It is a very chilly Friday night in Toronto, just before Christmas, and
I am standing ankle deep in hay watching Drew Barrymore, who is wearing,
among other things, black fishnets, an upside-down skirt, and a bathing
suit pulled over a tiger-striped turtleneck, feed a very large raccoon
his "luncheon" while announcing to no one in particular that she simply
has to go to New York City and lead her own life. Except that it's not
actually Drew Barrymore I'm looking at; she hasn't been Drew for almost
three months. She is Little Edie Beale, the eccentric debutante cousin
of Jackie Kennedy Onassis—in mind, body, and maybe even, at this
point, soul.
"I haven't seen her since September 30," says Kent Cummins, a friend of
many years and Barrymore's dresser on Grey Gardens, the HBO film
Barrymore stars in with Jessica Lange. It is after midnight on the
dilapidated set, and "Little Edie" is now descending the stairs in
clunky white patent shoes. "Even when we go out, I'll be like, 'Are you
in there?'" Cummins says. "Once she told me, 'Drew's inside and she
loves you very much, but she just can't come out right now.' It truly is
like living with Sybil."
Barrymore fought hard for the role of Little Edie, who lived with her
mother, Big Edie, in gothic isolation in a crumbling—and
cat-and-coon-infested—mansion in East Hampton, New York. The two
were the subjects of a cult documentary, also called Grey
Gardens, in 1975, and, more recently, of the Broadway musical
starring Christine Ebersole. When the film, which does not yet have a
release date, was announced, Drew approached its director, Michael
Sucsy, and pressed the inches-thick "Little Edie binder" she'd compiled
into his hands. "I thought somebody else must have printed out this big
book," he tells me, "but then I looked and it was all her."
The role of angry, self-doubting daughter to an overbearing, reclusive
mother required Barrymore to be a deeply sad lost soul one minute and a
madcap entertainer, literally singing and dancing, the next. It was a
difficult juxtaposition and a serious departure for the ever-sunny star
of such romantic comedies as Never Been Kissed and Music and
Lyrics, and the toughest of the three Charlie's Angels.
"Michael took a big chance on me, and I knew it," she says, "so I worked
really hard."
"I needed someone who would stick with it and never give up," he says.
Her transformation into Edie took wigs, prosthetics, and five hours of
makeup every day, as well as months of dialect coaching to achieve the
proper cadences of a Long Island socialite who "came out" in the
thirties at Manhattan's Pierre Hotel. "In those days, there were no
R's," Barrymore explains, adding that she watched Gigi,
one of Little Edie's favorites, over and over, and studied the voice of
Katharine Hepburn as she aged, beginning with Alice Adams and
ending with Adam's Rib. Barrymore's own true voice is that of a
self-professed Valley Girl—"I talk out of the side of my mouth, and
she talks from the back of her throat"—and she was so nervous that
she would never fully master it that she felt physically sick. "It's
really a different language. Still to this day," she says, employing a
classic Edie phrase, "when I'm taking off my makeup I think, I won't be
able to do it again."
We are between takes in her trailer, and she is telling me this the way
she tells me everything, completely in character. Lange is "Muhthah
dahling" as well as "the cat's pa-jammas." The presence of Cummins, who
calls her Edie to her face and "Crazy Silent Book Woman" to me, was a
necessity: In most films there are fewer than a dozen costume changes,
while in Gardens there are 43. "It wasn't 'Here, step into this
Prada dress'; it was 'Let me tie this dish towel around your head and
fasten it with a brooch,' " he says. Such was the depth of Drew's
immersion that she cut off communication with all the other treasured
members of her self-made tribe—close friends like Charlie's
Angels costar Cameron Diaz, whom she calls Poo, and Nancy Juvonen,
her "big sister" and partner in Flower Films.
Her cell phone, BlackBerry, laptop, and all other "modern devices" (in
Edie-speak) have been relinquished and an old-fashioned typewriter
installed in her room, along with a single concession to 2008 in the
form of a treadmill. "I don't want my ass to fall apart!" she jokes.
Before she left for Toronto, she tells me proudly, she took off almost
fifteen pounds—strictly through exercise, without cutting out her
beloved Johnny Rocket cheeseburgers or "bowls of pasta." (Her weight now
fluctuates between 110 and 115, and the dresses she wore for this photo
shoot were a size 4.) But naturally, there is another, more serious Edie
reason for the treadmill's presence: Her voice coach said her lungs
needed to be in shape to get the voice right.
