Catherine Sets The Record Straight
Source: Harper's Bazaar October 2003
By: Nancy Collins

Catherine Zeta-Jones gets personal about how motherhood and marriage (to Michael Douglas) have changed her, the secret to dressing for her shape and why she refuses to apologize for her ambition. By Nancy Collins.

    "Michael calls me Dame Doom because I will always see the worst-case scenario," laughs Catherine Zeta-Jones as she sinks into plump cushions on the veranda of the sprawling manor house in Bermuda that she shares with husband Michael Douglas. "It's my Welsh, black-Irish part, I couldn't believe my luck winning the Oscar, then spent the next three weeks thinking something was going to go wrong with my daughter's birth. All this good stuff can't be happening to me. I said 'Please God, take the Oscar back, just make everything okay with Carys.'"

    Apparently, God was listening, because on April 20, Carys Zeta Douglas, a beautiful replica of her mother, with a dainty version of her dad's famous cleft chin, flew into the world a mere four hours after Catherine woke up in the middle of the night in their New York apartment with labor pains. "I said, 'Michael' - nudge, nudge - 'get the clock.' When the contractions were a minute apart, we left Manhattan for the hospital in New Jersey. If it had been rush hour, I would've had the baby in the car."

    Fortunately, Carys had the grace to wait until the epidural kicked in. ("After my son, Dylan, I told Michael 'Next time we do this, I'm having the epidural before I conceive!'") "Women are going to hate me," says the actress, "but I pushed Dylan out in 30 minutes, Carys in 10. As for breast-feeding, well, Dylan I nursed for 10 weeks and Carys for just under four. Once her baby nurse fed her a bottle for the night, she didn't like me very much." Which was not entirely a bad thing according to Catherine. "I wanted to go out for dinner without my husband having to look at the clock and say, 'My wife has to go to the bathroom to pump.' Partnership is so important. Babies are ours for borrowed time ... soon enough, it'll be, 'Thanks for everything. See you.' I don't want to look at my husband then and say, 'Hey, remember me? How I breast-fed for a year-and-a-half?'" She pauses. "I have two children, projects I'm producing, a household to run.... Without Michael's support, I'm lost."

    It is hard to imagine Catherine ever truly lost. After all, this is a woman who in a three-year rush married Michael Douglas, popped out two kids and three movies, took on the role of global spokeswoman for Elizabeth Arden and T-Mobile and tap-danced her way to her first Academy Award-piking up the Best supporting Actress Oscar for Chicago some 30 minutes after belting out the film's nominated song, "I Move On," with Queen Latifah. "I said, 'I'm eight months pregnant, but when in my life will I get the chance to be up there along with Paul Simon and U2 singing and Academy Award-Nominated song?' I thought, No matter what, I'm having a great night at the Oscars."

    But then, Catherine has always been someone who knows what she wants, a woman with ambition-a word she wholeheartedly embraces. "People make it sound like I want money and fame, but I have ambitions for everything ... making this house complete, getting the damned toilet door put on right, learning to sail. I can't imagine myself without ambition."

    In her new film, Catherine plays a damn burning up wit it. Intolerable Cruelty does for divorce lawyers what The Player did for Hollywood execs-that is, it sends them up in smart, hilarious style, courtesy of those masters of skewered perspective, Joel and Ethan Coen. Draped in an array of glam frocks, Catherine plays "a sophisticated broad," an oft-married gold digger who finally meets her match in her husband's slick-talking divorce lawyer, George Clooney. "I love the idea of being attracted to the person you hate more than anyone else in the world," chuckles Catherine. "It's a nice mix of brutality and finding your true love."

    When it comes to her own true loves, Catherine's conversation never veers far from her children and husband, who has absconded to Ireland with a couple of pals for a golf-junkie weekend, calling my cell phone to inform his wife that the boys, having knocked out 18 holes, are roughing their way to the next nine. Dressed in a short, Christina Lacroix print skirt, Havainas flip-flops and a black Lycra "cheap-o" T-shirt, Catherine looks younger and more vunerable than the sophisticated, public image she projects. She is in fact, direct, warm and fun-lor of fun. Her luxurious black hair is pulled back in a casual twist, and though she is wearing makeup, she assures it's a rarity in her island life.

    Most striking is how little remains of the 50 pounds she packed on during pregnancy-a weight gain on full and glorious display as she traveled around the world promoting Chicago. As she miles piled up, so did the pounds. "It didn't bother me. I said 'Okay, I took off the 50 pounds I gained with Dylan and, I can do it again.'"

    At this instant, Dorothy, baby nurse to both Catherine's offspring, appears, cuddling a snoozing bundle of femininity, Carys Douglas, swathed in an elaborate, off-white antique silk dress. With three-year-old Dylan, a brown-haired, mop-topped dynamo, finally coaxed into his afternoon nap, his mother is left to marvel at the differences between her babies. "When Dylan was born, what freaked me out was that he was a boy, that I had made ... balls," she laughs. "Dylan's a showman; it's in the genes. He loves to sing, and since I'm a musical-comedy fan, he knows all the songs from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins. With him, it was, 'I've arrived!' while Carys was much more pensive. In fact, Michael's mom told me she's like he was as a child-thoughtful."

