truth outs: Shaun got Gucci, and Jeremy didn't.

*****

More truths about male models:

1. They hate Milan as much as Milan hates them. In bars here, there are signs that read NO MALE MODELS. If female models are desirable, appetizing nightclub garnish, male models are dangerous because they attract other men's girlfriends and because they're not quick to back down from a fight. One year a model showed up with a broken nose after a bar-room brawl, and an influential stylist, seeing his purpled eyes and bent proboscis, said, "It's perfect. Don't change a thing."

2. Models like Shaun will pocket about $15,000 for five days in Milan, but laws prohibit traveling with excessive amounts of currency. Thus, models have multiple foreign bank accounts and somtimes buy gold jewelry to transport their earnings home.

3. The grail for most runway models is the Gucci show, because the money's great and, backstage, there's a cornucopia of M&M's and candy bars, Big Macs and free smokes. Finally, there's the unusually vivid pep talk, delivered each year by one of the show's organizers: "You're the fifteen hottest guys in Milan," it begins, "and every woman out in that room wants to fuck you. I want to fuck you. You're all badasses, and when you walk out there every eye will be on you and they'll want to fuck you..." And so it goes. "He definitely makes you feel pretty special," says one model, "but he could just say, 'You're the man,' and leave it at that."

*****

Nine a.m. on Tuesday, the third day of Fashion week, and Shaun is backstage at the Missoni show, where quarters are cramped and windowless. There's been a building momentum to his week as he's been confirmed for show after show and, with Stefano at the wheel, he's crisscrossed Milan at all hours of the day and night to arrive on the next designer's doorstep.

Now he and a model from Kentucky named Boyd, who has spent the past year as the face of Christian Dior, sit before mirrors that run the length of the wall, worried over by stylists who juggle makeup brushes, curlers, blow-dryers and cans of L'Oreal Elnett. One dabs foundation under Shaun's eyes; another mousses Boyd's hair. Both models slouch in their chairs, in T-shirts and low-slung jeans, staring blankly ahead, smoking, accepting as a matter of course all this fuss.

In the bounce of opposite mirrors, their images reflect to infinity, yawning. Thirty male models are scheduled for the show today, wearing thirty outfits in all. As yet, though, only twenty-nine have shown up. It's Jeremy who's MIA. "Where is he?" Shaun says out loud to no one in particular. Last night, Shaun returned after midnight to the hotel to find Jeremy loaded and dervishing on champagne in the lobby bar. "There was no stopping him," Shaun says, adding that he's left Jeremy sometime after 2 a.m. lying faceup on the bar, swigging vodka straight from a bottle. "He never made it back to the room." Nearby, a collection of already styled models play Hacky Sack. Another model, a solidly built, long-haired American named Chris (as in Chris Grossarth; this Missoni show was Spring/Summer 2004), goes from one model to another, looking grave and telling each he has a very important question. He pauses solemnly before asking.

"Would you rather have breasts or a vagina?" he says.
"You mean, if I were a woman?" says a bare-chested model tapped to wear a tight bathing suit for the show.
"No," says Chris, "you're a man, and you're either going to be given breasts or a vagina. Which one?"
"Neither. Besides, I don't have room for a vagina."
"No. That's not the point. You have to choose."
"Jesus," says the model. "I have to choose?"
"That's what I said," says Chris. "There's no easy out."

Meanwhile, the stylists have released Shaun. Whereas at the Valentino show the theme was, according to one stylist, "big, luxurious hair" - and Shaun sported a hair salad right out of Munchkinland - the Missoni look this season is blessedly neat and natural. Shaun lights another cigarette and drifts over to fill a cup of coffee. Then he pulls out his cell phone and stares at it a moment, as if hoping for divination. During the time they've been friends, he's never known Jeremy to miss a show. As much as there's money at stake for Jeremy, there's his reputation. And without that, he won't work again.

"Breasts or vagina?" Chris says, moving down a line of guys, each standing before his own rack of clothing, waiting to be dressed. "Breasts or vagina?"

Shaun dials a number, asks to speak with someone, and a moment later he's on the phone with Jeremy, who's in bed with a fortysomething female agent from Los Angeles, one who'd extended an open invitation for sex their first night in Milan. Shaun hangs his head so others can't overhear and implores Jeremy to come down to Missoni right away. He listens a minute, shakes his head and hangs up. "He said, 'Fuck it. Tell 'em my father died,'" says Shaun.

Approaching showtime, a woman calls out in English: "We're going to need cigarettes out soon. First costume in fifteen minutes." Chris then makes an announcement of his own - "Guys, I have eleven vaginas and no breasts!" - which is received with scattered golf applause. Shaun glances at his watch, pulls out his cell phone, and begins to dial, but there's no signal now.

"He's going to wake up in a few hours and realize he made a huge mistake," he says. "We're a dime a dozen around here, and they'll have someone in two seconds to replace him."

Moments later, the models are dressed and then lined up, fussed over again by a legion of stylists. Sure enough, Jeremy's place has been filled by a guy who looks like Jeremy. Outside, in the theater, the crowd quiets and the music begins - the usual loud-thumping, sexed- up soundtrack of this dreamworld. And the man-boys, no longer joking and smiling but turned rather stern and in character, begin their march down the runway. Shaun is somewhere in the middle of the line but no longer looks like himself, among all the others who no longer look like themselves. They are nameless faces, shells, bound in the world's finest threads.

When Shaun walks out, there's a white flash of camera lights - and the collective, electric gaze of a packed house assembled to worship or ridicule. He's the bullet and the G-spot. On him, the clothes liquefy and shimmer. And for those who doubt it, imagine this world without Shaun: You couldn't pay people enough money to come to Milan at the swampy end of June to see these clothes rolled out on a hanger. It just would never, ever work.

*****

Final truths about male models:

1. Women speak to them in threes.

2. Men pretend to ignore them while often studying them more closely than women do.

3. The cost of beauty - the poking, the prodding, the pin sticking, having to wear G-strings or heavy wool sweaters in the sweltering sauna of Milan in June - is balanced by the fine sum that beauty gets paid. "It's a pretty easy job," says one model. "We walk up and back. We sit around and get photographed with beautiful women. And then there's the afterparty."

4. Male models excel at the afterparty.

*****

On the last full day in Milan, just before everyone jumps on flights to Paris for three more days of shows, a famous fashion house throws a private bash for a few hundred of its closest friends. This is something Shaun has been looking forward to all week - the chance to chill and party. And there's plenty to celebrate: In the end, he bagged the biggies - Gucci, Prada and Calvin Klein - and had fun with the littler houses like Verri and Nicole Farhi.

In all, he did twelve shows. And throughout the fourteen-hour days, he was polite and earnest, punctual and perfectly moldable. He got mad only once, when a woman, one of the organizers who gypsies from production to production, asked for his name when he arrived at another show. "Shaun," he'd said. And then, under his breath: "You should know that by now."

The only black mark was Jeremy, who after missing Missoni never showed up for Romeo Gigli. While Shaun was having his hair shampooed, moussed and dried for the second time that day, his cell phone rang. It was Jeremy.

"I'm gone, bro. I'm quitting," he said. "Yeah, I'm on my way to the airport right now." And just like that, he was on a plane back to New York.

"Maybe if he'd come around and apologized or kissed some ass...," says Shaun, "but it's his choice. He says he wants to go back to college at Columbia. He gets, like, straight A's there."

The bash is thrown in a huge open room, and the DJ spins a mix of techno, Ibiza dance and old-school disco. The crowd is a sweaty mash of everyone from young male and female models in torn jeans to older fashionistas who, three decades ago, might have worn fuschia Nehru- collared shirts irony-free to an event like this. At either end of the room are bars manned by shirtless male models wearing short shorts. Several press through the tight crowd, as if scripted to do so, retrieving bottles of champagne, dancing closely with the most enthusiastic taker. And there are many enthusiastic takers.

On the dance floor, Jake Boyle, a New York model, wearing a T-shirt that is safety-pinned and scrawled with punk band names in ink, is talking to two sisters, twins who both model, swaying with a drink in each hand. Boyd stands near one corner, talking to several women. It turns out that Dior has picked another model for their new campaign. "They told me to lose weight," Boyd says. "But I'm blowing over as it is. I mean, I'm becoming a man. I can't be a boy forever."

Meanwhile, Shaun moves through the crowd, downing glasses of champagne, greeting his righteous male-model posse with big hand slaps and soulful chest bumps while gently double-bussing those women he knows.

When the music goes tribal, Shaun makes his way up to the DJ booth and positions himself above the crowd, pointing to his friends and rocking to the music. With him is a nonmodel brunet, who's spent the evening moving closer and closer. Then all at once, with some surge in the music, she pushes up against his body and kisses him. Perhaps it's that Shaun is very serious about his new girlfriend - "I just moved in with her, man, and I'm not going to blow it" - but he politely accepts her kiss, only as if he were taking her coat, then does nothing to encourage her. Instead, he goes right back to rocking with the crowd.

Out on the street afterward, at what is now about 4 a.m., a group of male models loiter. A former Guess? Jeans model, a Brazilian with anything but little-boy pecs, guzzles from a vodka bottle while sitting on a motorbike. Shaun begins looking for a taxi while Jake, the punker from New York, decides he's going to run back to his hotel. Just takes off running, his long gazelle legs driving him sideways for about four or five steps until he leans like Pisa, then smacks down on the pavement. Again and again - each time with a sickening thud. As he makes his jagged way down the street, several people in taxis pull up to ask if he needs a ride, only to be met with a string of obscenities and another face-plant. When he reaches a second traffic light down the street, he simply disappears.

Fashion is meant to be fantasy, the magic thread sewn into the lattice of our occasionally humdrum lives, an expression of our own creativity and fetishes and aspirations. But the difference between us and Shaun is that, on the runway, he wears the clothes he does for few of these reasons. He wears them primarily for survival and profit. He's a mercenary who dreams of one day being the first male supermodel identifiable, finally, by the thing that eludes most people now: his name.

Tomorrow the shows move to Paris, Berlin, New York. Another season will arrive, and with it a new parade of faces and bodies and perhaps even a new Shaun De Wet. You may notice these faces, you may not. But on the empty streets of Milan at 4 a.m., the real Shaun De Wet waves down a cab and heads back to his hotel room, which is now minus a roommate. For the moment, he has survived another season in Milan. His call for tomorrow morning's show is 8 a.m., and he plans to be there on time.

Mary-Kate Olsen; W Jan 06

2005-12-15T02:41:00.000-08:00

Her messy hair, giant sunglasses and wardrobe full of decaying designer threads have influenced everyone from John Galliano to the girls at the mall. But lately Mary-Kate Olsen has had more on her mind than whether she can wear leggings with heels. There's the responsibility of her $1 billion company, the paparazzi who shadow her every move and the fresh heartache over a tabloid-worthy breakup. Now she's leaving college and her twin sister, Ashley, behind—at least for the semester—and making a fresh start in L.A. Her goals? Get healthy, learn to put herself first and find work as "just an actress" for a change.

Sipping a Diet Coke in a private room at New York's Soho House, Mary-Kate Olsen, the Full House star-turned-junior tycoon, is fiddling with one of her many Balenciaga motorcycle bags. With its dangling leather lariats, signature woven handles and distressed bronze buckles, the bag is as essential to her famously derelicte style as her giant sunglasses and knee-skimming thrift store?chic sweaters. The version she's carrying today was originally mint green, but it's so dingy, covered with stains, pen marks and even a chewed-up piece of gum, that it looks almost gray.

"It explains my life," Olsen says, sighing, when asked about her beloved accessory's sorry state. Pressed to elaborate, the 19-year-old is quick to say that she was "just messing," that she simply meant she has a tendency to wear things out. But Olsen might in fact be on to something. The beat-up bag is an apt metaphor for her current condition: an oft-imitated emblem of chic that over the past year and a half has been dealt its fair share of bumps and bruises.

In May 2004 New York Minute, a big-screen teen comic caper in which Olsen starred opposite her sister, Ashley, fizzled at the box office. The following month, Mary-Kate checked in for a six-week stay at a treatment center for an eating disorder. June also brought Olsen's 18th birthday and her ascension to the position of copresident, along with Ashley (who declined to comment for this article), of Dualstar Entertainment Group. The billion-dollar multimedia company oversees the production of their videos and movies as well as Mary-Kate and Ashley books, dolls, furniture, rugs, clothing and cosmetics.

As her tumultuous summer was coming to a close, it looked, for a while at least, like Olsen would get to enjoy a more typical rite of passage: starting college. But when she matriculated at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study in August, she was met with overwhelming media coverage of her every move—apartment jockeying, nights out at Butter and regular jaunts to the Union Square Starbucks. Then, this past fall, just as Mary-Kate was settling into Manhattan life and her sophomore year, Paris Hilton started dating Stavros Niarchos III, the Greek shipping heir and Olsen's boyfriend of five months. That, it seems, was the straw that broke the camel's back. In October, MK, as her friends call her, took a leave of absence from NYU and moved back to Los Angeles to pursue her acting career.

"It just got really hectic and I started feeling the city," says Olsen. "My world was really small when I was here." When asked if there was a specific incident that made her want to leave, Olsen shrugs: "I think we can all guess."

According to Olsen's best friend, Hayden Slater, the Hilton affair was very much a catalyst for the move. "She's really hurt. Did I see it coming? Absolutely not," he says. A senior at NYU, Slater met Olsen through her ex-boyfriend David Katzenberg and had been taking an acting class with her this past fall. "She likes to keep on the down-low and just hide out, and it's obviously really hard, especially with everything going on recently. She needed to get away from New York."

Olsen is loath to talk about Hilton, although she does concede that she unwittingly introduced her to Niarchos. "[Paris and I] always only had nice things to say about each other," she says.

"Now I guess you can tell we're not talking." Of her former boyfriend, Olsen says, "I miss him and I love him and I don't speak with him anymore. It's a hurtful and painful subject. I've pretty much been with someone my whole life, so this is a hard time for me."

And it's particularly depressing to consider that the man at the center of the Mary-Kate and Paris feud is a 20-year-old Greek playboy who, according to the tabloids, recently paid a homeless man $100 to douse himself in soda outside a Burger King. Olsen says of the tale: "I'm not going to comment on that. It's a disgusting, horrible story, and all I can do is hope it's not true. I never knew that person. Now can we change the subject?"

The day we meet, Olsen looks surprisingly sprightly for someone with a broken heart. She's wearing a long, one-of-a-kind coat she bought at Maxfield, her favorite store in L.A. "I love getting amazing jackets," she explains, "because you can wear your pajamas underneath and everyone's like, 'Oh, fabulous jacket,' and I'm like, 'You should see what's underneath!'"

What's underneath today is a tiny Dries Van Noten floral-print minidress that barely reaches her thighs. It's a rather skimpy choice for November, and she has finished off the ensemble with a pair of teetering Minnie Mouse?style maryjanes—a departure from the demure flats for which she's known. "I feel like showing off my legs," Olsen says, lifting them in the air. "I feel a little sexier today."

Though Olsen expresses this sentiment almost as a throwaway, it's not an insignificant one. For someone who's been treated for an eating disorder, feeling sexy is a step in the right direction, and, to hear Olsen tell it, the move back to Los Angeles has improved both her health and her self-esteem.

"Now I can walk outside in the morning and have a cup of coffee and actually breathe, and, you know, every once in a while I just need to take a break, you know?" Olsen says. Her conversation, like that of so many other girls her age, is peppered with "like," "kind of" and "you know," and her declarative sentences are often phrased as questions. ("I don't actually look at a lot of fashion magazines?" she says at one point, when asked what inspires her style.)

"You know, [college] is easier for my sister and that's great, you know? I'm happy that I kind of realized that, okay, I just need to take care of myself right now," she says. "I need to be able to go to yoga and work out and just read scripts and go on auditions, because that's what makes me happy. You know? Like, papers don't really make me happy."

Her handlers insist that this is just a temporary break and that Olsen will return to NYU or, barring that, transfer to a West Coast university. "She's not stepping away from school," says Diane Reichenberger, the new CEO of Dualstar. Reichenberger says Olsen comes to the office twice a week to discuss all the major decisions at the company. "You can't put a price tag on that kind of education," Reichenberger says. "There's your M.B.A."

Despite the term papers and the constant attention of the paparazzi, Olsen insists that she did enjoy her thus-far brief college experience. It wasn't particularly difficult meeting people, and her best friends live in the city. ("I'm shocked how open she is to dive in there and meet new people," says Slater.) And Olsen insists that she appreciated the academics as well. "I love to learn, I really do," she says. "We'd study something in class and I'd take it outside of class and become, like, obsessive and just research everything."

During her freshman year, she grew especially interested in Sigmund Freud. "I became obsessed with him," Olsen says. "It just really hit me, just the way he explains the mind and, like, how it works in certain people or certain diseases. How people may look at his stuff as a little off because some of it's pretty extreme, but how much truth there is behind it, you know? You start thinking and you're like, Oh my God. I think one of the most amazing things about learning is that you really discover things about yourself."

High school wasn't quite as intellectually stimulating. Olsen describes her years at North Hollywood's Campbell Hall as "fun" and "easy." She and her sister couldn't enroll in AP classes or electives because they were often working. "We weren't allowed to challenge ourselves, so we did really well," she says. "It was frustrating, but we knew at some point in our lives we could do what we wanted to do."

That point in their lives, or at least Mary-Kate's life, could easily be now. With a personal fortune of at least $150 million—and maybe more—she certainly has the wherewithal to indulge almost any whim. Still, she's not the type to bankrupt herself with a Michael Jackson-in-Vegas-style shopping spree. "She'll say, 'I'm only going to buy this today,'" says Cameron Silver, the proprietor of Decades, a vintage store in Los Angeles where Olsen is a regular. "That said, I wish she would just buy Decades. She could rock it."

It probably helps that, compared with other starlets her age, Olsen's fortune is old money. She began her career, involuntarily one has to assume, at the age of nine months. "As soon as I felt that I was responsible for other people's paychecks was definitely a moment when I was like, how the f--- do you think I'm supposed to handle this?" Olsen says. "It really hit me that I had a lot of responsibilities other than myself, which shouldn't have been my attitude, because I should be concerned first and foremost about myself. I have learned today, you know, that that's what it's about."

As much as Dualstar executives hoot and whistle in the press about the twins' newfound responsibilities as copresidents of the company, Olsen's focus, at least for the moment, seems to be her acting career. She doesn't speak particularly articulately, let alone with much enthusiasm, about her vision for the business. "We've branched out in a lot of areas, um, things I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about," she says. But ask her about the acting classes she took in New York with William Esper as part of her studies at Gallatin, or the novel experience of going out on auditions, and her eyes light up.

"My mind totally goes to that spot," Olsen says. "It was kind of like that rush of, Ooh, I want more, ooh, let's do it again—what can I do next? And I think that's what I was definitely looking for, some sort of passion and drive." But regarding a report in Page Six that she would be playing Brigid Berlin in the new Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl, she says, "Brigid Berlin is an obese woman who did breast painting, so I won't be playing an obese woman."

Her goal at the moment is to star in a film that doesn't involve Dualstar. "All throughout [the making of] New York Minute, everyone was the producer, everyone was the director," Olsen says. "It's a lot of pressure, and I'd rather not get in the mix of it. I want to be directed, I want to be pushed. To be just an actress in a movie is one of my goals."

Much of Ashley's and Mary-Kate's earnings come from the 47 direct-to-video films—titles like To Grandmother's House We Go, How the West Was Fun and Double, Double, Toil and Trouble—the twins made growing up. Olsen's taste today couldn't be further from that manufactured Cheez Whiz. She wants to work with visionaries like Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola and Jane Campion, whom she studied last semester; one of her favorite movies in recent memory was the S&M romance Secretary, which she watched "at least, like, a hundred times" in her bed after moving to New York.

Making those videos as a child and later as a teenager—the last, a Survivor takeoff called The Challenge, was released in 2003—was as routine as "waking up in the morning and brushing our teeth," Olsen says now. "We didn't have to dig too deep. We were playing cutesy little twins who solved mysteries. There was no depth to any of the characters. It was somebody else's idea of ourselves. It was very much people-pleasing as opposed to actually, I guess, working for it.

"I want to be directed, I want to be pushed," Olsen reiterates, and you have to give her some credit for that. "I'm looking for a challenge, something I can be extremely proud of even though I'm a perfectionist and never extremely happy with anything."

The day after we meet, Mary-Kate accepts an award, with her sister, from the Accessories Council, in front of an audience that includes Oscar de la Renta, Jessica Simpson, Sean "Diddy" Combs and Kenneth Cole. "It was like a classier MTV Awards," Mary-Kate says after the show. Calvin Klein designer Francisco Costa presented the Olsens with their honor, and in a move that seemed to perpetuate the image of Ashley as the twin who has it together, Mary-Kate stood mute as her sister accepted the award.

It's true that Olsen doesn't know how to pronounce Dries Van Noten, but it's also clear that she has an eye for putting together an outfit. While peers like Mischa Barton, Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie go straight to the stylist for their uniform Kewpie-doll looks, Olsen has crafted her own hugely influential aesthetic, mixing classic rock T-shirts with a ton of SoHo street vendor jewelry, designer pieces, vintage finds and the occasional pair of schleppy sweatpants. Dubbed "Dumpster chic" by The New York Times, her look has influenced many a runway show and red-carpet ensemble.

"I like her individuality and her boho-luxe mix of vintage and grunge," says designer John Galliano, who met Olsen at an amfAR benefit in Cannes. "She has the same way of putting herself together that Kate Moss has. She is so petite and delicate, yet such a strong and determined young woman. Feisty. I like that."

Olsen seems to recognize how far-reaching her style has become. At a Much Music event in Canada, where Ashley and Mary-Kate were promoting New York Minute, an organizer of the show told them the event had never had such a good-looking crowd. "I think some girls were wearing the same glasses as I had on," Olsen recalls proudly. "Ashley and I kind of giggled about it because they looked good. It could have gone the other direction, and we'd be thinking, What have we done to these people?"

Even Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa dressed up as Ashley and Mary-Kate, respectively, on Halloween, with the requisite Balenciaga bags and enormous Starbucks Venti lattes. Indeed, even more so than the motorcycle purse, it's the Starbucks cup that has become Mary-Kate's most identifiable accessory. When I first meet her at 4:30 in the afternoon, she's nervously clutching a mug of coffee, then it's on to a Diet Coke. Before 10 p.m., she will drink two more Ventis and smoke several Marlboro Reds with her publicist, Michael Pagnotta, who has worked with her since she was five. (Of the two to four giant Starbucks beverages she downs a day, she says she generally alternates between chai latte and skim latte—though she recently discovered the red eye, a potent mix of coffee and espresso. "Those will wake you up," she says, chuckling.)

"When I was younger, on weekends, my mom would make us pancakes with our initials on them and then a tiny cup of coffee," says Olsen. She quickly became an addict. "I remember at 10 sneaking my own coffee and pouring a ton of sugar in and going up to the playroom and drinking it."