On rare occasions, Drew's new beau, Justin Long (the "Mac" in the wildly
popular Apple-computer commercials and one of her costars in He's
Just Not That into You, coming out in August), was allowed to visit.
"Edie did have a gentleman caller," she tells me; she addressed him by
that name instead of his own.
It would have been almost comic had it not been so physically and
emotionally grueling. Drew's toenails fell off and the contacts
scratched her eyes; she lost weight and developed a respiratory
infection as well as a skin condition from the heavy makeup. "I have
never been so cut off from the world before, but I wanted to feel like I
had only what was right in front of me," she says. "I was really
conscious of creating an environment that I constantly wanted to get out
of. There was a lot of pain and frustration and lack of comfort. That's
who she was."
Though Barrymore is one of the very few people in Hollywood who are
thoroughly and immediately adored by almost everyone with whom they come
into contact, she has so successfully inhabited Edie that even her
driver doesn't like her very much. "It hasn't been fun," he told me.
"Nobody here knows me," she says. "They don't know I'm this happy,
hippie wild child."
When the production wraps, a few days after my visit, Drew calls Juvonen
at 2:00 in the morning, sobbing and laughing into the phone. Happy Drew
has very much returned, but she is not entirely untouched by her
crucible. "When you put yourself through something like that, especially
as a choice, an enormous amount of self-knowledge is gained," Juvonen
says. "It's one thing to say you're going to do it, but to follow
through and really do it, that's the growing up. I even see it in her
physically. There's a little more ownership there, a little more
wisdom."
When I talk to her again in January, Barrymore—as herself this
time—absolutely agrees. "Something about learning you can live
without everything changes you. All my life, I've been waiting and
waiting to become a woman, but I always felt like a little girl. Edie
did, too. But I think she might have been the thing that made me finally
become a woman. I thought for sure it would be a relationship with
another human being, a love. Little did I know it would be a posthumous
relationship with a woman named Edith Beale."
Barrymore may have felt like a child, and the moviegoing public first
met her as one, when, at six, she played the adorable Gertie in
E.T. But she is 33 now and for the last several years has been
doing an excellent impersonation of a grown-up.
Not only is she a mainstay on The Hollywood Reporter's annual
list of the ten highest-paid actresses, she is also an extremely well
respected producer. She was nineteen and Juvonen 25 when, at Drew's
suggestion, they founded Flower Films; their string of solid successes
includes their very first project, Never Been Kissed, and, of
course, the Charlie's Angels franchise. ("I'm dying to do a
third," Barrymore tells me. "Poo and Lucy [Liu] and I talk about it all
the time.") Even Donnie Darko, which starred Maggie and Jake
Gyllenhaal and made "about a dollar on the market," according to
Juvonen, "gave us some weird credibility. People loved it."
"Her name signals that a project is to be taken seriously," says Ken
Kwapis, the director of He's Just Not That into You, which Flower
developed from a script based on the smart and funny best-seller
(subtitled "The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys"). The all-star
cast includes not only Barrymore and Long but Ben Affleck, Jennifer
Aniston, Jennifer Connelly, and Scarlett Johansson. "She has built up
such an extraordinary reservoir of goodwill among actors that it was not
hard to entice all those strong leading players. She puts out a very
welcoming vibe and is enormously supportive of other actors, which,
among her colleagues, is definitely not always the case."
The Flower Films headquarters in West Hollywood is a chicly decorated
space with a homey kitchen that includes a mint-green vintage fridge and
a shelfful of cake stands that Drew proudly tells me she picked out
herself. When I visit, she is looking at raw footage for a documentary
she is making for the United Nations World Food Program, which has so
far required two sojourns to Kenya. She's also going over the latest
pages of the current CoverGirl ad campaign, of which she is "the face."
Some of the CoverGirl ads, at her urging, are in black-and-white. "She
had so many creative ideas for the campaign that they ended up making
her a co-creative director, which was a first for them," says Chris
Miller, Flower's vice-president of production, who also seems to take
care of everything from her press to her life in general. (She is
practically the only star of her caliber who does not employ a powerful
outside public-relations or management firm.)