    Her husband, she adds with obvious pride, is "amazing with our kids. At night, Michael says, 'Honey, go on to dinner. I'll bathe Dylan and put him to bed, and I'll see you later.' Even when Dylan was a tiny baby-and I was in that breast-feeding stage where you're too tired to get out of bed-Michael would get him, put him on my chest, burp and change him. Later, he'd put him on the other side and do it all again." The couple's devotion to parenthood is hardly surprising, since kids were on Michael's mind, at least the first time he laid eyes on Catherine in person, at the 1998 Deauville Film Festival. He declared: "I want to father your children." "Even though I go pregnant with Dylan before Michael and I were married, when everybody was saying we were just a Hollywood fling, we knew what we had," says Catherine. "I never stopped to question what being pregnant might do to my career. Other than quickly saying no to projects I couldn't do, I was thrilled." She was also in for a crash course on what it means to be famously pregnant. "One British magazine said that with Dylan I was 'too posh to push,'" she recalls, "and that I had scheduled a C-section when, in fact, both my kids were natural childbirths, but with medication."

    Catherine stops, a ferocity creeping into her voice as she prepares to address the ubiquitous pregnancy police. "Look, I never signed up to be a role model for anybody other than my children," she says. "I never wanted to be a political spokesperson. I have my own problems, and I'll deal with them. If I'm seeking help, I'll be the first to say, but don't blame me if I slip up or if I don't do what you thought I was going to do."

    What Catherine always wanted to be was a performer. When she was enrolled in dance classes at age four, at a church behind the Jones house in Swansea, Wales, it quickly became apparent to her frustrated performer of a father, a candy manufacturer, that the kid had talent. "We woke on Sundays, Elvis Presley and Van Morrison blaring, my dad singing along," she chuckles. "So he really focused me." As her "coach," he designed a club act, schlepped his daughter to endless competitions-one of which, an audition for a stage production of Bugsy Malone, saw Catherine, in true American Idol style, queuing up for seven hours with "thousands and thousands of other kids" before landing a lead in the London show. In a decision that the new mother doubts she could make for her children, Catherine's parents allowed her, at 15, to drop out of school and decamp alone to London, where she snagged the lead in a West End revival of 42nd Street by 17 beginning a career that would make her a star in England. "I lived with my former tutor, a single mother. I had a room with a bed, chest of drawers and closet. For someone from the sticks, I was streetwise."

    Catherine moves into present time, reeling off from memory a six-month trave/work schedule that will have her hopping continents and tackling projects that include playing Tom Hanks' love interest in Steven Spielberg's film Terminal. In the end, her life appears to be a Herculean feat of management, a skill she has learned a lot about from her husband.  "Every Friday, he says: 'Okay. TGIF. Come one, honey, this pile of papers has been siting here for a week; out it goes.'" Michael's organizational tentacles have reached into his wife's closet, introducing her to clothes archiving, something he has done for years. "Now, almost every dress I've worn-the red Versace from the first Oscars, all my movie clothes, even the outfit I wore the night I met Michael-is dry-cleaned, archived and put into cold storage in Los Angeles."

    Catherine describes her relationship with designers as "something I never take for granted." During the months of events surrounding Chicago, it was Valentino, Narciso Rodriguez, Richard Tyler and Donatella Versace who kept her ever-glamorous despite her ever-burgeoning waistline. "To my disdain, I had to measure myself for the cutters the whole way through," she laughs. "It's humbling to send gigantic waist measurements to Versace couture."

    Wisely, Catherine and Co. chose to emphasize her growing bosom-the crux, as it turns out, of her own fashion philosophy. "I need structure. These breast-feeding boobies need to have support, so I'm a big fan of undergarments. I tell designers, 'Let's start there and build out.' When I'm in an evening dress I need to feel in ... that it ain't going anywhere." She laughs, recalling when she swept into the Golden Globes wearing a revealing Versace and "a goddamned huge Fred Leighton diamond at my neck. Michael said, 'I don't know how you can put that diamond on when those bosoms are so big. You can't focus.'"

The actress is the first to admit that when it comes to being Catherine Zeta-Jones, it takes a village, or, more precisely, Team Zeta, as she's dubbed them, a coterie of professionals she calls her "security blanket" : hairdresser Karyn Hutson, makeup artist Cindy Williams and voice coach Joy Allison. "When I go to a function, it's business, a performance, so often I like to be different characters ... Sophia Loren in Dolce & Gabbana ... a marquesa is Versace. I tell Dylan, 'Mommy can't read you bedtime stories tonight.'"

    When she isn't working, Catherine admits that many times she simply can't be bothered. "Michael says we should make a greater effort in New York to get together with people. But by the time we get the kids to sleep, it's 8 o'clock. So to get all dolled up and go out ..." she trails off.

    If anything, says the woman who once described herself as volatile, marriage and motherhood have calmed her down. "Michael and I never raise our voices to our children or each other. In the past my reaction would've been to dramatize things-the louder you shout, the better they'll hear you-more out of insecurity than anything else."

    These days, of course, it is difficult to envision what could possibly make her feel insecure. "Personally and professionally," she admits, "this last year is going to be a hard one to beat. But" she continues, the lilt of challenge in her voice, "I'm definitely ready to go back to work. I was always my father's little girl. And though Michael loves his sons, he has no idea what's going to happen with the father-daughter relationship. But I do." She pauses , a glint in her eye. "As my dad always said to me, 'You show 'em, babe. You show 'em what you're made of!'"