So it's not such a surprise when the highly caffeinated actress lets on that—over and above her never-lived-in $7.3 million apartment in the West Village, beyond her tricked-out black Range Rover and even more than her enviable collection of designer bags—the possession she prizes most is her new espresso machine. "It's the most amazing thing I've ever had," she says dreamily. "It makes cappuccino all day long."

Oprah; What I Know For Sure

2005-11-20T06:44:00.000-08:00

A healthy relationship brings joy - not just some of the time but most of the time. I was clearing out a drawer the other day and came across 12 pages that stopped me in my tracks. It was a looove letter I'd written but never sent (thank God) to a guy I was dating. I was 29 at the time, desperate and obsessed with this man. It was 12 pages of whinin' and pinin' so pathetic that I didn't recognize myself. And though I've kept my journals going all the way back to age 15, I held my own burning ceremony for this testament to what I thought was love. I wanted no written record that I was ever that pitiful and disconnected from myself. The guy was just not that into me, and I couldn't see it.

When Sex and the City consultant Greg Behrendt appeared on my show last fall, he spawned a revolution with those words: He's just not that into you. Greg told the women in the audience one by one that they were giving themselves up for men who clearly didn't give two hoots about them. And one by one, the women admitted that they'd been settling for crumbs.

I was rootin' for Greg because I now know that a relationship built on real love feels good. It isn't selfish; it doesn't cause you anxiety. When someone really loves you, he understands that you're lovable just because you're here. How he treats you underscores that understanding.

Yes, a relationship requires work. But if it's healthy, it should bring you joy - not just some of the time but most of the time. It should never require losing your voice, your self-respect, or your dignity. And whether you're 25 or 65, it should involve bringing all of who you are to the table - and walking away with even more.

I know for sure that in the final analysis of our lives - when the to-do lists are no more, when the frenzy is finished, when our e-mail boxes are empty - the only thing that will have any lasting value is whether we've loved others and whether they've loved us.

Oprah Show

2005-11-20T06:41:00.000-08:00

Uma Thurman

Oprah: I heard a definition many years ago: "Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different." Isn't that a great definition? It just means that when you know better, you do better. If you had known better at that time you would have done better.

At the end of their afternoon tea, Uma asked Meryl one of Oprah's favorite questions: What do you know for sure?

"I know life is short and I'm a lucky woman. I think that you find your own way. You have your own rules. You have your own understanding of yourself, and that's what you're going to count on. In the end, it's what feels right to you. Not what your mother told you. Not what some actress told you. Not what anybody else told you but the still, small voice. Beyond that, I don't know. And it's the not knowing that's the good part. To me, mystery is the most beautiful thing - the fact that you can't figure it out - that's it for me. That's for sure."

Nicole Kidman

"I always go to my grandmother's grave. Actually my father and I walk through the graves together when I go back to Sydney, and we go and see my grandmother's grave and I like it. There's nothing wrong with that. I put flowers and I also like to just go and take flowers to different graves." She says it gives her "a sense of, I suppose, just the cycles of life, you know? And it also puts everything into perspective. It makes you feel actually very small."

Jennifer Aniston

"The other day I was doing yoga with my girlfriend. We finished and we were sitting there stretching and I looked over at her and said, 'You know what? I have to say I have a feeling I don't know if I've ever felt before. I don't want to be anywhere other than where I am right now sitting across from you.' And that means I'm not sitting somewhere dwelling on the past or obsessing about something in the future. It was a feeling of total peace."

Sarah Jessica Parker

"I really think that the substantial things really reveal themselves much more clearly now," she says. "Really what is important to me … is my family and my friends. And my family and my friends are the family that I choose."

Sarah J Parker; Vogue Sept 05

2005-11-08T02:55:00.000-08:00

A good thing about Sarah Jessica Parker is that even though her "life after Sex and the City" is in full swing, she feels that there is time to stop everything and smell the roses. She told the babysitter she'd be back by around four - and she'd be lying to you if she said she was happy being away from her good-smelling son - but here, in New Orleans, at the botanical gardens, she is way into smelling the flowers, especially the smelling part. With each expectant breath she luxuriates in the scent of a rose. "Oh, come here, smell this," she keeps saying. Yogic postures are required to reach your nose to the roses.

It's not just the flowers Sarah Jessica loves in New Orleans. She loves New Orleans. She's living in a house in the Garden District. At Whole Foods on Magazine Street, her son in the cart, she even signed a Sex and the City T-shirt on a worker at the checkout counter, to the thrill of the local paper, the Times-Picayune. Her neighbors invite her for Sunday dinners. "I had never been to New Orleans," she says, "and until you see it you don't understand its beauty. The architecture is unbelievable. There's not a house that's not beautiful. It's a city full of incredibly kind people, full of people who really take seriously Southern hospitality."

And of course she loves the food. "Po' boys are so freakin' good," she says as she passes a po' boy stand on the drive over to the gardens.

It's hot, though, and this morning she was feeling the heat as she filmed scenes from Failure to Launch, a comedy with Matthew McConaughey that involves a guy in his 30s who lives at home and uses his parents as cover to keep him from having to commit to a woman, a scheme that begins to fall apart when he meets Sarah Jessica's character. "You won't believe what I was wearing all morning filming a paint-ball fight," she says.

She has also just finished a movie with the working title of The Family Stone, due out this fall, which stars just about everybody - Dermot Mulroney, Claire Danes, Diane Keaton, Luke Wilson, and Rachel McAdams - and is her first role after Carrie Bradshaw.

But now, she's cool as she strolls the gardens, down the secret rows, past test roses, into the old hothouse, the wet humid home to the orchids. "You know, I am good with orchids, and I don't really know why," she says. Yes, Sarah Jessica is proving herself to be a little infatuated by scents and smells, not to mention good at explaining them. "Oh, dark-blue Lily of the Nile," she says, sniffing. Another rose - but it does not satisfy. "This one's more classic rose, and it's a higher note," she says. "It's more green-smelling than the other one. It would smell nice after you took a shower."

The reason for her olfactory expertise is the project she is most immediately excited about in the wake of Sex and the City: This month she is launching her new fragrance, Lovely - a scent that she has been working on not just for a few weeks or months but for years, so that she really does have a fragrance knowledge, a semiprofessional life among smells. You should see her explain how one ought to apply a perfume to one's arm: "You never crush it," she says. "It's all about the application."

For a long time, Sarah Jessica kept her fragrance passion a secret. Now she is public. And at this moment, before she has to jump back into her car, she has found the perfect rose.

"Ok, here we go, Pretty Lady," she says. "Ok, it's a bit more shy than a concentrated rose. It's not superaggressive." She beckons. "Ok, smell that!"

Sarah Jessica Parker pulls up to the curb at Clancy's, a restaurant uptown, in her rented Volvo, the radio tuned to the local jazz station. Clancy's is just a few blocks from the Mississippi River, but as Sarah Jessica walks in, it feels like the carpet in front of the Kodak Theatre for a moment. Nash Laurent, the impeccable maitre d', greets her easily, familiarly, and brings her to a table in the back. In a minute or two, the house specials arrive - fried soft-shell crab, Vidalia onions with fresh, rich red tomatoes, and for starters, oysters baked with Brie. "I don't eat like this every day," she says, his being pretty obvious.

Sarah Jessica is discussing her post-Sex and the City took her a while to figure out. After all, what's your next move when America thinks you and Carrie Bradshaw are one and the same? Do you pull a Seinfeld and walk away, content to be seen in the occasional commercial? Her answer: You choose your next part very carefully - in this case, a small film from the producer of Sideways. Directed by Thomas Bezucha, The Family Stone is the latest example of that genre-breaking genre, the 'dramedy' or 'comma' - that is, a comedic portrayal of dramatic events, in this case the interior life of a woman who is rejected by her boyfriend's family.

'I play a woman who is extremely successful in business,' says Sarah Jessica, digging into the tomatoes and onions.' IPOs and the South Asian market are her specialty. She's really wound tight, really controlling, really rigid, really-- she lacks certain social skills that are surprising. She's very intimidated by people. She always assumes people aren't going to like her, and of course it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.' The woman's name is Meredith, and the family Meredith meets us a liberal, eccentric New England family, a caring and nurturing family, who are out to hate the woman their beloved son brings home.

'In ways that only progressive people can be intolerant, they are intolerant,' says Michael London, the producer.

Playing the sister of Sarah Jessica's character is Claire Danes, who was impressed with Parker's actorly chops - by the way she transformed Meredith from un-self-aware to self-aware in the course of the Midsummer Night's Dream-esque plot. 'She exposes enormous vulnerability easily,' says Danes, who also enjoyed hanging out with Parker. 'I've loved her from afar and now I love her up close. She's just so innately charming and feminine and generous, and she has a beautiful voice. Life is more pleasurable when she's around.' According to Danes, Sarah Jessica never swears, even when playing darts between takes. 'She's incredibly polite,' Danes says. 'She's ladylike. She doesn't curse. I felt downright crass.'

For his part, Michael London admired Sarah Jessica as he watched her make peace with the fact that she was playing an unsympathetic character, which is gracious. 'She wasn't accustomed to being loathed and she wasn't accustomed to being loathsome,' he says. 'Sarah is extraordinary lovable. There's no other word for her.' Like Sarah Jessica, London thinks she made the right post-HBO choice. 'I think the last thing Sarah wanted after Sex and the City was a traditional vehicle, and here she gets to play against type, and we get an actress of depth and texture and feeling for the role.'

'It was the hardest experience I've had in a really, really, really long time,' says Sarah Jessica. 'This character talks nonstop. She's in a lot of pain. She's really incapable of extracting herself from situations she creates for herself. It was an extremely hard part, surrounded by a lot of really, really great actors.'

Dermot Mulroney, who plays her boyfriend, was impressed by her acting but also by her momness. During the filming of The Family Stone, they were both taking care of their respective children - he his six-year-old boy, and she her two-and-a-half-year-old while her husband, Matthew Broderick, was away. In Mulroney's eyes, Sarah Jessica made it seem almost easy, as if working and raising children all at once were no big deal. 'She would show up at an early call, on time, together, good-natured. And then to be sitting at the lunch table and have her say, 'Oh, no, I can't that weekend; I have my new fragrance coming out!'

'I mean, she's not only a really great actress,' Mulroney says, 'she's a really smart businessperson. She's really on the ball.'

Lovely is, as mentioned above, Sarah Jessica Parker's new scent, and yes, technically, it is a celebrity fragrance, Sarah Jessica Parker being a celebrity. But it is not like a lot of celebrity fragrances. Not to look down on the creative processes involved in the creation of certain other celebrity fragrances, not to cast aspersions on the scents and smells of the famous, but some celebrities just sort of phone their fragrance development in. Sarah Jessica is the opposite. She is a little embarrassed about how much she is into it. After getting married to Matthew Broderick, and then having a child with him, and dealing with the issues involved with marrying and having a child with someone, she still did not mention to him her fragrance dream.

'It seemed completely narcissistic,' she says. 'If I dared say it out loud I thought people would say, 'Who do you think you are?' I couldn't say the words out loud.'

Meanwhile, she in fact was known among her friends and family for her own scent. Something that happens on the streets of New York if you are Sarah Jessica Parker is this: You pass a friend who does not recognize you, for reasons having to do with sunglasses and hats or distractions, and then a few seconds later that friend, smelling you, turns and calls out: 'Sarah Jessica?'

Sarah Jessica's long and intensive history with fragrance nearly rivals her more famous relationship with fashion, and it begins with her in high school, when she used Love's Baby Soft. 'I knew that that was, you know, a fling,' she says. Then, as a teenager, while in Portland, Maine, in a play called Death of a Miner, she played the daughter of the actress Mary McDonald, who happened to use Aliage, an old Estee Lauder perfume. 'It was very peppery,' she recalls. 'It was very sexy.' She left the play for a spot in Square Pegs, her first big TV hit, and lived in LA, where, in her local apothecary, she fell in love with oils, that she mixed herself. Then, one day, when she was 20, Sarah Jessica's fragrance life changed forever. 'I met a girl who was wearing just a crappy musk brand,' she says. 'I said 'My God, you smell great!' And she said, 'It's just this thing from Rite Aid.' And I went to Rite Aid and I started using it, and it became part of my mix, up until today.'

Enjoying the Brie-covered oysters now, Sarah Jessica explains that musk appealed to her as an oil, the way it mingled with clothing, the way it lived on in her closet. 'Musk tends not to be considered ladylike, for people who don't shave under their arms,' she says. 'People tend to think of musk - while everybody likes it, especially men - as confident and forward and a little less gender-specific. Florals tend to be female and more marketable, and palatable.' She liked that the drugstore fragrance was really, really, cheap. 'At that point I'd come to understand that good things can come from all sources,' she says, 'that the finest department store in the world doesn't necessarily have something better suited for somebody, and I was thrilled at the price; it was $6.99 a bottle.'

How into the perfume was she? So into it that she eventually ordered it by the case directly from the company. So into it that when the company was about to go out of business they called her and asked if she wanted to buy some. 'You know what?' she said, 'I'll take them all.' She kept the 590 bottles in a storage space.

For a long time, she was happy with her fragrance life. 'The combination of the oils and this drugstore thing, I thought, was particularly winning,' she says. 'And I really stuck with it for years and years and years and honestly to the satisfaction of cabdrivers - it was just a crowd pleaser.' But as her bottle supply dwindled, she finally screwed up her courage. She spoke her fragrance dreams to her husband.

'He's a rather principled person,' Sarah Jessica says. 'He doesn't want a lot of people looking at him or us. He doesn't want to encourage anything that would make people pay more attention to us. But when I mentioned it to him, he said, 'You should! Absolutely! Everybody knows your smell!'

The next thing Sarah Jessica Parker knew, she was in touch with some fragrance people. They met in an unscented office downtown with Catherine Walsh, senior VP of cosmetics and American licenses for the Lancaster Group Worldwide. Walsh was impressed with Parker's perfume preparations. 'She knew olfactory how she wanted the fragrance to smell,' Walsh says.

Sarah Jessica presented a mix of her personal fragrance to Walsh. 'She had her concoction with her,' said Walsh. (Walsh uses the word concoction in the best possible sense.) With Sarah Jessica's homemade scent as a guide, they set to work, meeting regularly to talk and smell, usually over lunch, which would usually be sushi, a food the smell of which does not linger. Sarah Jessica was into it - some might say extremely into it, which is her M.O. 'She's calling all the time with ideas,' says Carolyn Strauss, president of HBO Entertainment, and a friend of Sarah Jessica's since the early days of Sex and the City. 'She's exhausting.'

Sarah Jessica Parker sat down with professional perfumers, sometimes called noses, who put the chemical portrait of a perfume together. This was for her like sitting down with Coco Chanel or Ethel Barrymore. Meanwhile, she was bringing samples home to her sisters, who were spraying them on one another, on their clothes. They were like a bunch of fragrance mad scientists. Sometimes she would ask her husband to smell something. 'I knew it was wrong,' she says, 'when Matthew would say, 'Uh, do you sell braces and handkerchiefs here as well, ma'am?'

After many weeks, they were close. They had the name - Lovely was Sarah Jessica's idea, as was the egg shape of the bottle. And they were getting very close on the scent of the scent, with mandarin and apple and bergamot and rosewood, with lavender cutting through, and for a second scent course serves up patchouli, and then finishes with a cedary if delicate musk.

'By the end the changes were so minute,' says Catherine Walsh, 'we were on the molecular level. We were chopping and cutting atoms at this point.'

People on Sarah Jessica's side, such as her sisters and her mother, were excited, while people on the fragrance-company side were also excited, even though a deal had yet to be signed and they had to keep everything completely under wraps, super-hush-hush.

They just needed to sign the deal, which is why everybody involved freaked out when Matthew Broderick went on the Late Show with David Letterman and spilled the beans. On that evening, she was at home, sweeping the kitchen while watching TV. 'I don't know what happened on that show,' she says, 'and Matthew will tell you it is the weirdest thing. Matthew knew it was a state secret. I was being cagey about it. I wasn't telling anyone.'

Letterman asked Broderick how his wife was. He replied that she was beautiful - a perfect start. Letterman asked what his wife was up to, and the part of Broderick's brain that was excited about the fragrance's development - and this is just a theory, since husbands' brains are really so little understood by science - told Letterman on national TV that she was making a fragrance.

At this point, according to Sarah Jessica Parker, the thought that went through her mind was, 'Is he out of his freakin' mind?'

As Broderick continued, Sarah Jessica discontinued sweeping and, again according to her, shouted, 'Noooooooooooooooooo!'

Letterman said that she 'always smells lovely,' which has Sarah Jessica nearly convulsing, in that Lovely, as we now know, was the still-secret scent's name.

After screaming at the television for a period of time, she regained her composure and settled on an extremely reasonable course of action. 'You know what?' she recalls thinking. 'I am not going to mention this to Matthew. There's no reason to get him upset. It might have gone by without notice, and why make him feel bad?'

The next morning, with Broderick still asleep, Sarah Jessica took their son to school. As she strollered, her BlackBerry began filling with messages from her publicist, who was frantically deflecting fragrance calls; the press had jumped on the story as if it were a breakthrough in medical science. Sarah Jessica was certain all this would ruin the fragrance deal. As it turned out, the fragrance executives were Ok with the whole thing. They even thought it was kind of funny, after a period of time passed. 'It was fine,' Sarah Jessica said. One thing Broderick had going for him, as far as forgiveness goes, was his own personal scent. 'He smells so good it's ridiculous,' says Sarah Jessica. 'He's just lucky like that.'

What do you wear to launch a fragrance? How do you choose the dress that will represent you and your scent to the world? After the fragrance deal didn't fall apart, a team was assembled to find the dress that would be for Lovely what khakis and cool accessories was for Sarah Jessica's Gap ads. Thus, Sarah Jessica hired Trey Laird, the creative director on the Gap ads, and Laird and the Lancaster fragrance team and Sarah Jessica, among others, sat down and considered a dress. The as-yet-undersigned dress needed to mimic what they had decided was the classic nature of the fragrance (lavender), and it needed to also to address the fragrance's old-fashioned glamour (florals) and its forward-seeming sexiness (musk). It needed to be, in a word, lovely.

Obviously, Sarah Jessica has logged her time on the red carpet, and she knows her was around a special dress, so before she discusses precisely how she arrived at the dress in question, let's look at her history on the red carpet.

Somewhere between Square Pegs and Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica grew from being a red-carpet novice to what might be a red-carpet expert, a red belt. Driving around New Orleans on a summer afternoon, Sarah Jessica consents to a kind of torture: while passing peach trucks and on her way, ultimately, to the house she is renting, she looks back in paparazzi history at photos of her on the red carpet, from the dawn of her career until now - she reviews her own fashion education and the evolution of the red carpet itself, dress by dress.

To reiterate, this is an intense experience. These are photos of her past that she had not prepared herself emotionally to see. It is an exercise that is at times embarrassing, at times stressful, though to her credit she never demurs, no matter how she feels about it; she never leaps from the car. Her first comment gives an insight into how much the red carpet has changed in the opinion of a participant.

'Oh, my God,' she says.

She begins in the eighties, when fashion on the red carpet was not about wearing fashion. Stars laughed in the face of the glamorous red-carpet styles of the past. As Sarah Jessica uncovers her face, she sees herself at the premiere of At Close Range in 1986. 'Leather jacket,' she says, 'punky vintage-looking, a la Madonna. I bought that at Fred Segal, if you must know.' She is shaking her head. 'This was very much in fashion, this sort of unconstructed shoulder, you know. Comme des Garcons. I was really super young; leathers were really big in California.'

The clothes memories are rushing back to her now.

April 1987, wearing a vintage purple housedress, walking with Kevin Bacon at an AIDS benefit: 'These are like common dresses worn by working women or mothers. These are the classic chiffon forties dresses, which by the way, people weren't doing that so much then. It was just a really cheap way of dressing, like I would get these from thrift-store bins for $1.99. I'll wear vintage all the time today, but I'll wear reconstructed vintage, like Galanos, or old Dior.'

At the Slam Dance premiere, 1987, the antifashion look is becoming more architectural: jodhpurs from a riding store, a Alaia top, black flats. She is ruthless. 'It was a style that was developing in Southern California, specifically in Los Angeles. The jodhpurs are from a real horse store in New York; I mean, this I think is an atrocity, this purse across the-- it's unthinkable.' She looks away, almost swears. 'Jeez Louise, this is horrible,' she says.

She takes a time-out. 'I would say that I was very much a sheep, not a shepherd,' she says. 'I think that when you grow up and you're different, all you want to do is find a way to be the same. And then as a more mature adult with experience on your side, you realize the beauty of thinking on your own, and having your own ideas and opinions, whether or not other people agree with them, like them, object to them, aesthetically understand them - it kind of doesn't matter'

But now, something is happening at the end of the eighties in red-carpet fashion: We see it in the culture and in Sarah Jessica's red-carpet picks. Fashion is suddenly about fashion. The thrift-store dress she wears on a 1989 red carpet is not an old housecoat anymore, but an old beautiful dress, a thing of glamour. 'It cost me, I think, about ten dollars. It's a beautifully made dress, beautiful silk with burnt-out velvet over it and a nude body. I wore it a lot. I would definitely wear that dress again.'

Yes, there were some missteps, even as things progressed. The five-dollar white T-shirt that she wore with Jack Purcell sneakers, a white cotton skirt, and a black Chanel bag to the opening of the movie The Lion King, which she attended with her future husband, who voiced the part of Simba, the lion king, is not something she would again attempt. ('I met him before he was Simba,' she says. 'Did you think I liked him only because he was Simba?') But even the mistakes were a step toward what the red carpet was becoming, what it is today, as you might discern from her calm but subtextually hysterical recounting of the ensemble she wore to the For The Boys premiere in 1991. 'I remember exactly this whole thing - I put it all together myself. On my feet, which you can't see, are some Christian Lacroix shoes that I still own. This was a bra that I wore as a shirt, which was rather bold and tasteless, I understand. And this was a fancy designer's coat that I borrowed for the evening ; I saw it somewhere, borrowed it, and returned it; that might have been my first borrow. And I did my own hair and makeup as usual, and I bought everything, bought these pants at Lord & Taylor's and had them tailored. They were a palazzo and I had them brought in to a peg.'

By 1996, showing up on the red carpet to the premiere of The Cable Guy at Mann's Chinese Theatre with her husband, she is, as she sees it now, where she wants to be. 'I like that very much,' she says of the simple black jacket and white pants. 'I just think it's so simple. I think it's very possible that I could wear something like that today. I would make them a little more narrow. And I would make the jacket shorter 'cause I'm short. I just think my hair looks fine. I did it myself, obviously. And I think Matthew looks great.'

She is happy with the red Prada on the red carpet for the opening of State and Main in 2000 - a red dress of Roman simplicity - and she beams at a dreamy pink Oscar de la Renta, with an organza flower on her arm. 'At this point in the red-carpet game,' she says, pleased, 'I wore what I responded to, and that was it.'