But Barrymore will have far more than a 30-second commercial to sink her
teeth into as soon as the writers' strike is settled. She is poised to
direct Whip It!, her first feature, a coming-of-age story
starring Ellen Page of Juno, and is literally breathless as she
explains why she thinks she's ready.
"I have traveled the world for 32 years and voraciously studied
literature, art, other cultures," she says. "I've been to the places,
spent time with the people. I am the most avid music fan. . . .
Photography has been my secret hobby and passion for years now." I
believe her. It is clear she is an insatiable student from the camera,
notebooks, battered paperbacks, iPod, and DVDs that are crammed into her
tote.
"I've been putting all that in a piggy bank," she says, "and I've been
waiting to break it open and make something that is very personal and
important to me."
Whip It! is about a sixteen-year-old girl trying to escape the
confines of her small town and her mother's values in order to "find her
tribe"—which she does, in a roller derby in Austin, Texas. The
narrative obviously resonated with Barrymore, who became her highly
dysfunctional family's chief breadwinner while still in elementary
school and has been living on her own since she was fourteen.
"I relate to what it's like to feel like your surroundings are dangerous
to the development of who you need to be as an adult," she says. "One of
the most important rules of filmmaking is tell your story, tell things
that are personal to you, and I feel like I'm out of the gate with that
one thing in my back pocket."
Still, Juvonen tells me, "I wanted to have her work for it. She's got a
lot of empirical knowledge, but gosh, you have to make a lot of
decisions. I wanted to make sure she was ready."
Here again, Little Edie came in handy. "I really think Grey
Gardens was a hard, but good, step toward directing," Juvonen says.
"I feel like she's earned it now, more than a lot of people out there
doing it."
Edie might have made Drew into a woman, but her current relationship
with Long mirrors the empowering lessons that He's Just Not That into
You teaches about men—that a woman deserves a man who truly
loves her and not one for whom she must make constant excuses. She and
Long knew each other for seven years before becoming as serious as they
are now. "I have been such a cards-on-the-table, direct, confident
person in my life, in my work, and with my friends," she says, "but when
it comes to relationships, for some reason, I have not grown up to the
speed I am elsewhere."
Her first marriage—at nineteen, to a bar owner named Jeremy
Thomas—was over in five weeks; the second, to comedian Tom Green,
lasted five months. Long, who is Vassar-educated and comes from a close
family, has already broken both records. "I do feel like she is finally
with a good person," says Juvonen. "She is with someone who adores her
and doesn't put her down on any level, someone whom she wouldn't allow
to put her down. And that is such a departure. Drew absolutely loves to
make a plan—that is her big thing. And this is a person she knows
will be there next Thursday."
Indeed, Long is there with Drew on a Friday afternoon in January when I
talk to her on the phone. They are just back from weeks of travel, first
to Juvonen's wedding on Richard Branson's Necker Island and then to
Harbor Island in the Bahamas with a group that included Cameron Diaz,
Kent Cummins, and Chris Miller. Now they are walking around West
Hollywood, "starving," she says, and desperate to find a spot where they
can grab a late lunch.
When she puts him on the phone, I meanly put him on the spot. "Tell me
one thing she brings to mind," I demand, but he doesn't hesitate:
"Instant light. Beauty and light, and she shines it on everybody who
comes into contact with her."
A harsher, less forgiving light shone on Barrymore for much of her early
life, but she endured it with phenomenal grace. "She has spent so many
years in the limelight, yet she is remarkably down-to-earth," says Ken
Kwapis. "There are a lot of wonderful actors who are absolutely
unapproachable on a personal level, but Drew is just the opposite of
that."
Miller agrees. "What sets her apart from, say, Gwyneth Paltrow or Julia
Roberts is that I would never in a million years go up to them in a
grocery store. She's just totally approachable. Even on the red carpet,
you can ask her what she ate today and she'll end up with how her dad
died. Talk shows want her even when she's not promoting anything because
she's so much fun."
Barrymore's unguardedness is remarkable given the fact that she had
little in the way of actual parenting. She had her first drink at nine,
was offered her first toke of pot at ten by a friend of her mother's,
and by twelve had taken up cocaine. At thirteen, she entered a six-month
program for alcohol and drugs—where for the first time she
experienced both supervision and structure. While she was in rehab, her
long-absent father, John Barrymore, Jr., called her more than once to
ask for money and hung up when she wouldn't oblige him.
