The Show Girl
Source: W Magazine July 2004
By: Aaron Gell
Typed By: Kaia
THE ALWAYS OUTSPOKEN CATHERINE ZETA-JONES HAS BEEN AN ENTERTAINER AS LONG AS SHE CAN REMEMBER—WHICH IS WHY SHE IS SO COMPLETELY AT HOME IN THE PUBLIC EYE. JUST DON’T PUSH YOUR LUCK.D’yah like lookin at me?
On the bank of a country stream, in a lush, sun-dappled glen, Catherine Zeta Jones perches on a rock, throws back her poofy plaits of raven-colored hair, and basks in the breeze, her shapely figure all but exploding from a low-cut top and a pair of jodhpurs.
She’s 21, and she’s about to become a star.
The scene occurs in the pilot episode of a much beloved English TV mini-series, The Darling Buds of May, in which Zeta-Jones plays what may be the ultimate farmer’s daughter. Her name is Mariette, and while she’s partial to lollipops and the song of nightingales, she’s no innocent. In fact, the girl’s pregnant, though by whom she’s not quite sure. Fortunately, there’s a perfectly marriageable prospect—a straitlaced tax inspector who’s come, appropriately enough, to examine her father’s assets—ogling our Miss Muffet from a nearby rowboat.
Suddenly, she turns to face him, narrows her eyes alluringly and delivers the line that so perfectly prefigures all that will come later—the A-list Hollywood career, the fairy-tale wedding to Michael Douglas, the third-trimester Oscar speech, the omnipresent paparazzi and even the freelance cyber surfer Zeta-Jones now employs to track unauthorized pictures of her to the most unsavory corners of the World Wide Web.
D’yah like lookin at me?
The actress lets out a throaty laugh when the subject of the miniseries is raised. Although she’d already had some successes on the London stage, Zeta-Jones could still wander the streets unrecognized when Darling Buds first bloomed. “Nobody knew who I was,” she recalls over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in New York’s SoHo on a gorgeous spring afternoon. “It came out on a Sunday, and bang. Monday, it’s a whole different story.” The show shot to No. 1 and quickly became a national institution, much of the credit no doubt to the startling combination of domelike innocence and lusty joie de vivre Zeta-Jones brought to Mariette (so named as an homage to Marie Antoinette).
Almost immediately, she found herself hounded by the scandal sheets, which began maliciously chronicling her early romances (with Mick Hucknall of Simply Red, among others). This scrutiny coincided uncomfortably with the winsome theater geek’s belated coming-of-age. “I was just living in the glare, and growing up and maturing and finding my sexuality at the same time,” she says of the frenetic period, which came to a head one evening when the actress plowed her car into a lamppost while being chased by motorcycle-riding paparazzi.
More troubling, though, was the critical reception afforded her next picture, Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. “Not a terribly good film at all, “she allows. “But the British press were like, ‘She’s a pox on the movie!’ Never mind that some guy called Marlon Brando was in it, too, and I just played the wife.” An attempt at a singing career fared even worse. “I thought it was time to be a pop star,” she says. “To no avail.”
Publicly labeled as a has-been at just 22, Zeta-Jones pulled a classic Zeta-Jones move. She upped the ante and moved to Hollywood. “I went, O-kay, sold my house, sold my car, put everything in storage and got on a plane,” she says, in the musical Welsh lit she typically masks onscreen.
“It was a really big decision for her,” recalls newscaster Anna Walker, a longtime friend of the actress. “I think she was fairly lonely in Hollywood, and she had a tough time trying to find roles out there, but she never gave up.”
Not on your life. Like her best-remembered characters—the saber-wielding spitfire in The Mask of Zorro, the chic drug kingpin’s wife in Traffic, the murderous chanteuse in Chicago (for which she won the Oscar)—Zeta-Jones has always displayed surprising tenacity when the need arose. Girded for battle in the emotional “bomber jacket” she admits is a mainstay of her psychic wardrobe, she dept at it and eventually caught the eye of Steven Spielberg, she thought she’d make a splendid Spanish contessa in The Mask of Zorro, which he executive produced. He also directed her latest film, The Terminal, opening in July, in which she plays a flight attendant who falls for Tom Hanks.