To a New Year's Eve performance of The Producers in 2003, she wore another fanciful dress from de la Renta, the man who was coming to define the higher stakes, and higher standards of elegance, that stars by then were coming to expect. 'It just suited the night so well,' she recalls happily, 'and I kind of think that's what it should be all about: Like what suits you.' De la Renta suited her well, too, for the 2003 CFDA Fashion Awards, and then - this is what they call a fashion moment; you will probably remember this - did a green two-tiered taffeta cocktail pouf for her to wear to an American Ballet Theatre fund-raiser in 2004.

'I really love Mr. De la Renta,' she says. 'I love him. This reminds me of the kinds of things that kind of epitomize the de la Renta woman that I hope to be someday.'

These final images in her trip down fashion memory lane are very much what the red carpet is today: shorter dresses; architectural silhouettes; everything a bit more formal, elegant, glamorous. The red carpet now is a little old-fashioned, but also forward-looking and sexy, a description that also approaches a kind of summation of the idea of Sarah Jessica Parker herself, who at the end of this fashion experiment, is very happy, if drained.

As the car pulls up to her destination in the beautiful old Victorian-homed neighborhood of the Garden District, she puts down the folder of her red-carpet past. 'I can't believe I got to wear all those dresses,' she says.

During the fragrance-fashion meetings, the Lovely team determined that this dress would have to transcend time, if possible. 'We wanted the dress to last,' Sarah Jessica says. 'We wanted it so that you wouldn't look at it and say, 'Oh, that's definitely 2005.' And so of course, everybody said Mr. De la Renta.'

The Lovely team went to his studio. Sketches were made. People touched fabrics. People were pleased. The sticking point would be the color. There was only one color that the dress could be, a pink, a particular pink that the entire fragrance campaign was built on. There was only one bolt of this pink.

'It was the perfect color,' says Sarah Jessica.

'The dress itself, it has a very full skirt and a very tight strapless torso,' says de la Renta. 'You know, she is not extremely tall, but she can wear anything really,. She has a sort of chameleon kind of body. She can transform herself to anything she wants to be. She can be an ingenue, a flirtatious lamb, a Marilyn Monroe type. She just looks great in my clothes, and you know what I do is the essence of femininity - she is herself the essence of femininity.'

In the end, the dress that you will see a thousand times on TV this fall and all over the printed world (and even in the very magazine you're holding) is a dress she could wear to an opening, a spectacular gala - a dress that she might wear to the premiere of all premieres.

'It definitely has that red-carpet quality,' Sarah Jessica says. 'It's the very unadorned. It's very simple. There's no hyperbole about the dress. It's simple and really classic. It's perfect.'

'I have a problem concerning wearing it again,' she says. 'I have too much sentimental attachment to it. It's coddled like a baby in my archives.'

Jennifer Aniston; Vanity Fair Sept 05

2005-10-30T23:29:00.000-08:00

When Jennifer Aniston opens the door to the Malibu bungalow she’s been holed up in lately, she gives me a radiant smile and an effusive hello.

Then she bursts into tears.

We have scarcely sat down in the living room, a serene little haven simply furnished with cushy white sofas and white flowers and white candles, when her face crumbles. She is instantly aghast. “I haven’t been feeling emotionally lately, really I haven’t,” she wails, fluttering her hands like Rachel Green in distress, except that this time it isn’t funny.

Other than the 24-hour security detail guarding her safety, Aniston is all alone in the modest rental where she has camped out while dealing with the end of her marriage to Brad Pitt – and its devastating aftermath, which has been far worse than the actual split. The last few months have brought an endless nightmare of hurtful headlines about her soon-to-be-ex-husband, along with the blatantly fraudulent stories about herself, in the tabloids and supermarket gossip magazines. Pursued around the clock by the rapid paparazzi she refers to as “ratzies”, she is ambushed even on her own deck by photographers who lurk on the beach outside her door, spying on her every move.

As she squeezes her eyes shut in an effort to stop crying, the scene provides a painful contrast with the last time we met. Little more than a year ago, I interviewed Pitt at the Beverly Hills mansion that he and Aniston had just spent two years renovating. A testament to both his passion for architecture and the couple’s hopeful vision of their shared future, the beautiful old house awaiting only a baby in a bassinet to complete a picture-perfect existence.

When I left, they both walked me out to my car. Their home, its windows lit and welcoming, glowed in the twilight. As we said our good-byes, Pitt and Aniston leaned together in the drive-way, arms twined around each other. Her head rested trustingly on his buff chest, still pumped up from his rigorous training to play the warrior Achilles in Troy.

They seemed the most fortunate couple imaginable – two beautiful superstars who had hit the jackpot, earning not only fame and riches but also an enduring love. Their fans had long been captivated by the romance of America’s Sweetheart and the Sexiest Man in the World, and now they were ready to begin a thrilling new chapter. Aniston’s 10-year run on Friends was ending, and she and Pitt had vowed to start a family when her stupendously successful television series was finished.

Pitt’s final words to me reinforced the impression of connubial bliss: “I’m happier than I’ve ever been.” But the ensuing months brought an onslaught of rumors that he had gotten involved with Angelina Jolie while filming Mr. And Mrs. Smith. Instead of the joyful announcement many had anticipated from the Pitts, there was only silence. The New Year began with photographs of the beautiful couple strolling hand in hand along the beach on Anguilla, looking relaxed and happy. Immediately the buzz shifted into rhapsodic re-appraisals of the state of their union.

And then came the oh-so-civilized announcement, on January 7, that Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt were separating – that their parting was “the result of much thoughtful consideration,” that it was not caused by “any of the speculation reported by the tabloid media,” and that they would remain “committed and caring friends with great love and admiration for one another.”

If Pitt had kept a low profile in the months to come, that might have even turned out to be true. Instead, the ominous drumroll of gossip began to crescendo as he and Jolie rendezvoused in exotic locales, still denying that they were an item. With the paparazzi snapping away, Pitt stepped into what looked suspiciously like a paternal role with Jolie’s adopted Cambodian son, Maddox.

“It was extremely hurtful to Jen that he was seen with another woman so quickly after they were separated,” says Andrea Bendewald, an actress who has been one of Aniston’s closest friends since they were teenagers.

Instead of being reviled as The Other Woman, Jolie posed for pictures on an energetic round of appearances as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations – and then trumped even that public-relations bonanza by adopting another orphan, an African girl whose parents had died of AIDS. In the blink of an eye, the twice-divorced Jolie – previously known as a tattooed vixen with a taste of bisexuality, heroin, brotherly incest, mental institutions, and wearing her husband’s blood – had morphed into a globe-trotting humanitarian who seemed to be channelling Audrey Hepburn.

For the 36-year-old Aniston, who had expected to spend the last year being pregnant, the pain of watching this spectacle unfold was compounded by vicious rumors about herself. As misogynist as they were false, sensationalistic stories claimed the real reason the marriage ended was that Aniston refused to have Pitt’s baby because she was so ambitious she cared only about her career.

Even now, that sexist slur makes her face darken. “A man divorcing would never be accused of choosing career over children,” she says. “That really pissed me off. I’ve never in my life said I don’t want to have children. I did and I do and I will! The women who inspire me are the ones who have careers and children; why would I want to limit myself? I’ve always wanted to have children, and I would never give up that experience for a career. I want to have it all.”

Aniston’s intimate note acidly that Pitt could have done more to refute the mean-spirited rumor that his wife wouldn’t bear his children, which reinforced the impression that he had good cause to leave her for Earth Mother Jolie. To some, this looks like sheer hypocrisy.

“When Brad and Jen were in the marriage, having a baby was not his priority – ever,” says one mutual friend. “It was an abstract desire for him, whereas for Jen it was much more immediate. So is there a part of Brad that’s diabolical? Did he think, I want to get out of this marriage, but I want to come out smelling like a rose, so I’m going to let Jen be cast as the ultra-feminist and I’m going to be cast as the poor husband who couldn’t get a baby and so had to move on?”

As the image wars raged in the gossip media, a heartbroken Aniston retreated to her Malibu hideaway to lick her wounds in private, accompanied by only her elderly corgi-terrier mix, Norman, who spends most of his time snoring on his dog bed. Public sympathy seemed to be on her side; the Hollywood boutique Kitson reported that its “Team Aniston” T-shirts were outselling “Team Jolie” T-shirts by a margin of 25 to 1. But that was cold comfort as Aniston was assaulted by one provocation after another.

When the Pitts broke up, Brad insisted he hadn’t slept with Jolie, and Aniston accepted his denial. “She wasn’t naïve,” says Kristin Hahn, an executive at Pitts’ production company, Plan B. “She’s not suggesting she didn’t know there was an enchantment, and a friendship. But Brad was saying, ‘This is not about another woman.’”

The moment he and Aniston separated, however, he re-emerged in what looked like a full-blown affair with Jolie. Struggling to accept a separation she never wanted, Aniston found that the “facts” she had been told kept shifting like quicksand beneath her feet. When I ask about that gracious, no-one-is-to-blame announcement of their separation, she takes a deep breath. “What we said was true – “

As I raise my eyebrows, she pauses for a moment, and then adds carefully, “as far as I knew. We wrote it together, very consciously, and felt very good about it. We exited this relationship beautifully as we entered it.”

All Aniston wanted then was to figure out what happened; how did the happy life they’d planned drift so far off course? But everything changed on April 29, when photographs broke of Brad and Angelina, frolicking on the beach with Maddox at a romantic resort in Africa. “The world was shocked, and I was shocked,” she says, still bending over backward to not excoriate her ex.

But to say that this news was like pouring salt in the wound would understate the its impact considerably; how about pouring molten lava into the hole where somebody ripped your heart out? And then things got worse.

The skies over Los Angeles are uncharacteristically grey today, and the Pacific shimmers with an opalescent sheen. Although the weather is gloomy, the ocean is calm; waves lap gently at the shoreline, making a soft shushing sound that Aniston has found very soothing lately.
“That’s quite a backyard, in my opinion,” she says as we stand on her deck, watching the hypnotic rhythm of the waves. “Just being able to go to the water’s edge and scream – “

She grins. “Not too loudly. You don’t want people to think that you’re crazy. But it can be very cathartic.”

She is wearing a white tank top and white drawstring linen pants, with a vivid lavender cashmere cardiwrap around her to ward off the unseasonable chill. Formidably toned by yoga, her body is in superb shape, but despite her tanned skin and megawatt smile she looks fragile and wan.

She remains resolutely upbeat nonetheless, casting her current situation in the most positive light possible. “It’s beautiful here; I love it,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to have a little Malibu beach house, and it feels good. I’m enjoying simplifying things.”

Although the bungalow was dark and depressing when she first saw it, a quickie makeover has transformed it into a cozy sanctuary that’s far more representative of Aniston’s taste than the show-place she and Pitt shared, where the décor seemed all hard edges and unforgiving materials. “Brad and I used to joke that every piece of furniture was either a museum piece or just uncomfortable,” Aniston says. “He definitely had his sense of style, and I definitely have my sense of style, and sometimes they clashed. I wasn’t so much into modern.”

I mention Nicole Kidman’s quip after splitting up with Tom Cruise, when she asked what she looked forward to in her new life without the diminutive husband who had abruptly ended their marriage. “Wearing high heels again,” Kidman retorted.

So I ask Aniston – who filed for divorce May 25 and expects it to become final this fall – what she’s enjoying about being on her own. “I can have a comfortable couch again,” she says with a wry smile.

In the tabloids and celebrity gossip magazines, the soap-opera version of her life continues to hurtle along like a runway express train, rushing Aniston through major life stages with ludicrous speed: Jen Is Devastated! Jen Is Furious! Jen Gets Revenge! Jen Has a New Man! Jen Is Over Brad! Most of the stories are wrong. (No, Oprah didn’t try to get Brad and Jen back together; no, Jen is not romantically involved with Vince Vaughn, her co-star in The Break Up, a comedy about a separating couple who continue to live together, which they shot in Chicago over the summer.)

Other reports are just idiotically simple- minded, breathlessly advancing a plot that bears little resemblance to the long, complex, painful experience of getting over a divorce. While the tabloids insist on dividing Aniston’s emotions into neat, distinct chapters, the reality is that pain and denial and anger and resignation all blur together, sometimes at the same moment – and the lengthy process of mourning is nowhere near over.

“There are many stages of grief,” she says. “It’s sad, something coming to an end. It cracks you open, in a way – cracks you open to feeling. When you try to avoid the pain, it creates greater pain. I’m a human being, having a human experience in front of the world. I wish it weren’t in front of the world. I try really hard to rise above it.”

Aniston is struggling to find a deeper meaning in the debacle. “I have to think there’s some reason I have called this into my life,” she says. “I have to believe that – otherwise it’s just cruel.”

Her friends are filled with admiration for the way she’s handled the whole mess. “This woman is basically having a root canal without anesthesia, but she’s really trying not to numb the pain or to shove it under the rug,” says Hahn. “She’s grown so much, and she continues to grow on a daily basis, because every time you think, ‘Well, I’ve dealt with this,’ there’s another hurdle to get over. It’s a bit Job-like at the moment.”

Aniston’s response has been to retreat into her cocoon, “in an effort to take care of myself and my heart,” she says. “I feel like I’m nestling. I love being home. I have friends that come over. My girlfriends I’ve had for 20 years. When things happen, the tribe gathers around and lifts you up. I’ve had lonely moments, sure, but I’m also enjoying being alone. There’s no question it takes getting used to; I’m a partnership person, and if something happens you instinct is to share it – but you’re no longer part of a couple. I definitely miss that. It’s sort of like Bambi – like you’re trying to learn how to walk. You’re a little awkward; you stumble a little bit. The things you would do with your partner, you don’t do. It’s uncharted territory, but I think it’s good for me to be a solo person right now. You’re forced to re-discover yourself and take it to another level. If you can find a way to see the glass half full, these are the moments you earn the most. I’ve had to re-introduce myself to myself in a way that’s different.”

She doesn’t downplay the difficulties. “Am I lonely? Yes. Am I upset? Yes. Am I confused? Yes. Do I have my days when I’ve thrown a little pity party for myself? Absolutely. But I’m also doing really well,” she says. “I’ve got an unbelievable support team, and I’m a tough cookie… I believe in therapy; I think it’s an incredible tool to educate the self on the self. I feel very strong. I’m really proud of how I conducted myself.”

A crucial part of Aniston’s strategy has been to ignore the putrid strew of rumor, speculation, and outright falsehood in the tabloid media. “It’s been very important to me not to read anything, not to see anything,” she says. “It’s been my saving grace. That stuff is just toxic for me right now. I probably avoided a lot of suffering by not engaging in it, not reading, not watching.”

She gestures toward Norman, who has roused himself for a moment to check on his mistress’s whereabouts. “It’s like those dog cones,” she says, encircling her neck as if putting on one of the plastic cones prescribed by vets to prevent dogs from scratching their ears. “I have my imaginary dog cone on, so I don’t see anything. It just allows for a much more peaceful life.”

Nevertheless, as Pitt publicly flaunted the instant family he created with Jolie, the tableaux of their newfound togetherness were humiliating. “I would be a robot if I said I didn’t feel moments of anger, of hurt, of embarrassment,” Aniston acknowledges.

But she tries to keep the lurid details to herself. “She is grieving, but she’s taken the high road,” says Bendewald. “She’s mourning the death of a marriage, and she’s done it very privately. She can have her moments of rage, but she doesn’t want to out him. She doesn’t want to make him the villain and her the victim.”

Indeed, Aniston vehemently rejects the interpretation that she was left for another woman. “I don’t feel like a victim,“ she says. “I’ve worked with this therapist for a long time, and her major focus is that you get one day of being a victim – and that’s it. Then we take responsibility for our own input. To live in a victim place is pointing a finger at someone else, as if you have no control. Relationships are two people; everyone is accountable. A lot goes into a relationship coming together, and a lot goes into a relationship falling apart. She’d say, ‘Even if it’s 98 percent the other person’s fault, it’s 2 percent yours, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.’ You can only clean up your side of the street.”

These days, one index of recovery is the fact that Aniston’s sardonic humor is resurfacing. When I tell her that my 13-year-old son is a big fan of hers, she doesn’t miss a beat. “Is he single?” she asks, deadpan.

She’ll toss off a crack about Pitt’s startling transformation into a punky bleached blond. “Billy Idol called – he wants his look back,” she murmurs with a sly smile.

By now she can even talk about those gut-wrenching photos of Jolie and Pitt in Kenya with mordant resignation rather than tears. “I can’t say it was one of the highlights of my year,” she says. “Who would deal with that and say, ‘Isn’t that sweet! That looks like fun!’? But shit happens. You joke and say, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’”

She sighs. “I feel like I’ve earned a superpower shield,” she says. Then, afraid of sounding grandiose, she adds, “I’m not comparing my suffering to other people’s suffering. Everybody has their own.”

Aniston’s friends were particularly horrified by W magazine’s 60-page photo spread featuring Pitt and Jolie as an early 1960s-style married couple with a brood of miniature blond Brads. “you want to shake the shit out of him and say, ‘Your timing sucks!’” says one. “He’s made some choices that have been tremendously insensitive.”

The W feature, which was entitled “Domestic Bliss,” couldn’t be blamed on the paparazzi; not only did Pitt conceptualise it, but he retained the international rights, so he actually profited from it. Aniston’s eyes widen in surprise when I mention that last fact, and she grimaces. “I didn’t know that,” she says. But she refuses to indulge herself I an angry reaction. “Is it odd timing? Yeah. But it’s not my life,” she says. “He makes his choices. He can do – whatever. We’re divorced, and you can see why.”

She shakes her head in exasperation. “I can also imagine Brad having absolutely no clue why people would be appalled by it,” she adds. “Brad is not mean-spirited; he would never intentionally try to rub something in my face. In hindsight, I can see him going, ‘Oh – I can see that was inconsiderate.’ But I know Brad. Brad would say, ‘That’s art!’”

She rolls her eyes, pretending to screw something into her forehead. “There’s a sensitivity chip that’s missing,” she says.

Aniston’s friends are amazed at her willingness to give Pitt the benefit of the doubt, but they basically agree with her assessment. “I don’t think he was trying to hurt Jen,” says Courteney Cox, Aniston’s dear friend and former co-star on Friends. “I don’t think that Brad is malicious, or a liar. The W thing was his idea, but I don’t think he thought that one through, about what it would look like to anyone else.”

Although Aniston remains determined not to bash out, she sometimes questions her own restraint. “Why am I protecting him?” she exclaimed to one friend, only to continue with what she sees as the signified course of action.

“I’m not interested in taking public potshots,” she explains. “It’s not my concern anymore. What happened to him after the separation – it’s his life now. I’ve made a conscious effort not to add to the toxicity of this situation. I haven’t retaliated. I don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t have a halo that I’m polishing here; everyone has their personal thoughts. But I would much rather everyone move on. I am not defined by this relationship. I am not defined by the part they’re making me play in the triangle. It’s maddening to me. But I had a mom who was angry about her divorce, and made shots, and I don’t want to play that out. If people are frustrated that I don’t want to do that, I’m sorry. I’m figuring this out as I go along. This is my first time at this particular picnic.”

As befits a storybook tale, the Pitts’ marriage was the first for both of them, and some of Aniston’s fondest memories are from the time they shared before the world discovered their romance. “We had so much fun falling in love,” she says wistfully. “It was so private; we kept it to ourselves for so long. It was something we were really proud of.” But after the relationship became public, it was always difficult to reconcile their mythic image with the quotidian reality of their private life, which was more likely to involve watching television, ordering takeout, and having close friends over than swanning around on red carpets.

“We were put on a pedestal, but we were just a couple like anybody else,” Aniston says. “When we were home, we’d watch the shows we loved, and one time there was this program called It’s Good to Be Brad and Jen. It was all about us going to Scotland and Greece and having our matching S.U.V.’s, and it wasn’t my life – I’d never even been to some of these places, but even I got sucked in. We’re sitting there saying, ‘Yeah, boy, it sure must be good to be Brad and Jen!’ So is it our responsibility to demystify this, to say, ‘This is not what it’s like – it’s not that fabulous, not that great’? There’s no doubt our life is fortunate, but…”

But even golden couples struggle with the formidable challenges of marriage. “It’s like the ebb and flow of every relationship,” Aniston says, “It’s hard; it gets easy; it gets fun again. What’s hard to sustain is some ideal that it’s perfect. That’s ridiculous. What’s fantastic about marriage is getting through those ebbs and flows with the same person, and looking across the room and saying, ‘I’m still here. And I still love you.’ You re-meet, reconnect. You have marriages within marriages within marriages. That’s what I love about marriage. That’s what I want in marriage. It’s unfortunate, but we live in a very disposable society. Those moments where it looks like ‘Uh-oh, this isn’t working!’ –those are the most important, transformative moments. Most couples draw up divorce papers when they’re missing out on an amazing moment of deepening and enlightenment and connection.”

She sighs heavily and turns away to light a Merit cigarette. “That’s not Brad’s view of it,” she says, glum again. “We believe in different things, I guess. You can’t force a relationship, even if it’s your view of how you would like it to be conducted. Obviously two people leave a relationship because there’s a different thought pattern happening. My goal is to try and achieve a very deep, committed relationship. That’s what I’m interested in, but it’s someone’s prerogative to be or not to be in or out of a relationship.”

“I think Jen wanted to work it out, and I don’t think he wanted to work it out,” Andrea Bendewald observes. “I don’t think he knew what he wanted.”

Nevertheless, Aniston has only kind words about her marriage. “I still feel so lucky to have experienced it. I wouldn’t know what I know now if I hadn’t been married to Brad,” she says. “I love Brad; I really love him. I will love him for the rest of my life. He’s a fantastic man. I don’t regret any of it, and I’m not going to beat myself up about it. We spent seven very intense years together; we taught each other a lot – about healing, and about fun. We helped each other through a lot, and I really value that. It was a beautiful, complicated relationship. The sad thing, for me, is the way it’s been reduced to a Hollywood cliché – or maybe it’s just a human cliché. I have a lot of compassion for everyone going through this.”

As for what went wrong, Aniston rejects any simplistic explanation. “It’s just complicated,” she says. “Relationships are complicated, whether they’re friendships or business relationships or parent relationships. I don’t think anybody in a marriage gets to a point where they feel like ‘We’ve got it!’ You’re two people continually evolving, and there will be times when those changes clash. There are all these levels of growth – and when you stop growing together, that’s when the problems happen.”

Friends say that it was always difficult for Aniston and Pitt to maintain the intimacy they craved while juggling their demanding work schedules, which often required long separations. Those tensions notwithstanding, Aniston believed her marriage was the real thing. “We both did,” she says.

So what happened? “I think – it changed,” she says haltingly. “We both changed.”

She sighs again. “You do the best you can, and I think we did. We did the best we could.”

Both of them? She looks me straight in the eye. “Both parties,” she says.

But nagging questions remain about Pitt’s conduct during the months leading up to their separation. “She was committed to the marriage,” says Bendewald. “He wanted to figure out who he was and what he wanted, but he seemed to want to do it without being married. She wanted him to figure out what he wanted and stay married. He didn’t think he could do that, so at that point she was like, ‘O.K., go figure it out.’”

