Smitten
Source: Allure July 1999 IssueThe star of Entrapment and The Haunting is bringing old-school glamour (and bluntness...and drinking...and cursing) back to Hollywood.
Poets like to claim that beauty is subjective-"in the eye of the beholder" and so on. Empirically, though, there are a few people roaming the earth who are actually superior: mathematically and unmistakably beautiful creatures who don't rely on the vagaries of human judgement for a label. One of these is Catherine Zeta-Jones. Even strolling among the famously pretty women of Los Angeles, out on Santa Monica Pier, she puts everyone else in the shade. The people who walk beside her appear by contrast gnomish and mishapen, hobbling to go about their warty business.
"Well, I certainly wasn't a beautiful baby," says Zeta-Jones, staring out at the green sea. "My dad nearly divorced my mum when, two hours after giving birth to me, she said I was a frog. When she saw the baby who played me as a kid in The Mask of Zorro, she said, 'Oh, they got that wrong!' "
Zeta-Jones has just finished work on The Haunting, a new film version of the classic Shirley Jackson horror story that also stars Liam Neeson and Lili Taylor and opens later this month. Distinct from her role in Entrapment, she plays a "bohemian bisexual" who's part of a psychological study that takes place in a house that turns out to be-wait for it!-alive and not entirely friendly.
It's an ideal part for Zeta-Jones: a woman brimming with confident sexuality, who also gets a chance to showcase her athletic prowess. Put aside the fencing in Zorro and the acrobatics of Entrapment; The Haunting has not left Zeta-Jones to dote or dwell.
"I christened her the Welsh gazelle," Liam Neeson says. "This film has her running down lots of corridors in knee-high boots and on slick floors. She was like-oh, name any great 100-meter runner. I'm 46 and I'm fit but I found myself saying, 'Could you slow down a bit? Yer leavin' me behind!"
This is an odd moment-a clear cusp-in Zeta-Jones's career. For the second time in her life, she's on the brink of full-throttle fame. In the early 90's, when she starred in the British TV series The Darling Buds of May, she sparked a national fever in the U.K. Her love life was topic of boundless speculation in the press; even the most casual male acquaintance was trotted out in the tabloids and inspected head to toe. Reporters clawed through her rubbish and shouted through the mail slot on her front door, to the point where Zeta-Jones was tempted to squirt bleach in their eyes and condemn them to the shrieking blindness they deserved.
"The recognition was intense," she recalls, pulling her sunglasses up over her thick brown hair. "It's only just starting over here-around the time of the Academy Awards. But I'm more ready for it now. I'm tough as an old boot!"
Even at 29, Zeta-Jones may claim old-boot status. She has been in show business for half her life. By the age of 16, she was starring in a London production of 42nd Street. She'd already been acting in the West end for a year and had trained fiercely in dance. Not only was she accomplished at ballet; curiously, she was once Britain's national tap-dance champion. She actually, and somewhat quaintly, regards those credentials as something to fall back on. "If this whole acting thing comes to an end," she says, "I can teach dance."
Being Welsh, she says, mean doing nothing in half-measures. Zeta-Jones doesn't plan to rest on her laurels. She's one of the few people in Hollywood who openly admit to wanting an Oscar one day. "I suppose I could just stay in this lucrative business and be a celebrity actress," she says, showing some steel. "But I put in too many hours of dance class to sit back and become a Hollywood Square."
Even on an average day of hanging around Santa Monica Pier, something in her manner suggests Zeta-Jones will never wind up teaching fouettes to fidgety brats back in her native Swansea, Fame-that vintage, wide-screen brand of charisma-has lit on her for good. As she walks past people, you can actually see it kindle. Some, of course, ignore her entirely. Others turn and stare because she has a grace not unlike Audrey Hepburn if Hepburn had been a gymnast. Bur more than a few glance behind those rectangular Dolce & Gabbana lunettes and sense a familiarity that pleases them. Everyone likes a star on the rise, and Zeta-Jones does not put on airs, which pleases the population even more.