Since Zeta-Jones picked up her first microphone as a six-year-old talent-show contestant, failure has never been an option. “I’ve onstage all my life,” she says, marveling. “I’ve never changed jobs never done anything else. I’ve never even worked in a store.” She made her debut as a professional singer when she was just 11, belting out Shirley Bassey covers for rowdy dockhands in the industrial towns around Swansea, Wales. She wasn’t nervous, she says, just anxious. We have a lot of greyhound tracks in Wales, and I remember those dogs, when they were just about to come out on the track and run around,” she explains. “I felt like that.”
Within a few years, she’d quit school and moved to London for a career in the theater. In those days, Zeta-Jones was so eager to please that director Micky Dolenx had to tell her to “calm it down a bit” when her vampy turn as Tallulah in Bugsy Malone struck him as a little too precocious. “He thought I was going to get into trouble, shucksing it up onstage at 15 years old!” She says with a laugh. “You know borderline naughty.”
While performing in Bugs and, later, 42nd Street in the West End, Zeta-Jones lived on her own in rented rooms, calling her folks each night and letting the phone ring three times as a signal that she’d made it home safely—“God forbid we have to pay for a phone call,” she snorts. Meanwhile, she educated herself under the guidance of her more seasoned colleagues. “In the theater,” she explains, “all the queens were like my mum and all the showgirls were like my dad.” She has a similar attitude today. “She really likes to be one of the fellas,” says Spielberg. “She’s more crew than cast.”
Zeta-Jones’s background helps explain why, when lightning struck twice and she got another crack at fame with Zorro, she embraced it wholeheartedly, but with a shrewdness and resolve that were rare for a Hollywood newcomer. To her credit, she is not ambivalent about being well known, not one for phony self effacement. Watch her on the red carpet, and one can still see, in that wide grin and princesslike wave, a glimpse of the greyhound within. And it’s that utter comfort with her won star power—more even that her effortless glamour (so deep-seated that she can complain that her hair is falling out “in clumps” without breaking the spell in the slightest)—that really earns her those endless comparisons to the greatest screen sirens of Hollywood’s golden age.
“She worked really hard for it, and I think that makes a big difference,” observes director Steven Soderbergh, who cast Zeta-Jones in Traffic and the forthcoming Ocean’s Twelve. “When you see her onscreen, she wants to be there. Some actors reach a stage where part of them is guilty or embarrassed or feeling that it’s an ignoble job. Or they’re afraid of success. She doesn’t have any of that. She’s going full-bore.”
Of course, Zeta-Jones’s hearty embrace of the trappings of stardom only goes so far. While she is dutiful about publicity, she is equally ferocious about guarding her privacy. “When it comes to the red carpet, my philosophy is, I’ll stand there all night if you really want,” she says growing steely, “but please, please don’t come harassing me.”
“She’s very good at making a distinction about what is her private life and what is her public life,” Walker says, “and that’s why when the barrier is crossed, she’s going to be upset.”
The editors of Hello! Magazine discovered as much in 2000. Irritated that Zeta-Jones and Douglas had sold exclusive rights to their wedding pictures to rival OK!, they hired a photographer to infiltrate the reception and rushed out their own grainy photos, prompting the unhappy couple to sue. “It was the biggest pain in the ass of my life,” Zeta-Jones says now of the highly publicized case, in which a judge ultimately awarded the couple some $24,250 in damages, a fraction of what they sought. But it wasn’t for the money, she says. “Does anyone think I’d go to that extent if I weren’t so wild about the injustice? I needed that like I needed a hole in my head. It was the principle: You’re not invited to my wedding, so don’t come. Okay?” While admitting her “out-of-control, furious” reaction might have been partly attributable to “the whole hormonal aspect after the birth of my son,” the actress says she was happy with the verdict.
“They were making a stand for everyone who’s been subject to that kind of invasion,” Walker, who was Zeta-Jones’s maid of honor, says of the lawsuit. “I think it was an incredibly brave thing to do. But obviously it doesn’t endear you to the press.”