Throughout that period, Pitt insisted that his relationship was not the cause of his marital discontent, but his actions since the separation have suggested otherwise.

“I just don’t know what happened,” Aniston admits. “There’s a lot I don’t understand, a lot I don’t know, and probably never will know, really. So I choose to take with me as much integrity and dignity and respect for what that relationship was as I can. I feel as I’m trying to scrounge around and pick up the pieces in the midst o this media-circus.”

Does she buy Brad’s claim that he didn’t cheat on her before they were separated? “I choose to believe my husband,” Aniston says. “At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised by anything but I would much rather choose to believe him.”

Their friends are still trying to parse what happened with Jolie. “I don’t think he started an affair physically, but I think he was attracted to her,” says Courteney Cox, who vacationed with her husband, David Arquette, and the Pitts on Anguilla just before they announced their separation. “There was a connection, and he was honest about that with Jen. Most of the time, when people are attracted to other people, they don’t tell. At least he was honest about it. It was an attraction he fought for a period of time.”

He may have been fighting it, but Pitt virtually checked out of his marriage as soon as he started working with Jolie, according to Aniston’s intimates. “He was gone,” says one.

Aniston met Jolie only once, when she took a passing opportunity to say hello. “It was on the lot of Friends – I pulled over and introduced myself,” Aniston recalls. “I said, ‘Brad is so excited about working with you. I hope you guys have a really good time.”

But he soon became emotionally unavailable for his wife, at a time when she needed him desperately. Pitt’s withdrawal coincided with the end of Friends, which Aniston experienced as a huge loss. “That was really painful. It was a family, and I don’t do great with families splitting up,” says Aniston, who was deeply wounded by her parents’ bitter divorce, which happened when she was 9.

“It was hard to have such a wonderful constant in your life, a place to go every day, and then all of the sudden it’s not there.” When she reached out for her husband’s support, she didn’t get it. “He just wasn’t there for me,” she says. To the amazement of Aniston’s friends, Pitt didn’t even show up for the final taping of Friends. “He was working,” she says, still defending him, even though movie stars have been known to request changes in a shooting schedule to accommodate events that are important to them. Although she isn’t talking to Pitt these days, Aniston remains in regular contact with his mother, whom she loves dearly, and she doesn’t rule out a better relationship with Pitt in the future. “I really do hope that someday we can be friends again,” she says.

She certainly doesn’t regret her four-and-a-half-year marriage – not even the million-dollar wedding with 50,000 flowers, a 40-member gospel choir, a Greek bouzouki band, and fireworks exploding over the Pacific. (“It was fantastic!” she says.) But she does have other regrets.

“There’s a lot I would probably do differently,” she says. “I’d take more vacations – getting away from work, enjoying each other in different environments. But there was always something preventing it; either he was working, or I was.”

She made more profound mistakes as well. “I wouldn’t give over so much of myself, which I did at times,” she admits. “It was that thing about being a nurturer; I love taking care of people, and I definitely put his needs before mine sometimes. It’s seamless; somewhere along the way, you sort of lose yourself. You just don’t know when it happens. It’s such an insidious thing, you don’t really see where it started – and where you ended. There’s no one to blame but yourself. I’ve always been that way in relationships, even with my mom. It’s not the healthiest. I feel like I’ve broken the pattern now. I’ll never let myself down like that again. I feel like my sense of self is being strengthened because of it.”

Aniston’s unhappy family history colored her experience of marriage from the outset. “I come from a fighting family, and I had a tough time arguing,” she says. “Fighting scared me. I wouldn’t speak up for myself. That’s something I’ve learned. I will always speak my mind.”

In recent months, the process of healing from the breakup with Brad has also created a new openness to healing relations with her mother. Their estrangement began nearly a decade ago, when Nancy Aniston gossiped about Jennifer on a television show, and worsened when she tried to cash in on Jennifer’s fame by writing an appalling book called ‘From Mother and Daughter to Friends’. Jennifer severed all contact, but she is now re-assessing their relationship. “We’ve exchanged messages,” she says. “Our doors are open. We’re taking baby steps. It’s a good thing.”

Although Aniston incurred criticism for distancing herself from her mother, who did not attend her wedding, she offers no apologies. “I feel pretty good about the choices I’ve made. The choice of not speaking to Mom for a while – that’s ours. Nobody else has to understand it. The same thing with Brad and myself,” she says. “I wouldn’t change my childhood, I wouldn’t change my heartaches, I wouldn’t change my successes. I wouldn’t change any of it, because I really love who I am, and am continuing to become.

“Besides, it’s all in the past,” she adds. “This doesn’t kill you. You move on. You can’t let the devastation of a divorce take over and win – let it make you this bitter, closed-off, angry, sceptical person. Then you’re just falling victim to it. You don’t want to shut your heart down. You don’t want to feel that when a marriage ends, your life is over. You can survive anything. Compared to what other people are surviving out there in the world, this is not so bad, in the grand scheme of things. Human endurance is unbelievable. Think of mothers of soldiers have to rise above! Everything’s relative.”

She looks down at her firm, fit body. “Nothing’s broke,” she says. Catching the quizzical look on my face, she concedes. “Maybe a little bruised.”

A few weeks later, on a stiflingly hot day in Chicago, Aniston and I are sitting in her hotel suite looking out on Late Michigan, which is studded with little white boats. I’ve just told her about the gossip magazine that says she’s registered here as “Mrs. Smith”. The report claims Aniston is taking perverse pleasure in making hotel staffers address her as Mrs. Smith, even though they know perfectly well who she is.

The only problem with this amusing tidbit is that it’s not true. “I wish I’d thought of it,” says Aniston, who is registered under an entirely different, although equally humorous, name.
Despite her vow of abstinence, she succumbed to a celebrity magazine the other evening – and immediately regretted it. “I feel like I’ve fallen off the wagon,” she moans. Unfortunately, the first publication she picked up featured an insult from Kimberly Stewart, Rod’s party-girl daughter. “She said I’m homely,” Aniston says. “It literally ruined my night. I got my feelings very hurt, actually. That was my instant Karma.”

She has always fretted about her appearance, although that is often hard for others to believe. Posing for her Vanity Fair cover shoot, Aniston was equally fetching in French-dance-hall-girl black stockings and in a half-open oversize shirt that evoked every man’s favorite just-rolled-out-of-bed look. With her tousled hair, cobalt-blue eyes, and dazzling smile, she seemed the ultimate adorable sexpot. Far from pining away in seclusion, she appeared to be sending a far more spirited message like “Eat your heart out, Brad!”

But Aniston has never been able to reconcile the glamorous Jen on page or screen with the self-doubting woman she sees in the mirror, and the current tabloid coverage has exacerbated that gap. “It’s literally two different people – the real me, and the ‘Jen’ they write about. ‘fighting back’, ‘getting revenge’ everything I couldn’t be farther from wanting to do,” she says. “So I’m back on the wagon.”

When she arrived in Chicago to film ‘The Break-Up’, the gossip media, frantic for a new development, immediately plunged her into a torrid romance with her co-star, Vince Vaughn. This affair apparently does not exist. “I adore Vince Vaughn, but I’m not going out with Vince Vaughn,” she says. “I barely know the guy. We’ve exchanged a wine-and-cheese basket for the start of the movie, and we’ve gone out to dinner with the director and other people. We’ve got to get to know each other.”

But is Aniston seeing him – or anyone else? “Nobody,” she says firmly. “I like a lot of people but I am sooo not ‘in like’ with anybody. I am really enjoying being by myself. I’m excited that I know there’s somebody out there for me, but I am absolutely in no rush. This is all very new, very fresh. This was a seven-year relationship that was very dear, very complicated, very special. I need to honor it.”

Aside from her initial flurry of tears, Aniston remains calm and thoughtful through hours of conversation with me over the course of several weeks. But there is one final topic to be addressed, and it’s the most hurtful of all. The rumor that Jolie is pregnant with Pitt’s child has swept around the world; some reports even have her finishing her first trimester. When I ask Aniston about that, she looks as if I’ve stabbed her in the heart. Her eyes well up and spill over. Several long minutes go by as the tears keep rolling down her cheeks; she bites her lip, seemingly unable to speak. Finally she shakes her head; this subject is simply too excruciating to discuss. “My worst fear is that Jen will have to face them having a baby together soon, because that would be beyond beyond painful,” says Kristin Hahn.

Fortunately, there are many other things to keep Aniston occupied these days. Although she took some time off after Friends ended, she has since shot several movies, and the coming months will bring a series of premieres. First up is Derailed, a thriller starring Aniston and Clive Owen as two married strangers who meet on a train and arrange a hotel room tryst – only to have an armed man burst in, rape the woman, and beat the man and blackmail him, setting off a horrific chain of events. The film will make adultery look about as appealing as Fatal Attraction did, according to Aniston. “It will be one of those movies you leave and say, ‘The affair thing? Maybe not!’”

Then there’s Rumor Has it, whose plot revolves around a young reporter’s conviction that The Graduate was based on her family, and that she herself is adopted. Mark Ruffalo plays her fiancé, and Shirley MacLaine is the Mrs. Robinson character, with Kevin Costner as the Benjamin Braddock who may or may not be Aniston’s father. Yet another upcoming film is Friends with Money, in which Aniston portrays a pothead maid whose friends – played by Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack, and Frances McDormand – are all married and far more successful in life.

Aniston is also re-evaluating her future role at Plan B, the production company she formed with Pitt and Brad Grey, who has since become chairman of Paramount. Pitt is now assuming the lead role at Plan B, but Aniston says she will still produce movies through the company.
“I’m excited about what the future holds,” she says. “I’m not a fortune-teller; I have no idea how it will play out. People says, ‘What are you going to do?’ I don’t know. I kind of love that not knowing.”

She is trying to outgrow some youthful illusions. Prince Charming let her down, and Aniston no longer believes in one true love. “I think there are many people, many soul mates,” she says.

But she still has faith in the redeeming power of love itself. “It’s out there,” she says. “It will happen. There’s an amazing man that’s wandering the streets right now who’s the father of my children. In five years, I would hope to be married and have a kid. I still believe in marriage 100 percent. When I hear people say that they would never do it again, it’s like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Why would you ever close your heart down?”

She gives me a sheepish smile. “Maybe it’s a fairy tale, but I believe in happily ever after.”

Jennifer Aniston; Elle Nov 05

2005-10-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

As with every beginning, Jennifer Aniston's began with an ending. An ending that's impossible to give away because, unlike with the classics of high-society romantic devastation—Madame Bovary, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Anna Karenina—there isn't anyone who hasn't read and deconstructed the story of Brad and Jennifer. Or the sequel, Brad and Angelina. Or the companion guide, Angelina Goes to Africa.

While still recovering from having her heart ripped out and Hacky Sacked about, Aniston, in an effort to separate fact from fiction, gave a raw-nerved, teary-eyed, and delicately choreographed interview to Vanity Fair, the ruling-class glossy where a star can, with dignity, safely tell her sad story, pose in her underpants, and be done with it.

Months have passed. Seasons have changed. Eight-pound dumbbells rest on the floor. A bottle of pinot grigio chills on ice. A fabulous hair day is being had. “All that shit's old news,” Aniston says, really smiling, waving it off. “Past: done. Present: now. Future: none of our business.”

Or, as her friend Courteney Cox-Arquette says, “There's definitely been a shift. And that chapter…well, she seems really happy now.”

Aniston gets up to find her Merit cigarettes in what has been her home away from home, a luxe suite in Chicago's Peninsula hotel. It is, she swears, bigger than her new house. The actress is so thin she warrants a scolding. “I know, I know,” she says. “I lose weight when I work. I'll gain it back.” Seeing me wrestle with the wine opener, she takes over. “Let me open it, I was a waitress.… This is a terrible cork.…” Struggling herself, she says in a polite tone, “Oh, motherf--ker!” Cork removed, she triumphantly holds up the bottle. “Would you like some wine?”

In flip-flops, snug Generra jeans, and a black T-shirt stamped with a skull sticking a red tongue out at the world, Aniston, 36, doesn't look old enough to drink. She has smooth, tawny skin, and thick, caramel-color hair pin-streaked with blond frames her small face. Her pool-blue eyes are etched with dark blue starbursts emanating from her pupils. She sees through everything.

It is Aniston's last weekend in Chicago, where she's been shooting The Break-up, opposite Vince Vaughn. They play a couple who buy an apartment, split up, and have to live together until it's sold. “This movie was fate,” she says. “To be able to walk through a movie called The Break-up, about a person going through a breakup, while I'm actually going through a breakup?! How did that happen?! It's been cathartic. It's turned something into a fantastic experience—” Aniston catches herself. “Not that divorce is fantastic, but I've never had more fun in a creative process.”

Since wrapping Friends, Aniston has been frenzied with filmmaking. In Rob Reiner's Rumor Has It, costarring Mark Ruffalo and Kevin Costner, she plays an obit writer certain that she's the offspring of the lovers who inspired The Graduate. In the upcoming Friends With Money, she joins Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand, and Joan Cusack as a ganja-loving maid whose friends are all married and moving up in the world. The actress didn't have to go far to research the role. “I have a bunch of friends who are potheads who are genius and wonderful, but they just can't motivate. They'll spend days trying to figure out how to make a birthday card!” She lights a cigarette. “Trust me, I have no judgment on the casual user. I've lived. But I'm talking about the true potheads—the wake-and-bakers who have arrested development because they've gone to the THC well one too many times.”

But it's her performance in this month's Derailed that allays any doubt as to whether Aniston can shed the skin of Rachel Green. Directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström (2003's Oscar-nominated Evil), the psychological thriller is a cross between Fatal Attraction and The Grifters. “It took me so long to say yes because I was terrified of it,” says Aniston, who acts her way through adultery, rape, and blackmail. “Not terrified—I don't want to say that. But I'd gotten comfortable, and I knew it was going to be a challenge.”

Then she heard a voice of reason.

“I was in Italy at the time, with my ex. And they were filming Ocean's Twelve—all the Lake Como stuff. So they were all staying there together. So basically, we were all having lunch at George Clooney's house and I had just gotten the script FedExed to me. I open up the envelope and it says Derailed, starring Clive Owen. And I was like, Wow, Clive Owen. I love Clive Owen! I can't wait to read this. We go down to lunch and we're all talking, and out of the blue Julia [Roberts] goes, 'Has anybody worked with Clive Owen?' She'd just finished Closer. And I said to myself, That's an omen. And I told her about the script. And she said, 'Well, honey, if you can, you have got to work with him, because he is dreamy.'”

Reading the script, Aniston became unnerved. “I'm thinking, Good God, Jesus. It's like watching a car wreck—you're riveted and then disturbed. I thought, Why would I want to make someone feel this way?” She smiles, arching a perfect brow.

Like her critically acclaimed portrayal of Justine, the depressed Retail Rodeo clerk in Miguel Arteta's 2002 The Good Girl, Aniston in Derailed draws on the deeper, darker, often repressed facets of her talent. “You're not going to be able to type her easily,” Reiner says. “She has the same range as, say, Meg Ryan, who can do light, deft comedy and then turn around and do In the Cut.”

“No one has seen her do this kind of part before, and it was a very smart choice to book Jennifer in. The bottom line is, she's a really classy actress—incredibly smart and sensitive,” says Owen, in his deep and dreamy British accent. He adds that she was “just hugely refreshing, completely unstarry, completely uncomplicated. There was no fuss. With big stars you never know quite what to expect. But for somebody who's lived under the spotlight for so long, she's incredibly sorted out and grounded. That was inspiring—that you can be a real human being. It takes an enormous amount of intelligence to keep rooted amidst that glare.”

Tell Aniston the ghost of Rachel Green did not appear once while watching Derailed and she squeezes her eyes shut, opens them, reaches her hand across the table, and says, “That is one of my greatest compliments.”

Arteta recalls the day he gave Aniston the Good Girl role. “She said, 'This is good timing.' After years of using comedy as a tool to make everybody happy…from her parents who got divorced [when she was nine] through the years of being on the show, she was ready to connect with the pain of being in her life,” he says. “Comedy had been a shield for her, and she played it out as far as she could take it.”

The director cast Aniston without an audition, understanding immediately the paradox that makes her perfect for the part. She is as sad as she is happy. “She connected with this universal feeling of 'I'm trapped in my life, I'm never going to get out.' Who would have thought that America's sweetheart could capture that? I will never forget the moment she walked onto the set,” he says. “She transformed her whole body; she had this sad, Chaplin-esque walk, as if Charlie Chaplin forgot to take his meds. And I turned to my cameraman and said, 'We have a movie.' ”

What The Good Girl promised, Derailed confirmed: that Aniston is gifted at conveying complex emotions. Consequently, you hate to see her out there treading in shallow water; she deserves better than getting-the-guy flicks. Aniston can tell you all about getting the guy. She deserved better than that, too. And after what she's been through, it would be disheartening to have her sell a character that buys into the fairy tale in 120 minutes, anyway.

Unless, of course, the prince is six feet five inches, hilarious, and named Vince Vaughn.

They say the only cure for love is to love more. “I agree,” Aniston says. “But I'm good right now. I have so much love. I have love. My women friends—they're all my mothers, they're all my sisters, they're all my partners, they're all my wives, my everything. It's hard to find a man who can live up to any of them.”

Vince Vaughn! He could live up to that. He could kick Brad's ass with one hand tied behind his back and the other cradling a beer.

Aniston wags a finger. “Vince is my friend,” she says, trying to be stern. “I adore him. He's delicious and funny. He's got all the colors of the rainbow. But I don't want to be a rebound girl. I feel like it will happen when it happens.”

(Asked later about the two of them looking very cozy at the Break-up wrap party, Aniston says, “No comment! Next question, please.”)

Nevertheless, Vaughn has been just what she needed. “He's one of the funniest guys I've been around,” says Arrested Development star Jason Bateman, who plays Vaughn's friend in the film. “She couldn't have picked a better person to spend a few months with while she's going through all this. Vince really looks out for her.”

“The thing with Jen is, she's so easy to feel drawn to,” Vaughn says, his affection obvious. “She's so genuine and warm, and she has a lightness, a classy ease about it all. You can see why people are so enamored. It's like she's stuffed with Elvis dust. Little kids see her and they don't know she's famous, and they just gravitate to her, they hang on her.”

More than any of the other Friends friends, Aniston has been adopted by the world as its own, in a Princess Diana “There were three of us in this marriage” sort of way. “I'm in the makeup trailer this morning,” says Paul Rudd, her costar in 1998's The Object of My Affection, calling from a London set. “And all the women were talking about how much they love Jennifer Aniston. They don't know her! But they do love her.” What Rudd finds amazing is Aniston's grace in the face of her fans' surreal familiarity with her. “People have the nerve to walk up and ask the most personal questions. The biggest testament to Jen is that she doesn't make them feel stupid for asking. She graciously responds.”

While in Chicago, Aniston is accompanied by Cyril, a sexy French bodyguard who belongs in a Luc Besson film but in the meantime is here to shield her from the crazies. “It's nice to have someone run interference,” Aniston says. “Mostly to protect you from those evil paparazzi vultures—they charge you so that they can get this look of absolute horror—because you're being charged! Then they write some wonderful caption like, 'Jen, furious!' Whatever happened to, like, hiding in a bush?”

Ben Stiller, her costar in 2004's Along Came Polly, remembers being in Paris for the film's press junket. “With Jen, you can't go anywhere without 20 guys on motorcycles following,” he says. One day she cleverly rented a boat to take Stiller and friends up the Seine to a secret pier, “and these insane photographers are off their bikes, running to catch the boat, and are left screaming on the dock like something out of Les Misérables.”

The sound of a tiny bell comes from another room. “Do you hear Norm's jingle?” Aniston asks, cupping a hand to her ear. “Come here, Norman. Come say hello.” Her big Welsh corgi-terrier mix trots into the room, his eyes the same blue as his mistress's. Aniston gets on her knees and gives him a huge hug. She grabs some grapes from the cheese platter, accidentally dropping a few on the floor. Bending to pick them up she says, “I'd swear you'd think I was pregnant.” She gives her head a little shake. “I don't know why I said that. Maybe because my friend's pregnant and she knocks into things, drops things all the time.”

No babies for Aniston—whom Stiller calls “the great catch of all time”—yet. But she's not quite ready to be caught.

“I'm enjoying this little solitude, this not needing anything,” she says. “I don't know what's going to happen next. Isn't that exciting? I can't wait to go to my sexy little house”—in Malibu, not far from the spread now occupied by her “ex”—“and sit on the beach.”

So if she were to run into someone she'd truly loved before, would she be open to loving that person again? “I don't know. I've never had that happen,” she says, her face suddenly expressionless. But then her features soften. “Look,” she says, “if you still love the person, you'll know it when you meet him again. And if you don't—you don't. If you do, you do. It didn't happen to me though, not yet, where I loved somebody and I met them 10 years later and 'I still love you.'” She reaches down to scratch Norman under his chin. “Maybe I would go back and do things differently. But those opportunities will come now. In the future. What's ahead. I've learned you can't change somebody. You be what you want to attract to you. You try to live by example and then hopefully it will come to you. But oh, projects are exhausting.” Aren't all actors projects? Maybe she should date someone not in the business.…

“I'm not saying I don't like a little fixer-upper,” she adds quickly. “But it's gotta go both ways.”

Listen to the hum, the whir, the ding, the ringing; you can hear Aniston's mind at work as she stares out the window at Lake Michigan. “I think I think too much,” she says. “And then I think too much about thinking too much. I'm an overthinker. I think a lot.” She taps her head. “The committee. Sometimes I have to say, 'Okay, guys, chill out.'”

It's the burden of having “her extreme emotional intelligence,” Vaughn says. “People could abuse that. But she chooses to use her gifts to make people feel good. She chooses to be kind.” Which is, given her situation, really saying something. But then again, she did once consider becoming a therapist.

“I love the human mind, the human emotion, the human being,” Aniston says. “We're fascinating creatures. I love the shadow parts of ourselves and the good parts of ourselves. And only recently have I gotten to that place of learning to embrace all of them—no apologies.” She looks out the window again. “My friend and I the other day were like, 'We're gonna rename ourselves the F--kits!' You know, 'F--k it! Just live.'”

Orlando Bloom; GQ Nov 05

2005-10-29T23:27:00.000-07:00

Don't be fooled by his bohemian dress and freethinking ways (or by the fact that he's very, very good in a very unperiod new movie): Orlando Bloom is the Errol Flynn of our time.

Orlando Bloom sits chewing banana and peanut butter on toast, having his morning tea on what could be the patio of a modest little house anywhere in the world - watching his coal black mutt ramble around on the grass, chew twigs, and relieve himself. But little things everywhere hint that this is a partly fictional realm. Bloom is swathed in one of the long scarves he favors, covered in trinkets, and wearing combat - weight black boots, but because he has become so extraordinarily well-known for playing epic roles, the overall effect is of a man who is not quite modern but in modern dress. And this is no man's house but a lavish bungalow at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. It's not even one of the A-list bungalows down on the main level, where John Belushi breathed his last. This one is far more grand - seemingly floating above the hotel, insulated from the world by heavy gray wooden doors. It even has a private exit so that Bloom can come and go without fear of paparazzi.