She talks more often of family than of fame. Zeta-Jones has long ago learned to parry questions about her beaux with the mantra "I don't have a boyfriend!" Instead, she's obsessed with stories about her godchildren. "I just had a whole bunch of 'em visiting the house," she says. "Jesus Christ! There are 11 of us in this place. We were camped out like American hillbillies. When we had dinner, anything resembling a chair was sat on. The kid slept in my bed. If you want to know what athleticism is, sleep with those godchildren for a night. They kicked the shit out of me!"
Not even profanity, which Zeta-Jones does not shy away from, diminishes her 1940s appeal. Jan De Bont, who directed The Haunting, calls it a "love affair with the camera-something the old movie stars had."
Neeson spotted the same quality in Zeta-Jones the first time he saw her, in a prerelease clip of Zorro. "She and Antonio Banderas had a lightness about them, the way Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr were together," he says. "She has a sense of lightness I haven't often seen."
Still, there's enough raw lust in Catherine Zeta-Jones to power the lights of L.A. "You are always falling in love a little with Catherine," says De Bont. "She gives the impression very clearly that she loves sex. She's always making jokes about it, talking about it-but in a clever, funny way. Which makes it easier, I think, to fall in love with her."
Zeta-Jones's sexuality was so clear to De Bont that, these days, he muses about the combustibility of casting her in The Haunting. "Putting Catherine in the same film as Liam Neeson," he says, utterly deadpan, "I was worried something would happen...between them...and there'd be no time to shoot the movie! Not that there's anything you can do. Keep them in separate hotels? Even that wouldn't work, probably.
Nor was Zeta-Jones's allure lost on Sean Connery. He specifically requested her as his costar in Entrapment. "Apart from being one of the most beautiful women I have ever had the pleasure of working with," Connery says, "she is one of the most professional, which in my book is greater than beauty...almost."
Zeta-Jones's looks have driven the media (that is, magazine writers like me) to garnish extremes of fever lust. The May issue of Details informs us that she "toys with our hearts and steals our souls." New York reports that she has "the hubba hubba of pop." Movieline touts her on a recent cover as "the new princess of Wales." At almost every mention in the press, gushy adjectives are so inevitably hitched to the Zeta-Jones moniker that the name would look lonely without them. Bizarre phrases like "silky type" and "minx-sultry" come into play; serious journalists write all about her mouth. Zeta-Jones shrugs it off, then pulls her beaded cardigan down her shoulders to get some sun.
Santa Monica Pier, with its paint-chipped miniature amusement park, is well suited to a taste of old Hollywood. Today the red-and-yellow Ferris wheel is shut down; the whole place has an air of brightly colored dilapidation. Even on the walk to the pier, Zeta-Jones has gotten a raucous laugh out of lige in L.A. these days. She chortles at the way a sidewalk just short of the sea is apparently reserved only for Rollerbladers and parents with strollers. "Is there any place for humans out here-for people without wheels?" Zeta-Jones cries in mock rage. "I only have these legs!"
Not even a pair of skates would help. There is an explicit clause in her film contracts that prevents her from Rollerblading. Just as the legs of Fred Astaire were insured for $650,000 and Betty Grable's carried a $250,000 policy, Hollywood has covered the entire body of its Zeta-Jones.
Los Angeles is nothing if not a land of escapes. Zeta-Jones, ever the Welshwoman, eventually pulls into a Mexican bar at the pier's end. In the heat of the afternoon, she downs a couple of margaritas (without salt) and distractedly eats chips (without salsa). "I can't drink tequila, but I do like margaritas," she says, tipping her face toward the sun. "That sounds strange, but it's a handicap. Not being able to drink shots for a Welshwoman? That's trouble."
Though she claims to "eat lots of chicken, which is getting boring." Zeta-Jones has the sort of body that keeps its tone through all the midday margaritas she cares to taste. She has the metabolism of a tiger beetle and admits that her body's apparent flawlessness has a lot to do with genes. "It's all in yer Levi's," she says, laughing, "but truth be told, nervous energy probably helps me out a bit."