No, it doesn’t. Considering more damaging to Zeta-Jones’s reputation then those unflattering photos of her nibbling wedding cake was the let-them-eat-cake spin with which the media portrayed her testimony. When the defense reproach the couple for selling their own wedding photos for OK! for about $1.6 million, Zeta-Jones explained that their purpose was not to cash in but merely to maintain control of their professional image. The sum “is a lot of money to maybe to a lot of people in this room,” she allowed on the stand. “But it is not that much for us.”
Talk about an homage to Marie Antoinette.
Ask Zeta-Jones if she regrets her choice of words, however, and one is treated to the rarest of delights: a major star eschewing the coy diplomacy so common to the species in favor of simple, unabashed candor. “I’m in a world where I get paid for my name and likeness,” she explains patiently. “And I get compensated very well for it. Otherwise get some other Catherine Jones to come and be the name on top! A million bucks is not a lot of money for name and likeness. Ask Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, anybody in our industry. Everyone knows we get paid a lot of money, so why pretend otherwise? So people will like us? It’s dumb!”
Furthermore, Zeta-Jones makes no apologies whatsoever for profiting from her name and likeness when the price is right. Her T-Mobile deal, a two-year contract for which she was paid a reported $6.3 million, engendered much grousing by Hollywood types who thought it was a tacky gig for an Oscar-winning actor. “It’s so funny the kind of backlash I had, after so many people have done endorsements and stuff,” she says. “At least I’m up front. I love the fact that everybody is so hypercritical—you know, like, ‘How can she be doing that to her career?’ and meanwhile they’re flogging a tire in Japan.” She raises an eyebrow and offers a sarcastic, “Uh, yeah….
“But I must say,” she adds, “people come up to me still and ask about [cell phone] pricing plans. And I’m going, I can’t believe people actually think I know anything about this.”
“Look, after all the work that I’ve done in my life, if I’m so visible that they can create and brand a company and be No. 1 in the country within one year,” she continues, “I’m sorry, but you have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.”
As Zorro discovered, Zeta-Jones is really good fun when she’s in a combative mood so it seems like an opportune moment to ask her about the oft-repeated rumors that she’s shaved a few (or more then a few) years off her age. “Everyone thinks I’m older, right?” she says, shaking her head. “I’ve been documented since I was 11 years old. If I look a older, I’m so sorry. I’m not a klutzy, stupid woman out there. If people think I look old, there’s nothing I can do about it. I turn 35 this year.” Actually, in person, with her hair down, clad in a pair of jeans, Manolos and a casual black top, rather than the couture gowns in which she’s often seen, she does look to be n her early 30s.
As she shakes her head, fuming, and leans back from the table, the Zeta-Jones grit that brought her so far so fast is plain to see. And she may only have just begun to show us what she can do. Spielburg promises that The Terminal will display “a brand-new side of her, who she is in the real world: her vulnerability, her inherent sweetness, her curiosity, the fun-loving, giddy side of her nature.”
Then comes Ocean’s Twelve, Zorro 2, and who knows what else. She recently switched agents after many years and is eager to branch out. “I want to be the girl who slips on the banana, be the girl next door, get away from that throwback, golden-era thing.”
And of course, there’s the business of nurturing a family (son Dylan is three and daughter Carys, one) and a marriage. “If I never went on a film set again, I’d still have plenty to do,” she points out. “Being a wife and mother is real work. There’s a certain group of actors who are my contemporaries—if they don’t do a role, I do it or if I don’t do a role, they do. But there aren’t many who’ve had kids and who are still married to their husbands and who also have a career.”
“I’m a lucky girl,” she continues. “I’ve got two healthy kids, a great husband, a great career. I’ve got money that I worked for. I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon. I’ve worked really bloody hard and I don’t get it, why people don’t go, ‘Oh, good for her!’”
Not that she preoccupies herself especially with what everyone else thinks. “I’m a showgirl,” Zeta-Jones explains. “I’ve stood in line and had people look at me and say, ‘She’s too fat,’ ‘Too tall,’ ‘Got dark hair,’ and I’ve walked around a corner and stood in line to be bashed again. Being a dancer is good preparation for life. I’ve been knocked down so many times that my instinct is always to stand up and go again.”
Indeed, she can picture herself onstage several decades hence. “One day, there’ll be a revival of Gypsy, and I’ll be up there,” she says, standing up to go and fishing a pair of sunglasses out of her handbag. “I’ll be singing ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses.’”