The moment he speaks - despite outward appearances - it's clear that the only thing that isn't tinged with unreality is Bloom himself, who comes across as impossibly levelheaded. He is finishing his first role as a contemporary American man, a character in the fictional real world, in Cameron Crowe's new romantic comedy, Elizabethtown. "Being a Brit, I've spent most of my time here either in New York or L.A.," Bloom says, unselfconsciously smacking peanut butter as he speaks. "But during the Elizabethtown shoot, we were staying in the Brown Hotel, a classic, old-school place in Louisville. Going to Kentucky was a whole different side of America I never knew about. It was America. The hats, the suits - they're not letting go of their traditions. Which is great. I love traditions. I mean, cultural ones."

In contrast to his sensible demeanor, Bloom is abnormally good-looking. And it's often hard to bear in mind how young he is - how much work and fame he has gathered up in a scant four years. He is routinely on all the lists: People's Most Beautiful, the Internet's Most Downloaded, you name it. But some fairly grim experience has made him play against type in real life. Laconically staring out over the fronds and high hibiscus of the Chateau and eating unripe blueberries, he doesn't hint at being aware of his Old Hollywood appeal and he certainly doesn't come off as ethereal.

There's nothing otherworldly about the inside of the house, either. It's a mess, scattered with health food, research, and mementos, much of which is still in boxes, since Bloom has been living here a month during one of his downtimes with Kate Bosworth. In the bedroom is residue from old work: There's a DVD about the Crusades, ancient homework for Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. Bloom grins and admits that while it's ideal to read entire books, DVDs have the appeal of being condensed and visual. "Knowledge is power," he says "but having too much can actually get in the way. You simply want to know what world you're in, and immerse yourself." He's taken time to hang a Cool Hand Luke poster, since he reveres Paul Newman. The kitchen is an aftermath of some kind of organic-food explosion. Everywhere you turn, there are protein shakes, containers of carrot and mango juice, oranges, tomatoes, and Lord-knows-what made out of tofu. "I haven't gone back to being vegetarian," Bloom says, surveying the chaos. "I've gone back to the process of seeing what foods give me energy. When you're working and you're required to switch it on, you need to know what fuels you."

Even Sidi, the wild black dog, has a prized possession or two in the wilderness of boxes and CDs and photos. Cameron Crowe has awarded the pup with a small framed Elizabethtown poster and signed it, "Try to eat smaller portions."

Walking out the door, one sees the least artful object in the house: a sign, in fierce block lettering, that reads DO NOT LET THE DOG INSIDE! Sidi is explicitly banished from the house, given his taste for apocalypse. "When I'm not here, he really tears up the place," Bloom says, as the lone crease in his forehead deepens slightly. "He can be pretty devastating."

It was the same during the Elizabethtown shoots. Kirsten Dunst marveled at what a tearaway that dog could be, and says Orlando's trailer had to be "Sidi-proofed."

"They had to put a sheet of plastic on the floor!" she says, laughing. "That dog just doesn't care. And Orlando's way of unstressing between takes is to jump around like a 5-year-old or ride on a pint-size scooter, whereas I'm more self-critical. He was always playing with Sidi between takes, and Sidi is still in many ways a street dog." Then again, in many ways, so is Orlando.

Elizabethtown is vintage Cameron Crowe: dead center in the crosshatch between comedy and drama. It opens with Bloom's character experiencing a professional failure - more accurately, as his character narrates, a fiasco of staggering proportions. A shoe he has designed for an Oregon-based company (clearly modeled after Nike) is such a disaster that it's being recalled, losing the company $972 million, all of it Bloom's fault. To magnify Bloom's self-loathing, the head of the company (played to the hilt by Alec Baldwin) leads him on a daunting walk through the corporate complex, explaining the sheer magnitude of this disaster. At one point, the two gaze onto a vast, NASA-scale ecological laboratory; Baldwin's character pauses and ruefully observes, "We could have saved the planet." At another point, laughing out his grief, Baldwin remarks that he has read that Bloom's shoe "may actually cause an entire generation to return to bare feet."

Bloom's character responds by creating an elaborate suicide machine and is on the brink of using it when he learns that his father has died: He must travel to Kentucky to retrieve the body. So begins a chain of events that, as is so often untrue in Hollywood movies, is impossible to predict. Crowe doesn't deal in cinematic formulas. The film is strangely both intimate and sprawling, hitting a lot of giant themes - fathers and sons, life and death, hope and regret - through small, subtle encounters.

It's striking how easily Bloom fits into regular clothing and the twenty-first century after having spent most of his career in chain mail, on horseback, or shouting things like "The Ring must be destroyed!" No film actor in memory has been so furiously attached to the epic and fantasy genres as Orlando Bloom. After making his debut as a rent boy in a 1997 film about Oscar Wilde, he spent three years at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama - then, right out of the gate, landed the Legolas role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Since then, he has rarely been seen without a sword or an arrow in reach: in Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven; in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy; in the gritty Australian legend Ned Kelly; and, of course, in the still blossoming Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. (If he were a few years older, he'd have been in Braveheart. That's a guarantee.) The only exception was a very small role in Black Hawk Down, in which his character breaks his back - but Bloom was cast partly because in real life he actually has broken his back.

Liam Neeson, who starred as Bloom's father in the somewhat controversial Kingdom, is well attuned to the notion that an epic quality is not a card that every film actor has in his deck. "Some actors suit period costumes," Neeson says, "and others don't. I always think of Errol Flynn. He looked uncomfortable in a suit - but put him in a ridiculous pair of tights, and he looked to the manor born! John Wayne playing Genghis Khan was quite the other thing. Clint Eastwood in a kilt would look ludicrous. I don't know what it is. Orlando simply looks the part."

From their experience in Kingdom, Neeson and Bloom know that this particular talent can double as a curse, for Ridley Scott is an especially meticulous director. "Even our underwear was period," Neeson recalls, laughing. "It was the full bollocks, you know?"

And the epic quality is sufficiently rare that, once you've proved yourself in the genre, you are sought out again and again?another impulse well understood (and, for that matter, experienced) by Liam Neeson. "If I were Jack Warner, I'd get a team of writers, get 'em writing period pieces, and sign him," Neeson says. "Orlando is like a classic '40s movie star."

None of this is to say that Neeson confines himself to speaking of Bloom's costumes; he seems a little amazed by how sharply focused the man is, especially for a young actor. "When I was that age? Jesus!? it was the Dark Ages of my emotional growth," Neeson says. "I knew fuck-all about anythin'! Orlando is with it, but not in a hip way. He knows what it takes to make a film, so he treats every department equally: the key grip, the gaffer, everyone. He's right to. Without them, we're nothing."

The fact that Orlando Bloom is unusually grounded for a man of 28, sadly, has a lot to do with the actual ground. His career (and inextricably linked with that, his ability to take the long view) was entirely transformed by a potentially fatal fall he took in 1998. Late one night, messing around, he leapt onto a drainpipe while trying to get onto a roof terrace; the pipe gave way, and Bloom fell three stories, shattering his vertebrae. "Until then, I didn't have a healthy appreciation for life and death, that we're not invincible," he says. "And for four days, I faced the idea of living in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I went to some dark places in my mind. I realized, I'm either going to walk again or I'm not.

"The doctor said he wasn't sure how severe the spinal-cord damage was," he says, as an oddly unattractive look of distaste, even horror, crosses his features. "I remember him telling me that, and staring at the ceiling, thinking, I never stared at ceilings before! And I wonder if I'm going to be looking at ceilings for the rest of my life.

"But there's something interesting," he adds very quickly. "I knew I wouldn't. I knew I wouldn't, I knew?" He repeats the sentence five times - quick like a stammer, as though he's still trying to convince himself against hope that this will not be his fate.

The upshot of the accident was nothing short of miraculous. He was in the hospital only a few weeks and walked out on his own power. And the minute he escaped, still constrained by a back brace, he reverted to testing the limits of body and soul. When the time came to remove the titanium pins from his spine, to the doctors' alarm, they were all fractured. They came out in shards. One of the pins had been driven too deep to remove, by dint of Orlando's physical overexertion. "I'd been doing stuff right away," he recalls, shaking his head. "I went straight back into it, man."

The calming of Orlando Bloom, in the paradoxical underage dotage he now conveys, wasn't instantaneous. "When I came out of the hospital, I started partying straight away - with the back brace on. It took me a couple of months to realize this was my life, and I didn't want to mess it up.

"But that accident has informed everything in my life," he says. "Until you're close to losing it, you don't realize. I used to ride motorbikes and drive cars like everything was a racetrack; it was ridiculous. It wasn't because I thought it was cool; it was just because I loved living on the edge. But I've chilled."

Cameron Crowe, too, sees all of this as key to Bloom's swift maturation as an actor. "That broken back - that's his Rosebud," Crowe says. "It's the key to him. He's got pain going on in there. That's why his silent mode is so interesting. Where other actors feel they have to constantly do something, Orlando doesn't. Which is great. He's a real guy with real stuff. Under that puppy-dog energy, there's darkness."

Perhaps it was Bloom's upbringing that made him capable of eventually slowing off of the racetrack. Growing up in Canterbury, and beyond that, the county Kent, exposes you to one of the world's cradles of sanity - a meadowed realm of constancy - even though some of its denizens look wild when viewed from afar.

"My generation in England was exposed to a huge antidrug campaign," Bloom recalls. "I was one of the kids in school saying, 'That shit's not good.' I've still gotten kicks; don't get me wrong."
At this point in the conversation, without a single word of transition, Bloom moves from the romance of drugs to the intoxication of women. "I remember asking my biology teacher, 'How is HIV and AIDS gonna come to an end?' " he says, still popping the sour blueberries. "And the guy said, 'When people stop having sex.' I replied, 'Dude, that's harsh. That ain't gonna happen anytime soon.' I had plenty of vices growing up. But when you're 21, you wake up and realize that your body is not something you want to fuck with."

To this end, Bloom has even surrendered caffeine, which, for many Englishmen, would be as bitter a defeat as Gallipoli or Yorktown. "I was doing night shoots for Elizabethtown," he says, "and drinking green tea, which has caffeine. Not an awful lot. Just enough to get me through the shoot. By the end of the night, my back was killing me. It dehydrates your spine. And my back?that's still my alarm. That's my canary in the mine shaft."

Bloom talks endlessly about how lucky he is; after seven years, the worst of his many reckless accidents hasn't faded from memory. "When you experience the sort of physical pain I went through, you realize you're not a god," he says "that there are limits to what you can do. It keeps you real. I mean, I can walk. I can enjoy a swim in the ocean and a beautiful day. And I was very close to not having that.

"I'm trying now to maintain a sense of balance. I was very extreme in my youth - everything in extremes, man! I'm at a very interesting time right now: a lot of change, growth - a lot of pennies dropping. I've a lot to be grateful for."

This is all odd talk from an actor who, since that accident and many others, has buckled so much swash in the movies. (To say nothing of the fact that, for The Lord of the Rings, he spent vast amounts of time in New Zealand, the adrenaline-sport capital of the world, resisting most of those temptations.) Yet when it comes to doing stunts, he doesn't hesitate. "I have one of those doctors who tell me, 'Go for it, man!' " he says. "Does he encourage me? No. But I've tried to put myself in a physical condition where I'm able to do that stuff."

"And, of course, for sex," I toss out, just to lighten things up.

"Yeah, all those mercy lays I got," he says, mock-wistfully. "Because I was the kid with the broken back!"

"Oh? you need mercy fucks," I repeat, nearly spitting up my tea. "That's the funniest thing I've heard in my life. You probably had to beg for it."

Bloom won't let go of the joke: "I was the kid with the broken back!"

By all evidence, Orlando Bloom has chilled. But the adrenaline chip in his brain is still switched on. He seems to have transferred its capacity from bone-breaking feats to potentially soul-crushing risks on a more emotional plane. "I like to feel alive, man," he says. "Part of it is danger, part of it is love. Although I'm trying not to have those two realms cross too much. I've had a few dangerous women. My cousin once told me, 'You're tall, you're handsome and you're gonna have to apologize for it the rest of your life.' He imparted that information to me."
"So - you're still looking for mercy fucks."

"That's right!" he says, clinging to modesty with both hands. "I still am. Exactly!"

If, as he claims, Bloom is a bit accident-prone, he is among the most graceful clods ever born. He moves slowly but always seems to be out ahead of you; he gestures rarely, but when he does, every joint of every finger seems to be underscoring a different, subtle part of his idea.
Despite all the old injuries (broken bones all over his body - here from a motorbike spill, there from something strange that happened with a rope), his athletic prowess is not lost on those with whom he's worked. Liam Neeson marveled at Bloom's fight scenes in Kingdom of Heaven. "Some actors are utterly lost if you put a sword in their hands," he says. "Orlando is all physical grace - and there's Errol Flynn again!"

Cameron Crowe, for his part, actually directed Bloom in the only television ad Crowe has ever shot, a quasi parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, shot in black and white, for Gap clothing. All we saw was Orlando Bloom and Kate Beckinsale running through shadowy streets. "He has this Hard Day's Night physicality," Crowe says. "Watching what we'd shot in the Gap commercial, there was Kate Beckinsale? who's hot!? and we couldn't stop looking at him. He's exploding with life."

The whole blend of modesty and the movie-star looks can only have contributed to Orlando Bloom's celebrity. In an average week, even with no film release in sight, he's in a hundred articles worldwide - the more so when anything kindles (or is stanched) with the dazzling Kate Bosworth.

That said, he's not entirely allergic to Hollywood tricks. For instance, when celebrities stay at hotels, as most people know, they check in under false names, like Fred Flintstone or Jay Gatsby. Billy Bob Thornton, for instance, sometimes uses the name of a certain writer. For her part, Kirsten Dunst uses a musical reference.

"I'm not exactly sure what name Orlando goes by," Dunst says, "but I bet it's something sexual. He's very flirty. And that's easy to understand. You should have seen them in Kentucky: Girls lined up holding signs with his name on them. He was very gracious."

Typically, Bloom regards most attention as a fleeting thing. And he's not interested in spending precious time on fleeting things. Especially tabloid attention.

"That stuff is not a part of my daily life," he says. "Most of it is bullshit. It even becomes hard to have a casual friendship, because suddenly you're 'linked to' that person. I guess there's got to be a cost. You can't live the spoils without having the flip side of that coin. So you learn to live with it."

Curiously, Bloom is so famous in costume that until recently he was able to blend in when he moved around in public. Cameron Crowe recalls that when the cast of Elizabethtown was shooting and living in Kentucky, girls were lining the streets just to catch a glimpse of Orly Bloom. (Though no one except the tabloids actually calls him Orly.)

"He was incredibly famous, but no one really knew what he looked like," Crowe says, still amazed. "In Lexington, there was a girls' national soccer championship team in the hotel. These girls were actually walking the halls - they were roaming in packs - looking for him. I heard them saying things like, 'He's on the seventh floor!' And he was standing right there. Right there. He just disappeared into the culture."

That air of mystery is attractive to film directors. Crowe recalls reading something Warren Beatty once said - that 75 percent of what people bring to a movie is their perception of the actor. "In that sense, it's great to have a fresh guy to put in the center of a movie," Crowe says. "We don't really know who he is. Orlando is a clean slate. Since Tom Cruise in Risky Business, very few guys that age have been able to do a comedy or drama and be that interesting to look at - and to really hold the center of a movie."

These days, Bloom's mother more than compensates for his aversion to his tabloid press. (And of course, when it comes to propriety and accuracy, British tabloids make their American cousins look like Huxley's Illustrated History of Gardening.) She clips it all, keeps track of his status as "the most downloaded human on earth," and shuffles through the bags of fan letters he receives. Bloom recoils. "I keep saying, 'Mom, I don't want to know,' " he says. "I don't want to see whether I'm on some chart. There will be a time when I won't be. That doesn't mean I'm not grateful. But I keep telling her, 'They keep building me up, so they're going to tear me down!'
"I keep getting asked what it's like to be a heartthrob," he adds, much amused by the unspoken joke: Tempus fugit. "There's that next kid, believe me, who's right there on my tail and if he's not right now, he's gonna be!"

Bloom is convincing when he says things like this: offhand remarks a modest person would say so as not to seem like a preening, self-absorbed ass in a magazine article. And when he says he has too much self-doubt to believe the hype, there's not a trace of posturing. A casting agent once told him that a little self-doubt will get you a long way: It makes you work harder, keeps you sharp. "If you think you can do it all," Bloom says, suddenly showing some heat, "you're just gonna sit back. Whereas I'm constantly working at it: doing more sword training for Pirates, getting coached on dialect to make sure it's as good as it can be for Elizabethtown. I'm always working, because the one time I don't, I guarantee, is when I'll end up saying 'D'oh!' "

He looks at his enormous wristwatch somewhat worriedly, for he actually has a dialect session in an hour or so, and more than once he has registered that it's a real concern for him. (It was also the sole doubt Cameron Crowe had in casting him, though that one doubt was quickly put to rest, Crowe says.)

"Look, I just want to stay normal," Bloom says, very normally. "That's the biggest challenge: being able to sit in a cafe nd watch the world go by."

Granted, wide is the road to temptation and at least until that next kid catches Orlando J. B. C. Bloom - his world is a sea of temptations. But he prides himself on learning lessons, even other people's life lessons. "My dad once told me that one of his dreams was coming to Los Angeles, getting a Mustang, and driving it down Sunset Boulevard," he says, beaming at the memory. "One day, it came true. And he got pulled over by the police. Know why they stopped him? Know why? He was driving too slowly! That's a great story for me. He was soaking up the environment and he got done! 'Sir, you got done!' "

In more than one sense, Bloom isn't finished. Even at the outset of his career, he's ever flickering with a Buddhist tendency here or there. He chokes at the fact that he's in an industry where it's a virtue to label its products (including actors). Yet he has no idea what his label should read. "I'm still trying to formulate the idea of who I am - and part of the problem of having these ideas and images projected on you is that it's hard enough really figuring that shit out!" Even in the Shangri-la confines of Bloom's temporary home, time does not stop, and the hour is running late. At a dialogue coach's office across town, there's a new identity to burnish: some "R" sounds to harden, a few "A" sounds to flatten out. Orlando Bloom shakes his head and eats one last bad blueberry. "There's only a story in success so far," he says, refusing to descend from the philosophical level before he flees the hotel out his private exit. "That's why Cameron made a movie about failure - about fiasco. Because we all meet in the dirt. That's where we meet."

Kirsten Dunst - W Sept 05

2005-08-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

Whatever strange twist of cinematic fate brought Kirsten Dunst to Versailles not once but twice during the past year, it certainly did the girl some good. As she strolls into the Café de Flore in Paris, her hair pulled back into a messy blond knot, flashing her signature sharp-toothed grin, she attracts admiring looks from tourists and snooty regulars alike. Dunst spent the summer of 2004 in Versailles—Kentucky, that is, home of Woodford Reserve Bourbon—playing the role of a plucky flight attendant in Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown. Then, all spring long, she minced her way through the glittering halls of the real Versailles—home of the 18th-century French monarchy—as the lead in Sofia Coppola's upcoming Marie Antoinette biopic.

Today, lingering in the aura of her last scene as queen, the big let-them-eat-cake moment filmed only days ago, she breezes in from Chanel's rue Cambon headquarters carrying Karl Lagerfeld's sketch of the black lace gown she wore to the Oscars. It's a far cry from her look of the moment—a geometric-pattern coat, checked shirt, rolled shorts, simple sandals—which trumpets eccentric West Coast cool, not Franco-chic. After three months here, Dunst, the consummate California girl, still says "Saint Ger-MAIN" the American way, but she orders her citron pressé like a regular, and she excitedly announces that Paris has become her new favorite city. "I'm totally being decadent and enjoying everything," she sighs, settling into a banquette, "wandering the streets and eating lots of macaroons at Ladurée."

She'll head back to Los Angeles tomorrow, but right now she's bent on prolonging her Paris moment. Living in a Left Bank apartment, Dunst has packed her weekends with good-girl thrills: checking out cute boys, hanging out at the café La Palette and chalking up a string of late nights at the city's trendiest club, Le Baron. Her luggage, like that of your average wide-eyed tourist, is bulging with modest souvenirs, including a couple of ashtrays from the Ritz's Hemingway bar. But she's also hauling home plenty of expensive new clothes. "I love fashion," she says, brightly ticking off her favorite addresses: Lanvin, Isabel Marant, A.P.C. and Free P Star, the vintage boutique she ransacked weekly. "I love buying clothes. It changes your whole mood."

Dunst is full of such chirpy pronouncements, and she's so bubbly that it's hard to imagine her in need of a boost. The easygoing allure that made her the perfect choice to play Spider-Man's über girl next door, Mary Jane Watson, has been working in her favor since she began acting and modeling at age three. As an angelic little girl with a ferocious bite, she first hit it big at 11 in Interview With the Vampire, and today, at 23, she's made more than 30 films and is a favorite of the industry's top directors, from Crowe and Coppola to Michel Gondry.

"Kirsten has always been extremely smart about mixing big studio movies with independent films," says Peyton Reed, who directed her in Bring It On, the arch cheerleading comedy that used Dunst's real-life pom-pom experience to great advantage.

In films both large and small, however, Dunst has exuded an irresistible innocence, sometimes self-aware and sometimes utterly giddy. In 1999's Dick, Dunst was at her bubbleheaded blondest, playing a ditzy teen with a thing for Richard Nixon. In Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, she seemed somehow chaste even while stoned, in her underwear, bouncing wildly on a bed.

Gondry explains that offscreen as well as in films, there's something unexpectedly captivating about Dunst's pure, unfussy ease. "There is no tension with Kirsten," he says. "Most actors like to eat lunch in their trailers so they can concentrate on the next scene. Kirsten ate lunch every day with the crew. She doesn't come up to you after each take full of anguish about her performance.

"When I first met her," he adds, "I didn't know how much I'd like her. I didn't find her so attractive. But her beauty grows slowly on you, and you get hooked."A rock-solid optimism defines Dunst's role in this fall's Elizabethtown, a romantic comedy costarring a brooding Orlando Bloom, who first meets Dunst on a flight home to Kentucky. Bloom describes the movie as a "happy-sad comedy-drama" and explains that Dunst basically provides the happy comedy and he the sad drama. "Kirsten is a really positive person," Bloom says. "In the film she brings my character back to life. She's perfectly cast because she is that light."

Dunst says the role of Claire was one of the best female parts she'd read in ages. "She is honest and up-front to a fault," the actress says. "She doesn't have a lot of fear. She's dorky and doesn't care, and in that way she's cool." But capturing that unselfconsciousness required a great deal of conscious effort, as Dunst discovered when Crowe demanded multiple takes of even the simplest scenes. "Cameron pushed me more than any director I've worked with," Dunst says. "He has such a specific vision of the way he sees things, and, you know, you're not always going to nail it for him right away."