She speaks in what's called "Swansea posh"; her hometown, the same as Dylan Thomas's, carries a relatively subtle accent. Sometimes you'd swear she was London-born, but catch her on a few key words-"streetwise," for example, or "loot"-and the vowels go deep as a well.
As we drink, Zeta-Jones is always bending, limberly reaching for something that isn't there, doing three things at once. She endlessly rearranged her hair with a kind of silver tuning fork she's using as a hair clip. When a sunbeam singles her out, somewhat ridiculously, in the corner of the outdoor bar, she tugs her shimmery gold tank top down to the top of her breasts; within an hour, she is noticeably darker on the chest, and on the little rims of her ears.
Asked what she's wearing, she's happy to show it off, in the voice of an American fashion announcer. "These are my little Gucci capri pants, in khaki," she chirps. "The cardigan is from the London store Whistles. But the pride of the ensemble is these shoes"-here, she effortlessly raises a leg over her head-"which I'm very pleased to say were purchased for $5 in Kuala Lumpur."
The Zeta-Jones look, if it has yet been named, takes a bit of work. The day passed when she leaves the house looking frumpy in in jeans and a thrift-shop coat. This year's Academy Awards, where she was photographed in a strapless red gown by Versace, went a long way toward conveying her unabashed love for glamour. Rather horribly, I make the mistake of calling this "the red thing," which sends Zeta-Jones into a laughing rage. "The red thing?" she asks incredulously. "The red thing? I'll tell Donatella you called it that the next time I see her~
"I've always been into clothes and all that shit," she adds, "but I've never been a victim. I can't just be dressing hip-hip-hip. I'm an actor, not a clotheshorse."
What the fawning press most often misses in Zeta-Jones is her ease of manner. Having been both kissed & kicked by the media, she now seems immune to it and says whatever pops to mind. She talks about sex (if not her private life) as openly as she discusses the weather. Actually, she's wide open on most any topic. Of Sean Connery, for instance, she says, "Anyone who doesn't try for the level of perfection he does gets told to fuck off, which I admire." When reminded of the small scandal that erupted a few years back when Connery reportedly told Vanity Fair that some women are looking for a slap now and again, she'll go as far as to bemoan the press with an equally easy-to-twist quote: "I'm a feminist and all, but there are some women who should be swept from the face of the earth!"
Only the subject of rugby darkens her features (that is serious stuff); she squints and reveals the one crease that interrupts the smoothness of her brow. But generally it's easy to picture her singing Carpenters and Neil Diamond songs with the karaoke machine in her Haunting trailer-and even renting out an entire karaoke room in Malaysia during the Entrapment shoot. It seems typical of a woman who has either shed her inhibitions or simply has never had any.
"I hope she won't mind me sayin' this," says Neeson, "but Catherine is one of the guys. There's a consummate ease about her. She's very game. Not precious at all. And it goes without saying that she doesn't look like the dog's dinner, you know?"
Walking in a gradual zigzag along the pier, Zeta-Jones caroms from topic to topic like a kid on vacation. A hundred peculiar facts reveal themselves: That she is possibly the only person in America who has a stunningly pretty driver's-license photo. That she enjoys Al Roker, whose mother's birthday is today. That she has been thrilled to meet John Le Carre and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Upon meeting the latter, she says, she felt like swooning and asking about Love in the Time of Cholera: "Where you the man? Who was the woman?"
And yet there is still plently of old Wales in young Zeta-Jones. Though she has been misquoted in tabloids as saying she doesn't believe in marriage-really, when has the press not distorted her?-she wants six kids, two years apart, "the Welsh way." Her countrymen are renowned for their musicality and she is no exception, proving it by tapping her tuning-fork hair clip and singing one perfectly sustained note. She also has a few supersitions: Though she is determined to go through life as a potential organ donor, she will never sign away her eyes.
"They're welcome to my little toe, my spleen-anything," she says, turning into the sunlight. "But not the eyes. Never the eyes. I want to see where I'm going!"