Crowe, who auditioned Dunst for the role of Penny Lane in Almost Famous—she lost out to Kate Hudson—explains that with Elizabethtown he was bent on taking Dunst "to a place where I could surprise her. Instead of just using the first take, her performances benefited from a few more laps around the field." Although he describes Claire as a "warrior for positivity," Crowe says there's a lot more to her—and to Dunst—than that. "Her character is actually a sad person hiding behind a front," he says. "Kirsten has a sadness in her, and that's what's interesting about her—when the clouds part and the sun shines through. That's the mystery of Kirsten and what makes you want to keep the camera fixed on her face."

While for some, Dunst's bright side can be almost blinding, it was Coppola who first recognized something a little darker and more complicated just below the surface, casting her at age 16 as The Virgin Suicides' melancholy sexpot, Lux. "It was the first time that anybody had looked at me and seen me as something besides this cute little girl," Dunst remembers. "She saw me as somebody who was complex and sexy and beautiful and was on the verge of becoming a woman. All these things that nobody wanted me to show, Sofia wanted me to show, which was who I really was anyway."

Marie-Antoinette, Dunst's second venture with Coppola, provided the actress with a whole new set of challenges. The two-hour hair and makeup regimen and the 18th-century couture costume fittings were exhausting in themselves. And the movie demanded that Dunst's Marie Antoinette evolve from a frightened teenager to a decadent thirtysomething. Meanwhile, from the moment Coppola and her crew arrived in town to infiltrate the local landmarks, the Parisians scrutinized them with a mixture of indulgent curiosity and suspicious Gallic froideur. Socialites vied for cameo roles. The paparazzi trained their telephoto lenses on the action. And the French fashion crowd buzzed with set gossip, including rumors that the rock band Phoenix played onscreen and that courtiers wore pink wigs. How could a film that stars Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI be remotely true to its era? Dunst predicts that the French press will be especially rough on the film when it debuts next year. "And I'm not sure whether historians are going to love our movie," she says buoyantly, "but we don't care."

Dunst's loose, all-American manner might seem to make her an odd choice for the role, but the actress says her own childhood gave her great insight into the plight of the doomed queen, a 14-year-old Austrian child bride who was shipped off to Versailles with a limited knowledge of French. "The way that I grew up," Dunst says, "starting so young, working on movie sets and being with all these older people—I could really relate to having people around you who always want something." Dunst credits her mother's own naïveté about the industry with keeping their family sane as her star was on the rise.

Though she says she mostly enjoyed her early life in Hollywood, she has this advice for other would-be child stars: "If you really like acting, just do plays in school. Kids should go to school and then veg out on the couch, and their biggest problem should be getting their homework done." As for her own career choices, she says, "I don't regret anything. That was my life and it was meant to be, and this is what I always wanted."

Of course, growing up on the set had its advantages. Dunst borrowed a John Galliano gown from Coppola to wear to her senior prom. But she says her girlfriends did their best to keep her life as idyllically dull as that of any other California kid: Together they put on plays in the backyard, threw sleepovers and went out for milk shakes and fries. "We, like, lived in the Fifties," she says. These days, those loyal friends reap the benefits of Dunst's fame, delivered in the form of all those freebies that land on her doorstep. "Everybody gets all the discounts I get," she says, eyes wide. "I give loot! My mom has so many purses!"

Beyond the goodie bags, Dunst's big box-office exposure—thanks mainly to the Spider-Man movies, which have a way of earning about $100 million in their opening weekends—also means that she increasingly has her pick of plum roles. Her price tag is now a reported $8 million, and Spider-Man producer Laura Ziskin says that Dunst's unaffected, natural style helps her connect instantly with audiences, whether she's doing comedy, romance or drama. "She's a spectacular actress, but she does it all with ease—you don't see the wheels turning," says Ziskin. "Women like her. Men like her. They feel like they've known her for a long time."

Increasingly, the paparazzi like her too. In L.A. Dunst is followed and photographed almost daily, whether she's carrying her Starbucks coffee, walking her dog or eating a salad in front of her mother Inez's day spa. The tabloids also keep a close eye on the waxing and waning of her two-year romance with Jake Gyllenhaal, a relationship Dunst will not discuss. (She was apparently on her own in Paris, though since returning to L.A. she's been photographed smooching Gyllenhaal poolside.) "My love life is something I don't talk about," Dunst says firmly. She's happy to play the innocent abroad, but she also knows when to flex her star power.

In Paris she's had her photo snapped on the street only once. While she admits she's a little homesick for L.A.'s In-N-Out Burger and live music scene, "after being here where I've had so much freedom, I don't want to go back," she says.

She'll return to a newly redecorated house in the hills, and, since the filming for Spider-Man 3 is still several months away, she'll have plenty of time to kick back and relax. Sounding a bit like the fun-loving Marie Antoinette, Dunst explains why she's no workaholic: "If you don't live your life, then how can you act? You have no experience except the last experience on a movie."

Instead, Dunst breezily declares that she'll take a photography class—or maybe she'll even learn French.

"I know it sounds brain-dead, really blond of me to say that I want to learn French after I've spent three months in France, but honestly, all I know is hair and makeup terminology," she says. "And, like, très jolie."

In The Mood For Love

2005-07-29T19:15:00.000-07:00

Salon.com

Where does love go when two people who feel a mad attraction to each other never act on it? Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai's "In the Mood for Love" is less a movie than a dream meditation on the nature of love that never steps into the light. Plotwise, not much happens. But when the movie's over you feel that it has taken you somewhere, that it has given shape and tone and texture to a love that hasn't even had a chance to breathe in the real world. It's a reassurance that love never simply goes "nowhere," dissipating like perfume in the air. It has its own kind of energy and life, and if you sit quietly enough, you can almost hear it thrumming.

Wong is by no means a linear director; he prefers latticelike structures, nets of visuals and sound that allow us to scoop up bits of information like shimmery fish. As with his gorgeous 1995 "Chungking Express," it's not always possible to figure out exactly what's going on in "In the Mood for Love" -- but then, that's not really necessary. The potent glances that pass between the two lovers, played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, and even just the way the actors move, are enough to carry you.

The setting is Hong Kong in 1962. Su Li-zhen (Cheung), a young wife whose husband is almost perpetually away on business, takes a room in the apartment of Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan). That same day Chow Mo-wan (Leung), a journalist whose wife is also away much of the time, moves into a room down the hall. Both find themselves forced into the role of being on-again, off-again solitary people, deprived of the luxury of settling comfortably into the rhythm of life with one other person. They pass on the stairs of the local noodle shop, barely glancing at each other, partly out of propriety and partly out of embarrassment, as if each hopes to scurry away secretly with his or her takeout dinner without wearing the loneliness of it as a symbol.

The two barely speak until Chow realizes that their respective spouses are having an affair. Shocked and hurt, they discuss the situation in an almost businesslike way, despite the fact that miniature galaxies of feeling have already passed between them in their furtive glances. They become cautious friends, and it's clear they're both considering the possibility of falling in love with each other. But when Chow pushes forward ever so slightly, Su retreats, mostly out of a sense of honor. She doesn't feel the two of them should behave as badly as their spouses have. They take breaks from their friendship, but as time goes on, it falls into a gentle if slightly irregular rhythm, a loping ballad in 5/4 where the extra beat is the thing that sets them apart from all the other lovers in the world.

Wong's Hong Kong streets, often slicked with rain, and color-patchwork interiors have a glistening, dreamy look. Almost every frame is buffed to a subtle romantic glow. Credited to two cinematographers -- Mark Li Ping-bin and Wong's frequent collaborator, Christopher Doyle -- "In the Mood for Love" looks period-perfect and yet also exists in a romantic nowheresville beyond any real time or place. Tendrils of cigarette smoke hang in the air between the lovers like specters of possibilities; the corridors of the hotel where they meet -- not to sleep together but to discuss the martial-arts story Chow is working on -- look both lively and lonely, the clashing patterns of curtains, wallpaper and tile floor a mismatched surprise.

Wong directs his actors beautifully, although the gentle two-steps-forward, four-back restraint he summons from them must have made him maddening to work with. (In a New York Times Magazine interview, Cheung said she became so frustrated working with Wong that she swore she'd never do so again -- until she saw how beautifully the movie turned out.)

Leung -- not to be confused with the actor who starred in Jean-Jacques Annaud's "The Lover," Tony Leung Kar-fai -- has a grave, refined presence, but there's a boyishness to his dignity that's almost overtly sexual. Cheung, one of the most staggeringly beautiful actresses working in the movies today, lends soft, understated expressiveness to her character, a woman who's afraid to let her face betray what she really feels. Her body language tells a good half the story of the character. We often see her walking from behind, dressed in her brightly colored, fitted, extremely high-necked cheung sams; her gait has a sensuous, high-heeled amble. The dresses, restrained in fit but not in color or pattern, mark her as a modest, fashionable woman of her time and place, but even so, there's something potentially free and modern about her. She's like a cautious, resting butterfly, wings temporarily folded but ready to fly at any time.

As actors, Leung and Cheung are balmily attuned to each other here. Although their romance never ignites, it throws off pure, soothing warmth. Wong's rhythmic sense as a director is different from that of Ang Lee, whose "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" also cradles an unfulfilled love story at its center. Wong's picture moves more slowly than Lee's, but there's more energy pulsing through it. The lovers' restraint feels lush and vital, a current between them that's practically a third character. By the time Leung finally takes Cheung's hand -- it happens late in the movie -- it's as if a dam has broken, yet the delicacy of the gesture remains intact. It's not soaked in melodrama.

In one scene, Chow and Su sit in a cafe, discussing their respective spouses' indiscretion even as the bond between them has already shown itself to be filament fine and strong. The lovers are shown to us mostly in profile, which means each actor has only half the usual available resources to work with: one eye and half a smile apiece.

But they telegraph their desire beautifully and perfectly, and the fact that their faces are partially hidden from us enhances the sense of intimacy between them. They're two halves of one exceptional whole, prevented by circumstance from ever coming into the open. But the fact that their love never flowers hardly matters. As they've written it out, it exists fully formed and three-dimensional somewhere in space, like a geometry problem that extends far beyond the paper it's written on -- backward, forward, from left to right and from East to West.

The Virgin Suicides

2005-07-29T19:13:00.000-07:00

Salon.com

Jeffrey Eugenides' novel "The Virgin Suicides," set in 1970s suburbia, is a creamy, moonbeam-laden love letter to the girls of the day, in their French-cut T-shirts, bell-bottoms and Love's Baby Soft. It's a tender and beautifully written book, one that makes the case once and for all that boys can be a sentimental and perceptive lot, but there's one big problem with it: It's so obsessively detailed that by the end it's almost unreadable.

The book's narrators are a group of boys who've grown into men, but who can't leave their memories of five neighborhood girls, the Lisbon sisters, behind them. If all boys had as many exposed nerve endings as they seem to, we'd live in a world with no skyscrapers and no bridges.

Leave it to a woman to boil all the excess, leaden moisture out of Eugenides' book and leave just the bare-bones poetry. Sofia Coppola's adaptation of "The Virgin Suicides" -- it's her directorial debut, and she also adapted the screenplay -- captures the loveliest visuals and bits of language from Eugenides' book and faithfully, but not slavishly, transfers them to the screen. There's no irony in Coppola's treatment; she nabs all of the book's humor without layering on too many smirks or ironic winks. She connects with the essential purity of Eugenides' story, stripping it down to its bare essentials and cutting straight to everything that's wonderful about it. It's a movie adaptation that's filled with love.

That's not to say that if a man had made "The Virgin Suicides" it would have been a worse movie, but it's safe to assume it would have been a rather different one. I've never been one for ghettoizing, and certainly not canonizing, female artists; it always seemed to me a better idea to look at a work, as much as is humanly possible, for what it is rather than to fixate on what's between the legs of the person who made it.

But there's no denying that men and women bring different sensibilities to their work. And you can't ignore the unusually large number of high-profile pictures made by female directors in the past year or so, among them Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry," Mary Harron's "American Psycho" and Bonnie Hunt's "Return to Me," as well as "The Virgin Suicides."

What's always frustrating about the trumpeting of "hot" new female directors is that, as always, the ones who get all the attention haven't necessarily made the best movies. Stacy Cochran is a case in point. Her wry 1992 suburban fairy tale, "My New Gun," made barely a blip on the radar screen, and her next feature, the more delicate and subtly shaded "Boys" (1996), was misunderstood by most of the critics who saw it and went unseen by just about everyone else. Cochran presented a film at Sundance this year that has yet to find a distributor.

There's also a tendency to overlook female filmmakers working in other countries, some of whom have been making subtly terrific movies for years: New Zealander Jane Campion earned lots of attention in 1993 for "The Piano," a foolish if visually lush movie that tapped into the feminist zeitgeist of its time. The success of "The Piano" was treated as some sort of signal that female directors had at last "broken through" -- though through to what, I'm not exactly sure -- and I would have been thrilled if its popularity could have ensured greater international success (or at least attention) in subsequent years for filmmakers like Great Britain's Carine Adler ( "Under the Skin" ); France's Claire Denis ("I Can't Sleep," "Beau Travail" ) or Catherine Breillat ( "Romance" ); or Canada's Lea Pool ("Set Me Free").

The point is, even though it's hard not to notice when a clutch of female filmmakers suddenly appear on the scene, it's never a good idea to lump them into a group that's defined by some broad women's view. But there's nothing wrong with admitting that women are likely to view things differently from the way men do.

Look at Denis' "Beau Travail," an adaptation of Melville's "Billy Budd" set in the Foreign Legion. On its most basic level, "Beau Travail" is a paean to the beauty of men's bodies. But even when Denis, with the help of her terrific cinematographer, Agnes Godard, shows us rippling muscles and sweat-dappled skin, the images are distinctly different from what you might see in gay porn. Denis doesn't sentimentalize or declaw the male form -- she revels in its supple, tigerlike qualities -- but she does view it with a certain amount of tender regard, tacitly acknowledging that there's always a fragility to that shell of skin and bone and muscle, regardless of whether it belongs to a man or a woman.

What's interesting in particular about "The Virgin Suicides" isn't just that it was made by a woman, but that it's a case of a woman's adapting a novel about a group of young men's nostalgia for the unattainable girls of their youth. In the old days, you might have said those girls were imprisoned in the male gaze. But Coppola's picture is completely nonjudgmental about the narrators' love for the Lisbon girls (although it should go without saying that love shouldn't be subject to anyone's judgment).

The picture has a feminine sensibility in terms of its dreamy languor, the pearlescent glow that hovers around it like a nimbus. (It's beautifully shot by Edward Lachman and features a willowy score by Air.) But there's also a clear-eyed precision at work here, almost as if Coppola subconsciously wanted to make sure she captured Eugenides' vision, while also giving a sense of the Lisbon sisters as real live girls.

There are five Lisbon sisters, all beautiful and clear-skinned, with that straight, fair California-girl hair that every girl of the era wanted desperately. Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) is the most luscious of them, and sends off signals that she just may be the most sexually adventurous.

Cecilia (Hanna Hall), the youngest, is a sensitive, troubled girl, given to traipsing around in a tatty vintage wedding dress, and for reasons that no one is quite able to fathom she attempts to slit her wrists very early in the story; she recovers, only to successfully off herself shortly thereafter.

The story is told from the point of view of a small group of neighborhood boys (represented by a wonderful voice-over by Giovanni Ribisi) who worship the Lisbon girls. The mysterious death only enhances the sisters' aura. But even before Cecilia's suicide, the girls had been carefully watched by their stern, overprotective mother (Kathleen Turner) and, to a lesser extent, by their docile math-teacher dad (James Woods).

After Cecilia's death, the household becomes even more cloistered, until local hottie Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) falls madly in love with Lux and decides he simply must take her to the homecoming dance; the only way she's allowed to go is if her sisters attend, too.

The real charm of "The Virgin Suicides" lies in the details, in the way it evokes both the era and the peculiar romantic fixations of awkward teenage boys. The movie gets the suburbs of the time exactly right, with the trim split-level houses and impossibly verdant lawns, the streets lined with lazy trees (and, in this case, dying ones -- there are references in the plot to diseased elms). Rec-room basements decorated with so much cheerful anxiety they can't help looking sullen; dens where family members gather, glassy-eyed and silent, to watch nature shows.

Coppola's suburbia is partly a half-remembered dream state and partly an optimistic interior decorator's sketch, a conglomeration of how people lived and how they desperately wanted to live.

Coppola's just as good, though, at showing what happens when that idealized world goes off-kilter. After Cecilia's death, the Lisbon home takes on a dullish cast, becoming heavy with grief and awkwardness. Coppola captures it with just a few shots: A priest (Scott Glenn, in a moody cameo) comes to bring solace to the family and opens the door to one of the girls' rooms, where he finds them, silent and listless, arranged in a haphazard starfish shape on the floor, a tableau of youthful beauty rendered lethargic and numbed by sorrow.

Of course it's the girls, as reflected in the eyes of the boys who love them, who sit like queens at the movie's throne. Dunst's completely winning Lux, with her velvet-powder-puff skin and wild-cherry smile, may represent the ultimate teen-dream ideal, but she's a believable one. She's a girl who's so open to the pleasure of sex she wants everything it has to offer: the giggling, the teasing, the whole damn pas de deux.

It's easy to see why Trip -- a lizard-like charmer in his slim-fit cowboy shirts and puka shells, an oversexed creature who charms young women and old alike -- wants no other girl. "You're a stone fox," he tells her with a kind of awestruck dumbness. Prefab as the compliment is, he makes you see it's been poured directly from his heart.

Trip gets three friends together so the group of them can take the Lisbon girls to the dance, rescuing them from the torpor of their too-long-in-mourning home. The dance sequence sparkles from the moment the boys pick the girls up at the Lisbon house: The sisters file down the stairs in their oddly shaped, matching homemade dresses, a procession of fairy tale maidens decked out in Butterick finery.

The dance itself, featuring a high school gym that's been halfheartedly transformed into a glumly festive forest by the simple hanging of a glitter curtain in front of the bleachers, captures perfectly those futilely hopeful school dances where the collective wish that something good would happen hangs in the air like a toxic cloud.

The forlorn hope of that dance is what makes it so moving: It's hilarious when Lux, her sister Therese (the charming Leslie Hayman) and their respective dates cluster behind that tinsel curtain to drink peach schnapps and make out. But it's still easy to see how they're hurtling themselves toward something, any old thing, that might change their lives. And when Therese beams at her date and says, "I'm having the best time," her utter sincerity is heartrending. Who ever had a good time at those things? But her simple declaration represents the way we always hoped against hope we would.

The music in "The Virgin Suicides" couldn't have been more perfectly chosen, not just for the way it evokes the era but for the way it builds subtle strata of moods: The homecoming dance, set to ELO's "Strange Magic" and 10CC's "I'm Not in Love," takes on a kind of swimmy surrealism. And it's a delicious joke when Trip first swaggers onto the scene to the tune of Heart's "Magic Man."

The picture's single loveliest sequence involves not just music but the magic of record albums. The girls, sequestered by their parents in their suburban prison, receive a signal from the boys who love them: Their phone rings, and when they answer, Todd Rundgren's "Hello It's Me" drifts through the receiver. The girls cluster around their hi-fi to send a song back, and the plaintive volley continues: Gilbert O'Sullivan's mopey "Alone Again (Naturally)" is countered by the Bee Gees' "Run to Me," which is followed by Carole King's "So Far Away," the songs' plaintive messages traversing the phone lines like lantern signals exchanged between lonely sailors.

The whole time, the narrative of "The Virgin Suicides" is leading up to a single mysterious act. Yet the story isn't a mystery at all, but simply the affirmation of a simple truth: That even if memories of the people we once loved (from afar or up-close) are embroidered and enhanced over time, that doesn't necessarily make them less valuable or less "true." In other words, disillusionment doesn't necessarily equal enlightenment. In "The Virgin Suicides," Michael Par appears as the older Trip, skinny and decrepit-looking and wasting away in some bleak drug-rehab center (and still wearing the same ultra-fitted cowboy shirts). Par's grown-up and burned-out Trip tells the story, in flashback, of what happened between him and Lux, and when he asserts that he never loved anyone as much, you've no choice but to believe him.

The older Trip is touching not because he's so down-and-out, but because in talking about Lux he's momentarily transformed. You see a glimmer of the stud he once was flash across his face; even his body language changes a bit. Trip never had the ability to see Lux as the woman she really was. Hanging onto his dream vision seems to have done nothing but suck the life out of him -- and yet you wonder, if he'd been able to thoroughly dismiss her memory, would he have just shriveled up and blown away completely?

Some readers (in my experience they were mostly women) were frustrated with Eugenides' book for the way it fixated on the men's view of the women instead of the women themselves. But "The Virgin Suicides" isn't simply about the way men can fall hopelessly in love with ideals; it's about how they can be ultimately undone by them, and Coppola understands that perfectly. She re-creates their vision for us in all its beauty, but she also suggests the holes in it -- the dark spots that dance in front of you when you've been stupid enough to stare directly at the sun.

She has compassion for those boys, but there's no doubt that her heart really goes out to those girls. Descending that staircase to greet their anxious dates, they weren't sorceresses or fairy queens or succubi. They were just young girls in bad dresses, waiting to be understood. Instead, they were simply loved.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

2005-07-29T19:06:00.000-07:00

Salon.com

If you've ever had a dream in which you're painfully aware of having lost something, or someone, but you have no idea what or who has slipped away from you -- a dream in which an absence is a presence, a cookie-cutter-shaped hole moving like a ghost in the space around you -- you'll understand "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" intuitively. You may also find it devastating.

This is French director Michel Gondry's second full-length movie, written by Charlie Kaufman (with whom Gondry also collaborated on his first picture, the 2000 "Human Nature"). In "Eternal Sunshine," Jim Carrey plays Joel, a man who arranges to have every memory of his ex-girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), erased from his brain, only to realize that those memories may be more dear to him than the failed union itself: They're all he's got left.

The movie traces the romance in reverse-order flashbacks, starting with the most painful memories of the breakup and working forward to the earliest, sweetest ones. Joel realizes that in allowing bits of Clementine to disappear, he's also erasing chunks of himself. "Eternal Sunshine" is a meditation on the way other people go to work on us in ways we're barely aware of, like ghostwriters who grab the pen when we're not looking, writing new chapters for us that are better than any we could have come up with on our own.

The best moments of "Eternal Sunshine" are deeply and desperately moving: At times the picture feels achingly alive. In fact, the first 20 minutes or so of "Eternal Sunshine" are so free of gimmickry and self-consciousness that I almost couldn't believe it had been written by Kaufman, who has built a tidy career out of writing cool-weird puzzle movies, brain teasers for modern audiences who might get bored if they were left to do the work of simply confronting their emotions. Was there more to Kaufman than I'd previously given him credit for?

The answer is that, yes, there may be. And yet there's still not quite enough.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" represents a failure of nerve: As if Gondry and Kaufman weren't sure that the story of Joel and Clementine would hold us, the doomed couple's unfolding-in-reverse romance is intercut with a subplot filled with zany touches, like Mark Ruffalo as a sexy-awkward techno-geek in Nutty Professor glasses, and Kirsten Dunst as a dippy-adorable office assistant who edyercates herself by memorizing quotations from "Bartlett's." (In her most torturously cute moment, she recites from the poem from which the movie takes its title, attributing it to "Pope Alexander.") The ballad of Joel and Clementine is a piercing reverie, gorgeously sun-dappled and at times so wrenching that it's almost painful to watch. But whenever Ruffalo and Dunst -- or any of the movie's other numerous sidekicks, like far-from-mad-scientist Tom Wilkinson, or Elijah Wood as Ruffalo's well-meaning but dimwitted assistant -- appear, the movie jerks us out of our dream state.

You might argue that this is a dramatic device, a way of breaking what would otherwise be an incredibly intense story into easily digestible bits. But I think it's symptomatic of a much larger, thornier problem in moviemaking today, one that undercuts the reasons movies have come to mean so much to us, emotionally and culturally, in the first place: The '90s were all about ironic detachment -- it was uncool to care too much about anything, or at least to admit as much. Now that we've tread somewhat tentatively into the 21st century, most of us claim to have gotten over the irony thing. And yet, many of the movies of the past five years that have been hailed as inventive and interesting by young audiences -- pictures like "Memento," "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," the last two written by Kaufman -- are also movies that work hard to wow us with their jigsaw intricacies.

It's as if young filmmakers fear that their audiences will become bored with a movie if they don't have a clever mind-boggler to wrestle with along the way (the equivalent of a magnetic bingo game on a long car trip). In grappling with these perplexing riddles, we're supposedly exercising our intellect. But isn't it also possible that we're using them as a handy diversion, a way of distancing ourselves from emotions that might be too strong for us to deal with easily? Labyrinthine plots are supposed to stimulate us. But are they really just distracting us from the work at hand -- the work of feeling?

I'm not saying audiences shouldn't take pleasure in intricate movies. It can be exhilarating, and just plain fun, to feel your brain and your imagination working in tandem, as you do while watching pictures like "The Usual Suspects" or "Femme Fatale" or "The Big Sleep" (the last a movie that doesn't make much sense at the end, although getting there is so much fun that it hardly matters).

But just as there's a difference between knowing things and being informed, there's a difference between going all the way with a movie and going only as far as is convenient or comfortable. One of the most popular features ever run in Salon was a 2001 article called "Everything You Wanted to Know About 'Mulholland Drive,'" a dissection of every explicable or inexplicable mystery of David Lynch's ode to both the gleaming surface and tawdry underbelly of Hollywood. "Mulholland Drive" does work as a puzzle, and its intricacies are enjoyable. Personally, though, I'm much more interested in its hypnotic poetry and the tarnished-tinsel quality of its images. And while it's always fun to ponder Lynchian details, you can miss the point of Lynch's movies entirely if you spend too much energy pondering the significance of the scruffy maniac in the parking lot or the contents of the blue box.

That said, I suspect that whether they recognize it or not, audiences yearn for movies that can make them think and feel. And for many moviegoers, "Eternal Sunshine" may fit the bill. There's so much that's right with the movie that, just a few days after seeing it, I've already done a fairly decent job of blotting out everything I hated about it as I watched it -- we all have our own memory-erasing techniques.

The beginning of "Eternal Sunshine" is nothing short of lovely; in fact, it's close to perfect. We see Carrey's Joel waking up in his plain-vanilla outskirts-of-New York apartment on a shivery winter morning; striding toward his car in the parking lot only to see that the driver's side door has been gouged; waiting on a crowded train platform, headed for his job in the city; and then making a last-minute dash for a train to Montauk, for reasons we won't fully understand till the end of the movie. There he walks along a doleful blue-gray beach. He sees an interesting-looking girl. We hear what he's thinking in a gruff, whispery voiceover that sounds as if it's emerging from the seashell of our own deep subconscious. He asks himself, for example, why he falls in love immediately with anyone who shows him the slightest bit of attention?

On the train back to the city, he gets acquainted with the interesting-looking girl, who is, of course, Clementine. She has blue hair that has further rebelled against authority by sticking out every which way; it will change color several more times during the course of the movie. ("I apply my personality in a paste," she explains to Joel, half apologetically and half defensively.) Their first conversation has a nervous, twitchy energy, animated by their attraction to each other and by their desperate hope that each will find the other amusing and intriguing. (She: "That's the oldest trick in the stalker's book." He: "There's a stalker's book? I've got to read that one.") They speak to each other like people who have just met, after having been lovers for ages.

We want them to be together possibly even more than they do, and Gondry and Kaufman build on that foundation for the rest of "Eternal Sunshine." As the story progresses, we learn that the opening was a flashback of sorts: Joel and Clementine have broken up, bitterly. Joel hopes to win her back by buying her a necklace from her favorite store (in one of the movie's gentlest and most resonating touches, he has chosen a gift that's clearly perfect for her character, a pendant made from a hand-painted shell), but when he shows up at the bookstore where she works, she looks at him as if she doesn't know him. He's crushed, and then angry; before long he finds out that she's had her memories of him erased from her brain, a service offered by a company called Lacuna, which operates out of a city office that looks more briskly efficient than shady.

Joel, in an act of despairing retaliation, decides he wants the procedure done, too. He asks Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Wilkinson), the doctor-slash-guru who invented the technique, if the erasure carries any risk of brain damage. "Technically, the process is brain damage," Mierzwiak responds with a straight face and a dash of doctorly confidence. The process involves, among other things, knocking the patient out with drugs, placing a helmet on his head that looks like a cross between a colander and an old-fashioned bonnet hairdryer, and attaching a laptop to the whole contraption. A team of trained technicians -- that would be Ruffalo's Stan and Elijah Wood's Patrick -- then locate the pertinent memories on an onscreen map of the patient's brain and zap them one by one.

The unconscious Joel unravels his and Clementine's history, starting with the breakup. But as he moves back through the relationship, surveying all the small moments that make up the mosaic of a relationship, he realizes there are parts of Clementine he can't bear to give up. At one point, the two of them are making love underneath a comforter -- the light shines through it faintly, turning their faces funny colors, and we feel we've been drawn deep inside their tent of intimacy. We see Joel running through hallways of memories, and they're gobbled behind him as if by an invisible crocodile. In one sequence, he and Clementine run past a fence, and its planks disappear one by one, like a disappearing zipper made of piano keys.

The first time Joel hits a memory he knows he can't live without, he pleads, "Oh please, let me hang on to just this one!" The technicians, of course, can't hear him, and they're barely paying attention to their jobs anyway: Stan has invited his girlfriend, Mary (Dunst), over to keep him company. Mary is also the receptionist at Lacuna, and while she takes a fleeting interest in Stan's work, the two of them are much more interested in setting the laptop on autopilot, raiding Joel's refrigerator and liquor cabinet, and stripping down to their underwear and jumping up and down on his bed, barely bothering to avoid his passed-out, helmeted, pajama-clad form. Meanwhile, after having a beer or two, Patrick has taken off completely to spend the evening with his new girlfriend.

"Eternal Sunshine" cuts between that exaggerated, jokey subplot and the real drama of the picture: the desperate efforts of Joel and Clementine, even as they're locked in the confines of Joel's brain, to stick together. (At one point, conspiring to foil the brain-erasers, they hide out in Joel's childhood kitchen: He crouches, in feetie-pajamas, beneath an outsize kitchen table; she has adopted the guise of his childhood baby sitter, in mini-dress and lace-up go-go boots.)

The problem is that the movie stretches too hard to come up with wacky twists and turns, when what's really riveting is the way Joel and Clementine strive to stay connected to one another. The narrative machinations strain at cleverness, but they can't live up to the movie's visual inventiveness, which is so casual and offhanded that it renders this weird fantasy world wholly believable. Gondry built his early career directing commercials and music videos. His work with Björk, in particular, in videos like "Bachelorette," "Human Behaviour" and "Isobel," have an unearthly, quivering quality reminiscent of the early days of filmmaking, the kind of thing Georges Méliès might have done if he were working today. Gondry gave us miniature airplanes sprouting inside light bulbs (before busting out to scatter through the air like insects) and books that start out normal-sized and grow to gigantic proportions.

In "Eternal Sunshine," Gondry's vision is rarely overtly fanciful; he's much more interested in the magic of straightforwardness. (His cinematographer here is Ellen Kuras, and she gives the movie a look of dreamy urgency that's perfect for the story.) The visual effects in "Eternal Sunshine" are stunningly simple: Gondry plays with scale in the kitchen scene, using giant furniture to make Joel seem fragile and tiny. (Gondry has used similar effects in his music videos, and they're also evocative of the effective visual gags Spike Jonze concocted for "Being John Malkovich.") And I have never before seen an everyday quilt lit up with the fragile glow of a Chinese paper lantern. It's the kind of image you drink in and savor, and it's also a metaphor for the connection and warmth that Joel and Clementine have lost. "Eternal Sunshine" is most elegiac when there are no words in sight.

And yet it's to Kaufman's credit that the dialogue between Joel and Clementine always rings true. If you can comb past the craziness around them and just listen to them, you hear that they speak to each other just as people in love (or falling out of it) do. Carrey and Winslet are wonderful here. Clementine is different from any character Winslet has ever played. The actress typically radiates angelic calmness; here, she's always vibrating, an electrified rabbit that can't be turned off. Yet it's impossible not to care for her: Her dippiness isn't an affectation, but a light beam that shines in a wriggly line straight from her soul. She's flaky and feisty in equal measures, a mix of qualities that makes her fragility that much more believable.

Carrey is Winslet's perfect counterpart. Although much of what he does here is funny in a sidelong way, this is a deeply serious, and wondrous, performance. When we finally get around to seeing Joel and Clementine's first meeting, she asks him if she can have a piece of chicken off his plate, and then grabs it before he can say yes. "It was like we were already lovers," Joel reflects, not dreamily but as if he were stating an indisputable fact on which the fate of the nations of the world depended. Winslet is the one with the large, searching eyes, but in my memory of Carrey's performance, his are much larger: They're striving to take everything in, to record events and places but, chiefly, to memorize Clementine's face. It's a face that means the world to him, and it's in danger of disappearing forever. Carrey's Joel is an ordinary guy -- there's something inexplicably touching about his regular-joe shirt-and-sweater outfits -- but his romantic desperation is like something out of a 19th century novel or a '20s silent film. It's large and magnificent, a force that can't help busting out of the framework of everyday life.

Meanwhile, Dunst's Mary and Ruffalo's Stan jump up and down in their underwear, Wood's Patrick bumbles through his newfound romance, and Dr. Mierzwiak's jealous wife shows up unannounced. We're supposed to laugh, or feel nervous apprehension, or wonder what kind of crazy thing is going to happen next -- but all we want to do is get back to Joel and Clementine. Those loopy shenanigans constitute the movie's connective tissue, but it feels stretched out and feeble. What's real and what's not? Kaufman and Gondry seem to be asking again and again, without realizing that the very faces of their two lead actors have completely erased our interest in those types of questions. The filmmakers busy themselves puttering around the boundaries between fantasy and illusion, without realizing that they're the only ones who care: Once we're inside Joel's head, that is our reality.

I've been critical of Kaufman in the past, chiefly because I despised the phoniness of "Adaptation." But if I hold Kaufman responsible for much of what troubles me about "Eternal Sunshine," I have to allow that much of what's right about it must also stem directly from him: The movie is redolent with wistfulness and melancholy, and those aren't things you can layer on after the fact.

The disappointment I felt at the end of "Eternal Sunshine" was almost crushing, simply because there were sections of it that were as daring in their emotional directness as anything I've seen in years. Did Kaufman, or Kaufman and Gondry, construct the movie as they did simply so audiences wouldn't leave the theater feeling too devastated to engage in conversation, let alone a cocktail or a cappuccino? Maybe. Yet there are moments in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" that bring us as close as anyone should ever come to staring at the sun. The movie's warmth is irresistible; the risk of getting burned should have been left to us.

Before Sunset

2005-07-29T18:59:00.000-07:00

Salon.com

The tagline on the movie poster for Richard Linklater's extraordinary and beloved 1995 "Before Sunrise" reads, "Can the greatest romance of your life last only one night?" It's a question that can be answered in two possible ways. First, with another question: "How does the human heart define 'one night'?" Or, better yet, with another movie -- in this case, the delicate but ardent "Before Sunset."

In "Before Sunrise," Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke played Celine and Jesse, young students who meet up on a train while traveling through Europe. She's French; he's American. Their first conversation is creaky and halting, a sorry old freight train struggling to make it uphill, with the earnestly eager Jesse working desperately (as men so often do) to engage the luminous Celine in a conversation that will last more than 30 seconds. Celine keeps trying to return to her book, doing her darnedest to pretend she's not intrigued by him.

But she warms to Jesse, almost against her better judgment (as women so often do), and the two decide to disembark in Vienna and wander the city together until Celine's train leaves the next morning. They spend the time talking, sometimes about heady metaphysical conceits and sometimes about nothing much at all. By the end of the picture, they're intimate strangers, like an ancient married couple in a fairytale who magically awake one day to find themselves young and beautiful and yearning to discover each other anew again.

At the end of "Before Sunrise," Celine and Jesse part, reluctantly, agreeing to meet again in Vienna six months later. It's an ending that works by speaking directly to our indignance, to our proprietary feelings about characters we've come to love in an extremely compressed amount of time. How could these two people even think of moving on and living a life without us, their tag-along voyeurs? And yet that's exactly what they do, leaving us to wonder: Did they keep that appointment in Vienna? And if so, what happened next?

"Before Sunset," which reunites Jesse and Celine after nine years, answers both of those questions, and yet it goes far beyond merely satisfying our curiosity. "Before Sunrise" was an opalescent picture, one that dazzled with subtle flecks of light. "Before Sunset" has an even subtler texture, and yet its muted patina leaves a more potent, longer-lasting afterglow. "Before Sunrise" captures the exhilaration of connecting with another person; "Before Sunset" moves forward from there, burrowing into territory that's more complex and dangerous, but also perhaps more vital. It reminds us that connections can remain strong even after we believe we've safely loosened them. And it offers the idea, alternately comforting and terrifying, that we don't have the luxury of moving further and further away from our most significant memories until they're just tiny specks in the distance; instead, they stick with us stubbornly, forcing us to fold them into our lives as we go on living. A romance that lasts just one night can change the rest of your eternity.

How true is that for Celine and Jesse, circa 2004? To say too much about "Before Sunset" is to give the game away. Or, as Jesse himself says, "In the words of my grandfather, 'To answer that would take the piss out of the whole thing.'" But I think it's safe to tell you Jesse is a successful novelist who has just published a fictionalized account of his night with Celine. Paris, where she now lives, is the last stop on his book tour. He gives his last reading among the cozy, cramped jumble of shelves at Shakespeare & Co., and as he's fielding questions from journalists about the possible real-life genesis of his story (dodging them is perhaps more like it), Celine herself suddenly appears. Jesse keeps talking, barely breaking stride, but it's obvious from the look on his face -- it has the guarded radiance of a decent guy who's learned, the hard way, not to expect too much out of reality -- that there's one particular thing he'd desperately hoped would happen. And finally, it has.

Celine greets Jesse with the kind of awkwardness that is its own warmth; their individual force fields start to disintegrate around them at the merest touch, although, on the surface, they both scramble to maintain their defenses. Jesse has less than an hour and a half before he catches his flight home, and he and Celine decide (as if it were actually a decision to be made) to spend that time together. As they walk through the city, starting out at a café, wandering through cobbled streets and eventually onto a tourist boat on the Seine, they share details about their lives: Celine works for a humanitarian-aid organization and is currently dating a photojournalist she claims to be in love with. Jesse is married and has a kid he adores.

Their conversation meanders from the pleasant catching-up that happens between old friends, to veiled admissions about their respective frustrations and disappointments, to declarations whose directness is piercing. As Celine and Jesse wander and talk, the camera lingers on their faces for seven or eight minutes at a time, as if it can't bear to tear itself away from their conversation, or, more specifically, from their presence itself.

We can't tear ourselves away either. The movie is structured in real time -- it's 80 minutes long, and its pacing is so fluid that the picture is over long before you're ready to let go of the characters. (Like its predecessor, "Before Sunset" ends with an implied question -- you'll have to see the movie to find out what it is.) And, like "Before Sunrise," it's beautifully shot by Lee Daniel -- its surface is both modestly low-key and lustrous.

Delpy and Hawke's performances seem to be actually layered into the movie's structure: It's a given that Celine and Jesse are entranced by each other, yet they maintain their sturdy façades through much of the movie -- the feelings beneath the surface don't so much spill out in a torrent as sift out like magic dust, a testament to the control and sensitivity of these two actors. Delpy gets to play the neurotic cutup: She tells Jesse the story of how, when she was living in New York as a student (as it turns out, he was living there at the same time), a police officer told her she'd better get a gun. Her words come out in a breathless somersault: "Me with a gun, I mean, that's really scary!" Her eyes go all googly, like those of a cartoon mermaid.

But even Celine knows she's using the entertainment value of her neuroses as a shield: When she allows her deeper feelings to tumble out, her vulnerability closes in on her. We see how the restless, thoughtful 20-ish girl we met in the first picture is not so different from this alternately poised and goofy woman in her early 30s -- the chief difference is that the woman wonders if she may be running out of things to look forward to. Delpy is trimmer now, more willowy. Her face has lost its puppyish innocence, but gained an incandescent thoughtfulness.

How does Jesse respond to this older, and yet not so different, Celine? Hawke's performance matches Delpy's note for note -- he's the woodwind to her strings. When you first compare this Hawke to the 1995 version ("Before Sunset" includes a brief montage of images from the earlier movie), you may think he hasn't aged much at all. But when you look more closely, you see how his tail-wagging boyishness has settled into something sturdier, more reliable -- not as if he's accidentally lost his innocence along the way but as if he'd consciously tuned it out. Explaining his decision to get married, he admits to Celine that he had been obsessed with "this idea of your best self. And I wanted to pursue that even if it overrode my more honest self." And at times, he looks at Celine with such anxious expectation in his eyes that he seems infinitely more vulnerable than even his younger self.

The script for "Before Sunset" was written by Linklater, Delpy and Hawke (from a story by Linklater and Kim Krizan, who collaborated with the director on the screenplay for "Before Sunrise"). It seems as if the three set out with a stern mission for themselves and never veered away from it. "Before Sunset" is that rare adult romance that doesn't condescend to adults. We generally accept that young people are more vulnerable to suffering at the hands of love. The prevailing wisdom is that you don't feel things as acutely as you get older, which, like so many nuggets of prevailing wisdom, is true -- except when it's not.

"Before Sunset" accepts no prevailing wisdom. In love, there's no black and white, only rosy grays, and "Before Sunset" revels in the freedom of that limitless palette. Although there isn't a single kiss in this love story, it's intensely erotic -- and more to the point, it's not afraid of eroticsm's juicier and more forthright twin, carnality.

The suggestion, I think, is that connections between souls can be as solid as, and even messier than, connections between bodies. At one point Jesse confesses to Celine, "If someone were to touch me, I'd dissolve into molecules." We often talk about romance as a dreamy thing, a gossamer blessing that floats down upon us from the sky. "Before Sunset" nudges us into rethinking everything we claim to know about romance. For all its elusiveness, it may be sturdier, earthier than we know. It just might be the glue that holds the molecules together.

Pop Matters

Physical Eloquence: It's a classic movie buff question. Somewhere, right now, in a bar or a video store or on a ticket holders' line, someone is struggling to name a great sequel that's been released in the years since The Godfather, Part Two (1974). In a perfect world, this discussion would end in a half-empty café, with participants singing the praises of the grand and delicate Before Sunset, director Richard Linklater's present-day return to the couple first seen in the 1995 romance, Before Sunrise.

The sequel opens in the renowned Parisian bookstore Shakespeare & Co., where first-time novelist Jesse Wallace (Ethan Hawke) is giving a reading. The audience is small, mostly press, and they inquire as to the autobiographical nature of his work. They suspect what viewers of Before Sunrise already know: while traveling on a Eurorail pass nine years ago, Jesse fell in love with Celine (Julie Delpy), and spent one night with her in Vienna before flying home to America the next day. As he answers questions, she stands quietly off to the side until he notices her. They exchange affectionate, uncertain greetings, and again, his travel arrangements impose a time limit: Jesse is scheduled to leave for the airport in little over an hour.

Unlike its predecessor, Before Sunset unfolds in real time. Nearly all of Linklater's films have been restricted to a single night or day; excepting last year's crowd-pleasing detour, School of Rock, he's been working up to this film since his debut, Slacker (1991). The writer/director and his stars (who wrote much of their own dialogue and turn in career-best performances), pay close attention to conversational and emotional nuances. Early on, the talk can be rambling and contradictory, but Hawke and Delpy are good enough to convey to the audience what the characters strain to communicate to, or hide from, each other. Jesse's impending departure creates real tension, which is further magnified by the film's sense of place.

Whereas Celine and Jesse were tourists in Vienna, killing time in a church or riding the Ferris wheel seen in 1949's The Third Man (one of the earlier film's many unobtrusive allusions), Paris is Celine's hometown. Here, we are reminded of their separate lives and obligations. Much has occurred since they last met, including a missed reunion appointment in Vienna, as well as marriage and children for one of them. Gone are the colorful poets and gypsy fortunetellers who popped up at regular intervals in Before Sunrise, and gone with them is the youthful ignorance of pain and regret. Most of the Parisians we see are simply going about their own daily routines (smoking, jogging, shopping). The older Jesse and Celine talk to each other almost exclusively, eventually unable to suppress the questions and recriminations they never believed they'd have the chance to voice.

It's no accident, then, that Before Sunset avoids most expected landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe, showcasing instead neighborhood cafés or out-of-the-way gardens. The scene in Shakespeare & Co., where owner Sylvia Beach published the notorious first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922, reminds us that Jesse and Celine parted ways in Vienna on Bloomsday, 16 June. (Joyce set his masterpiece on that specific date to commemorate the anniversary of his first date with his wife, Nora.) Thus, Jesse's defense of autobiographical fiction reads not as an apology for his professed ignorance of conventionally dramatic subjects such as "violence and... political intrigue," but as an affirmation of Joyce's great theme -- the influence of past experience on human consciousness trying, ironically and heroically, to make sense of the present.

Celine observes, "Memory's a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past." The night in Vienna was a life-changing encounter for both of them, and Before Sunset's stunning second half acknowledges the often dire consequences of such a momentous event. Tense undercurrents darken their early flirting and catching up, and rather than provide relief, an unexpectedly sweeping long shot of the pair walking along the Seine presages the conversation's spiral toward the operatic. By the time Jesse convinces Celine to join him for a boat ride -- it's for tourists, she protests -- the real-time structure has put the audience in their position, anxious to ask the big questions, yet dreading what are sure to be difficult, lacerating answers.

Regardless of their faults (if not because of them), viewers want good things for this couple. We might say that they remind us of our friends or of ourselves, and while that may be true, it denies the actors the credit they deserve. Even in such a talky film, their silences are as memorable as the longest monologues: Jesse cringes after an awkward sexual reference lands with a thud; Celine reaches for him as he stares out a car window, recounting a bad dream, but she pulls back, like a skittish animal, as he turns to face her. Their physical eloquence verges on heartbreaking.

Theories of cinematic representational modes are irrelevant when it comes to a film like this. Like novelist Richard Russo, another self-effacing American artist mining the infinite dramatic gradations of so-called "ordinary" lives, Linklater is generous in ways that can cause us to forget how good he really is. Developing the rhythms, evasions, confessions, accusations, and apologies of Jesse and Celine's conversation in real, mortality-haunted time, Before Sunset captures an articulate naturalism far more difficult to achieve than any CGI shot or Baudrillard-lite philosophy. The film illustrates the beautiful and frustrating complexity of human hearts seeking love and meaning in a life we know to be transient.

John Updike, also a Joyce acolyte and an obsessive chronicler of the fleeting moment, has explained that he revisits the character of Rabbit Angstrom every decade because Rabbit's perspective grants him "a way in" to complications that may otherwise seem overwhelming. What he sees through Rabbit's eyes, the writer admits, is often more interesting than what he perceives with his own. His audience aged with Rabbit, and they came to anticipate his regular revelations about the world they lived in. Jesse and Celine strike me as having this kind of potential: Hawke and Delpy have already said that they were interested in doing another sequel because the characters have stayed with them for so many years. To experience love, loss, loneliness, hope, and grief with them as they continue to age would be a source of great delight.

Sun Times

By Roger Egbert. Nine years have passed since Jesse and Celine met in Vienna and walked all over the city, talking as if there would be no tomorrow, and then promising to meet again in six months. "Were you there in Vienna, in December?" she asks him. Nine years have passed, and they have met again in Paris. Jesse wrote a novel about their long night together, and at a book signing he looked up, and there she was. They begin to talk again, in a rush, before he must leave to catch his flight back to America.

"Before Sunset" continues the conversation that began in "Before Sunrise" (1995), but at a riskier level. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) are over 30 now, have made commitments in life, no longer feel as they did in 1995 that everything was possible. One thing they have learned, although they are slow to reveal it, is how rare it is to meet someone you feel an instinctive connection with. They walk out of the bookstore and around the corner and walk, and talk, and the director Richard Linklater films them in long, uninterrupted takes, so that the film feels like it exists in real time.

"Before Sunset" is a remarkable achievement in several ways, most obviously in its technical skill. It is not easy to shoot a take that is six or seven minutes long, not easy for actors to walk through a real city while dealing with dialogue that has been scripted but must sound natural and spontaneous. Yet we accept, almost at once, that this conversation is really happening. There's no sense of contrivance or technical difficulty.

Hawke and Delpy wrote the screenplay themselves, beginning from the characters and dialogue created the first time around by Linklater and Kim Krizan. They lead up to personal details very delicately; at the beginning they talk politely and in abstractions, edging around the topics we (and they) want answers to: Is either one married? Are they happy? Do they still feel that deep attraction? Were they intended to spend their lives together?

There is the feeling, as they discuss how their adult lives are unfolding, that sometimes the actors may be skirting autobiography. Certainly there is an unmistakable truth when Jesse, trying to describe what marriage is like, says "I feel like I'm running a small nursery with someone I used to date."

But the movie is not a confessional, and the characters don't rush into revelations. There is a patience at work, even a reticence, that reflects who they have become. They have responsibilities. They no longer have a quick instinctive trust. They are wary of revealing too much. They are grown-ups, although at least for this afternoon in Paris they are in touch with the open, spontaneous, hopeful kids they were nine years before.

"Before Sunrise" was a remarkable celebration of the fascination of good dialogue. But "Before Sunset" is better, perhaps because the characters are older and wiser, perhaps because they have more to lose (or win), and perhaps because Hawke and Delpy wrote the dialogue themselves. The film has the materials for a lifetime project; like the "7-Up" series, this is a conversation that could be returned to every 10 years or so, as Celine and Jesse grow older.

Delpy worked often with Krzystzof Kieslowski, the Polish master of coincidence and synchronicity, and perhaps it's from that experience that "Before Sunset" draws its fascination with intersecting timelines. When Celine and Jesse parted, they didn't know each other's last names or addresses -- they staked everything on that promise to meet again in six months. We find out what happened in Vienna in December, but we also find out that Celine studied for several years at New York University (just as Delpy did) while Jesse was living there (just as Hawke was). "In the months heading up to my wedding, I was thinking of you," he tells her. He even thought he saw her once, in the deli at 17th and Broadway. She knows the deli. Maybe he did.

What they are really discussing, as they trade these kinds of details, is the possibility that they missed a lifetime they were intended to spent together. Jesse eventually confesses that he wrote his book and came to Paris for a book signing because that was the only way he could think of to find her again. A little later, in a subtle moment of body language, she reaches out to touch him and then pulls back her hand before he sees it.

All this time they are walking and talking. Down streets, through gardens, past shops, into a cafe, out of the cafe, toward the courtyard where she has the flat she has lived in for four years. And it is getting later, and the time for his flight is approaching, just as he had to catch the train in Vienna. But what is free will for, if not to defy our plans? "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane," she says.

Rolling Stone July 05 - Jessica Alba

2005-07-05T07:52:00.000-07:00

The Body & Soul of Jessica Alba: What is it about Jessica that makes you obsessed about her? Of course she's beautiful. But is there something else?? Maybe it's a magical curse. I dunno. Would I have been better off not knowing she existed so she wouldn't be on my mind so much?
--from one of the hundreds of Alba fan sites.

"I got plenty of ass."

Jessica Alba is hiking in Hollywood's Runyon Canyon with one hand gripping her left cheek. She is talking about her body. The body. Hers of the mesmerizing torso showcased to full, undulating perfection in several films, most recently Sin City and in this month's summer opus Fantastic Four, and bested only by the aforementioned ass, a heart-shaped beauty that sends men into fits of sputtering praise, but an ass that Alba nonetheless believes is a tad too large.

"I hear people in this industry talking shit all the time about how Jennifer Lopez is fat," she says tersely. "And I know if they're calling her fat, they're saying the same shit about me."

Rightly, Alba worries about this. At twenty-four, she has, thus far in her acting career, been largely defined by her body. Of her last eight films, she has been nearly naked in seven. She is five feet six and a half, 34-25-34, and weighs 120 pounds, depending upon her training schedule. But the numbers tell little of the story. Even beneath the baggy sweats she favors, Alba's body is a marvel of feminine proportion. A siren song. Everything slopes and curves where it should. Nothing juts or strains. Muscles blend into soft arcs.

As a result, Alba has consistently been ranked in the top ten on various men's-magazine fuckability polls. Web sites devoted to her celebrity hammer on her hotness with creepy persistence. Mark Wahlberg's reality-infused HBO show Entourage devoted an entire story arc to the conquest of Alba, her body hounded like the Holy Grail of scores by the young male cast, a quest Wahlberg himself has supposedly pursued in real life. Us Weekly even reported the rumor that Alba was Tom Cruise's first choice for a publicity girlfriend -the plum position ultimately handed over to default pick Katie Holmes. The thinking: Alba's carnal appeal is so powerful it could endear Mr. Cruise to a youth audience and affirm his virility once and for all.

She is good-humored about the scrutiny, but she confesses the one-note quality of it all is starting to wear her out. "The scripts I get are always for the whore, or the motorcycle chick in leather, or the horny maid," Alba says as she climbs a hill, panting slightly. "I get all these screenplays that start, 'Tawnya is in the shower. The water streams down her naked, perky breasts.' " She sighs, then laughs a tired laugh. "I don't think this is happening to Natalie Portman."

There are many reasons for this, and Alba, to her credit, has a firm grasp on most of them. Cast as she is, she hasn't yet had much opportunity to "act." The closest she comes to a scene-stealing turn is as one of the popular snots in Never Been Kissed, where she is indisputably funny and natural. The rest of her curriculum vitae -- including schlocky thrillers, the short-lived James Cameron sci-fi television series Dark Angel and the ill-conceived hip-hop-heroine picture Honey -- is less impressive. Her turn in Sin City stands out, but largely because Alba plays a stripper with a heart of gold. And a lasso.

"It's not always so great to be objectified," she says. "But I don't feel I have much of a choice right now. I'm young in my career. I know I have to strike when the iron is hot."

"Alba plans to capitalize on her God-given assets for the moment, saturate the market with her sultry image and then, when she "won't have to do that stuff just to get people's attention," she hopes to transition into someone like Diane Keaton or Goldie Hawn, women she admires for their kookiness and pluck. "I look forward to the day when I can do a small movie and act," Alba says, "and it's not about me wearing a fucking bathing suit or chaps."

Problem is, Alba isn't kooky. Kooky does not come with plum lips and amber skin and a beckoning grin. Alba, for better or worse, is a babe. More than that, she is a certain strain of babe -- the kind that invites rather than intimidates. She is a good girl, playing a bad girl. Her face is open and warm. She smiles often. She is fresh-scrubbed. She never struts, but ambles. She has normal-size breasts and no plans to enhance them. She points to pimples on her forehead and laughs. She eats -- a lot. In short, she is girlfriend material, and it is this accessibility, when married to her liquid body, that makes her walking kryptonite -- an effect in evidence whenever she exits the house and leaves a trail of double takes in her wake. Men on the street take note initially because she is pretty, but then, as she walks closer, it registers -- "Man, that's Jessica Alba!" -- and the admiration explodes into palpable desire.

"She doesn't even notice it," says her close friend and sometime personal trainer Ramona Braganza. "We went into Starbucks in Ohio, and all these guys were falling all over themselves and whispering. She had no idea."

Alba herself tells a charmingly naive story about how in L.A. she is never able to dine alone. “Everyone feels bad for you," she says. "For some reason, waiters, cooks, they all have to come out and talk to you: 'How's the food? Did someone not show up?' I'm like, 'No, I'm reading my book. I'm totally happy.' "

When it is suggested that perhaps these concerned gentlemen emerge specifically to see her, that surely not every gal eating solo gets the pity party, Alba shakes her head. "Men in Los Angeles get uncomfortable when a woman is by herself," she says. "Unless she's shopping." On any other actress, such an observation would smack of disingenuousness, but somehow Alba pulls it off. Maybe because she has been acting since she was twelve and has already in her short lifetime "had periods where I was in everybody's face and times when nobody knew who I was."
Alba has already been back and forth on the celebrity trip and has decided, ultimately, "fuck it." Now she ignores fame completely, staying in a bubble of her creation, a sunny, insular place where life is as deliciously sweet as she wills it to be. A place where men talk to her because they are kind, not horned up. A place where the future has nothing to do with her haircut or her high-riding buttocks.

"I don't need to be famous," she says adamantly. "I'm not that ambitious. At this point, if I'm not sucked in, I'm never going to get sucked in. Being the so-called hot girl, I disconnect from that. It's not that deep."

Alba grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs, the only daughter of Mark and Cathy Alba. Mark is “dark Mexican,” Cathy is French and Danish. The genetic mix has been kind to Alba, leaving her with an intriguing ethnic palate that netted her roles as everything from a part-Malaysian, in The Sleeping Dictionary- a film most famous for clearlu showing what fans prayed were Alba’s breasts (“They weren’t”) - to Anglo superhero Sue Storm in the upcoming Fantastic Four. The fanboys were up in arms about her being cast in the latter role, until a newly blond Alba appeared, eyes twinkling, onstage at a press event and melted their collective hearts.

Alba says her ethnic mélange, while photogenic, made for a challenging childhood. “I never really belonged anywhere,’ she says. “I wasn’t white. I was shunned by the Latin community for not being Latin enough. My Grandfather was the only one in our family to go to college. He made a choice not to speak Spanish in the house. He didn’t want his kids to be different.”

Alba is taking Spanish lessons now. “I have a great accent” she says,” because I grew up in the neighborhood. But I have no idea what I’m saying.” There were other struggles. Her parents met and married in their teens. By the time they were twenty and twenty-one, they had two kids, the second being Jessica’s brother, Joshua. “We all grew up together,” Alba says of her family. “My parents were so young. My dad hates when I talk about our past, about not having things, living with Grandma, wearing thrift-store clothes, cutting coupons.”

Alba’s parents held several jobs apiece. Nights her father was a cook in a rib joint. “He was terrible,” she says, ‘but you could see them working, and he would ham it up for the customers, so the kept him.” Her mother logged days at McDonalds and evenings tending bar. “At every place, she would make up a drink and name it after herself,” Alba says. When money got especially tight, Mark would drive the kids to Mexico and point out the shacks and the filthy water. “He wanted us to see that we had nothing to complain about,” she says.

Still, she craved more. “I was born with a wicked sense of entitlement,” she admits. “I always thought I was born into the wrong family, that I was fucking royalty and nobody knew it but me.”

Her attitude made school difficult. “From and very early age, I remember thinking that adults were always acting like assholes,” she says. “I couldn’t understand why I had to respect them. My preschool teacher forced me to write right handed when I was left handed. I didn’t get why I had to change. Nobody could give me a reason. I have had a big problem with authority ever since.”

“Since she was a baby, she’s always been a leader,” says Mark. “She’s really assertive. You know how hard it is to talk to adults and try and get a job when you’re a kid? She met James Cameron when she was seventeen and just said ‘I think I am the best person for the job’. She is unafraid of people in power.”

Alba was a clever and observant child. She noticed thing. Like how much her parents enjoyed cutting loose. They needed to break out of the box of their lives. She remembers being unable to sleep most nights, and how she would wander into the kitchen and see her parents partying or arguing, drama they tried to protect their kids from in the daylight hours. “I would stand there and listen” she says. “I would see stuff I shouldn’t.”

Today Alba considers her parents her best friends. She has no complaints about her upbringing. She gets that people do the best they can and that they were kids having kids and that now, maybe, they will finally have their time to shine. “I want them to move here” she says. “I want them to expand their minds a little, get them out of the suburbs.” Alba sighs. “I wasn’t given a whole lot in my life. I was on the bottom of the class system. But I got wisdom. I never just did what people told me. I questioned everything.

When I look back, it is really no surprise that I started working at twelve.” She broke into movies and TV with relative ease: within a year of her first audition she had a regular role on the series The New Adventures of Flipper. “She never had a childhood,” says Alba’s friend Braganza. “She had to be the adult in her family. She worked all the time. I remember with Dark Angel, she was supposed to be a bike messenger, and I had to teach her how to ride a bike. She had never learned.”

If Alba mourns her lost childhood, it doesn’t show. “I don’t like to waste time,” she says. Alba is all about tomorrow-who she will become and what that will mean. She wants to have kids, some hers, some adopted, with a husband or without. She wants to start a business. She wants to run a production company – “and not just so I can put myself in movies. So many people do that it’s pathetic.”

Alba has no patience for weakness, especially weakness born of ego, “you know, like some woman in her forties who dates a twenty year old so she can keep getting her picture in US Weekly.”

She prides herself on being professional, straightforward, levelheaded. Among her friends she is the advice giver, the dump-his-ass girl. She is older than her years, a girl who by circumstance and disposition grew up fast-less the wine chugging/wake up with a stranger type, more the review your contracts, eat your vegetables, organize your sock drawer type. Alba is consciously responsible, the sort of person you could trust to feed your cat, and nothing grates her nerves more than women who act like little girls because they can.

“I can’t stand that girl: the poor little girl you have to rescue, the crazy girl” she says. “It drives me up the fucking wall. It’s annoying. Stop.” She rolls her eyes. Drops her chin. “Most men love the crazy girl” she says “Oh save me! You’re such a big strong man. The more insecure the man the more likely he will love the crazy girl. And also, ninety percent of the time, men are about the physical. And most women who are hot are crazy. Because they don’t need to have it together.”

Jessica Alba drives her convertible BMW like a teenage boy. She is aggressive and distracted, prone to frequent braking and curb rubbing. There are many close calls, which she barely registers, or does but blames the victim. “Maybe I could be one of those car service people,” she says wistfully, cutting a wide corner. That would be dope.”

As she drives she talks animatedly about her man, whom she is on her way to meet at a fancy clothing store. “If I found someone messing with him, I would cut them. It’s not even a question of how much I would fuck them up. That’s the ghetto side of me.” Alba squeals into a Beverly Hills parking lot. A woman in head to toe studded denim teeters out on metallic heels. “That is my mom” Alba says with a soft smile “If she could dress that way everyday, she would.”

Alba parks and walks quickly toward Rodeo Drive. “I’m always a little late,” she says. “My parents were always so excited to be places that we would be early. I remember having to sit there and make conversation, like Uh, OK.” She finds the store and rushes inside, straight into the arms of her de facto fiancé, twenty six year old film assistant Cash Warren. The two kiss like the movie is ending, then reluctantly break apart. Warren, who looks like Lorenzo Lamas if Lorenzo Lamas had gone to Yale, met Alba while working on Fantastic Four. (He is listed as an assistant to the director, Tim Story: it’s Warren’s second credit after working as an assistant last year on the god-awful Queen Latifah flick Taxi.) Warren has spent the past six months doing everything in his power to persuade her to marry him. Today he is trying on various Dolce & Gabbana suits for industry appearances with Alba in Cannes. “Basically, I do whatever the girl wants,” he says squeezing his swarthy frame into skinny pants. Alba eyes the questionable ensemble.

“Try the jeans” Alba coos. “For me.”

“I must love you a whole lot,” Warren says as he disappears into the dressing room. A few minutes later he howls. “These cannot be mens jeans!”

Alba jumps up, laughing, and rushes to the dressing room, hopping into his arms and shutting the door behind her. There is some whispering and more laughing. After a bit, Alba emerges grinning. “If we fuck this thing up” she says, adjusting her baseball cap, “we’re idiots.”

“We are the boy and girl version of each other,” she says. “We have the same ideas about the future. If I met Cash and I was married to somebody else, I would have to get a divorce. We make that much sense together.” She picks up an oozing wedge of Camembert, holds it to her nose and inhales sharply. “I wasn’t sure I was going to meet anybody,” she says. “I thought I was going to be a single mom. And I was totally fine with that. But it is nice having somebody, not doing everything alone.” Alba puts down the cheese and exits the shop. Outside, two girls walk by arm in arm, squealing. Alba eyes them.

“I don’t make friends easily,” she says matter-of-factly. She goes on to explain that girls her age have a history of being jealous or weird or competitive around her, so unless another woman is sure of her game, Alba gets the steer clear vibe. Which is why most of her girlfriends are married with children. Back at her house in Beverly Hills, Alba lets her pugs, Sid and Nancy, out and changes into sweats. In her living room is a just delivered, massive twelve foot by twelve foot poster of her Sin City character pinned with a note from director Robert Rodriguez.

“Where am I going to put this?” She wonders, genuinely embarrassed. There is little evidence of Alba’s career anywhere in her home. No movie stills or glamour shots. Only family pictures, in simple frames and modest furniture. “Why pay $10,000 for a couch?” She asks. “That’s stupid.” She shows off her whirlpool tub and the plasma screen above it, “my big indulgence,” where she watches America’s Next Top Model as she bathes. A nearby bookshelf is full. Martin Amis. Elizabeth Wurtzel. Nigella Lawson.

“All of this was carpet,” she says, gesturing to the gleaming black wood floors. “And this, she says, pointing to her office, was a gym.” The house is understated and clean, with a masculine edge. The only two touches of girl are the photo collages stickered with words “vacation” and “birthday,” and the underwear drawer in her closet, which is ajar and reveals piles of lace and floral silk. When she sees the open drawer, she quickly pushes it shut.

“I used to come to Beverly Hills for auditions as a kid and think Why don’t I live here, Why don’t I drive that car?” As she talks Alba walks past her bed. On it rests a Playboy. “Let me explain,” she says, blushing. “My father called me the other day screaming about how I was in Playboy. I was terrified it was something humiliating, but it was only me in a paparazzi shot in a bikini straightening my towel.” She flips open to the page and stares at the photograph, taken from behind and featuring her bottom round and high in the air. She says nothing for a moment. Then throws the magazine down on the bed. “Whatever.”

“We can see you!” It is the day before she leaves for France, and Alba is giggling as she recounts the last time she went hiking and had to pee. She took refuge behind a wiry bush and let it rip just as an entire troop of Boy Scouts trudged past. “Their leader was mortified,” she says. “He kept yelling, you in the bush, we can see everything! But what am I going to do? Come out and introduce myself?” For an actor who has been working since childhood, Alba is remarkably forthcoming about the potentially embarrassing details of her life.

She lost her virginity at eighteen.
She is a control freak.
She is not the world’s best dancer. (“When I was filming Honey, the choreographer kept saying I was going to ruin her career.”)
She is bossy.
She hates to lose.
She thinks what is happening in Iraq is “all kinds of fucked up.”
She used to be a Bible thumper, praying to God to rid her of her wanton desires. (“It wasn’t hard to tell the truth”, she says. “I couldn’t imagine having sex with a teenager. I had been working for six years. I had responsibilities. Those boys wanted to hang and drink beer. That just wasn’t my shit.”)

Alba is at home, scouting the fridge which appears to be arranged by food category- for a bottle of water. Tomorrow before leaving town she will go to a meet and greet with DVD salesmen to promote Fantastic Four. She will turn up looking pretty, and if the past is any indication, be groped by soft men in golf shirts. “We pose for snapshots, and there are times when they put their hands on my ass or cupped my breast,” she says, sighing. “And I have to stand there and smile like nothing is happening.” Alba shrugs.

Braganza stops by, and Alba suggests they go to a Tae-Bo, a trendy workout class. “I have a photo shoot soon,” she says, pointing to her belly. Braganza demurs. They decide to walk instead. As they do, Alba reveals that last week she was unexpectedly and Violently Fench kissed by a chimp named Tia. Twice. Amazingly, this is not her lead anecdote. It rests a lazy third to stories about porn shopping in Cleveland (Brazilian Booties) and her aunt’s unfortunate home waxing accident. Still, the monkey story leaves Braganza appropriately mortified. “How in the world?” She asks.

“So I’m shooting a special for MTV,” says Alba, “and they told me all I had to do was push my lips out a little and the monkey would give me a peck, but instead she rammed her tongue inside my mouth and swept all around in a circle.” Here, Alba demonstrates, and the sight of her, lips parted, her index finger swirling around inside her mouth, triggers predictable stares and sighs from passerby. She is laughing too hard to notice. “She touched every inch in there! It was the most disgusting thing ever!”

“And they filmed it?” Asks Braganza.

“Oh, yeah, that will be a special moment.” The women keep walking, chatting about Hollywood, dogs and horrible kissers. The sun begins to set, turning L.A. a dusky blue. Alba pauses to admire the sky. She is thinking about the year ahead, wondering how things will evolve, if, in fact, she can break out, grow up and leave her sexy image behind.

“As a girl, I was always told I was nasty or dirty if I was sexual in any way,” she says quietly. “Americans are such prudes.” She starts walking again. “That’s why we’re all so perverted.” She smirks, then smiles big, her teeth gleaming in the twilight.

“Not me of course,” she says, “I’m an angel.”