All that is well behind her. She is a sociable and extremely fun smoker
and drinker, but you will never see her at the clubs staked out by the
paparazzi. (They do, however, still lurk around her office and her
house.) Even at her most self-destructive, she never had any of the
histrionics or career meltdowns that plague your usual onetime child
star. "I think I had some mechanism in my head that said, 'If you don't
pull it together for yourself, no one else will,' " she says. "That's
coming from a person who had to try it all, burn my hand on the stove,
and party it up, and who still loves to have a good time. I do believe
in 'Work hard, play hard,' but 'Work hard' always comes first, and it
did even when I was wild and young."
It was her early "film families" who provided her with her first
"tribes," she says. "When I found one that I thought was safe and
nurturing, I could express myself, and that was a good thing. But it was
also temporary, and the heartbreak was devastating when I had to leave
every single time. So I'd fight to find the next job and tribe—I
was like a little Traveling Wilbury. But as a result I can really roll,
and I like to go on any adventure, and there's a part of me that's glad
about it because I never got stuck."
She is telling me this in a booth in an old haunt on Santa Monica
Boulevard called the Formosa Cafe, where tiki drinks are still served
and faded movie-star glossies cover the walls—a place where, she
says, "my dad used to get hammered when I was a kid." Despite their
disappointing history together, when she murmurs "God bless him," it is
clear that she means it, just as it is clear that she is proud of her
actual tribe, a theatrical family whose history in the business can be
traced at least as far back as the reign of George III.
Her great-great-grandmother Louisa Lane Drew descended from strolling
country players. When she arrived in America on a packet from London at
the age of seven, she was already famous for her ability to play adult
roles of both sexes, often three or four at a time in a single
production. Described by one critic as "an astonishing little creature
who evinces a talent for and knowledge of the stage beyond what we find
in many experienced performers of merit," she was kissed by President
Andrew Jackson as a child, managed a theater company in Philadelphia,
and took as her third husband John Drew, an Irish comedian with a
fondness for liquor. Their daughter Georgiana (called Georgie) was,
according to her son's biographer John Kobler, "a radiant blonde with
enormous blue eyes and a natural comic sense." She joined her mother's
company as an adolescent; it was she who married the gorgeous Maurice
Barrymore, a British boxer and actor who had taken his name from an old
playbill—his real name had been Herbert Blyth.
Drew Barrymore's middle name is Blyth, and one of the few pieces of
artwork in her office is a poster advertising an 1890 production of
The Senator, starring Georgie Drew Barrymore as Mrs. Hilary, "a
susceptible young widow." There are also biographies and memoirs of
Georgie's children, Ethel, Lionel, and the especially tragic John, who
died of complications of myocarditis and cirrhosis of the liver at 60.
Their memoirs reveal that, like Drew herself, they received precious
little parental supervision; and though the boys had ambitions to be
painters and Ethel to be a concert pianist, they all went into the
family business as a means of survival.
Although her grandfather, great-uncle, and great-aunt were all dead by
the time she was born, Drew derives a certain strength and reassurance
from her remarkable gene pool. "I had my own little Yoda in the form of
my family," she tells me at Formosa, where John Barrymore's photograph
hangs on the wall. "Maybe they were crazy, but they were talented and
they were interested and they were passionate about life, and they
weren't afraid to live it to its fullest. Maybe that hurt them in some
ways, and maybe they didn't understand family values as well as some
other families, but they're still an interesting tribe, and I'm proud I
come from that circus. When I was a kid, I used to look at the moon and
think it was my grandfather. I always knew where he was."
On her first night in Toronto for the Grey Gardens shoot, Drew
pulled out a Life magazine devoted to Twentieth Century,
the great Howard Hawks film starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard,
whose astonishing, rhythmic voice she can imitate perfectly. "I was in
my hotel room, and I suddenly felt very close to them. I burst into
tears and started screaming at the ceiling, 'I need you right now; I
need you by my side.' Why do we do this? Why do we remove ourselves from
the world and all the people we love and go into the darkest part of
ourselves?"
The upside of having access to that "darkest part," of course, is that
it can inform the transformation into a complex character like Little
Edie. "It's her pain I connected to. I always knew I had a lot on
reserve, but I also realized that I am basically a really happy person."
Perhaps it is that essential disposition, as well as her ancestral
"Yoda," that contributes to Kwapis's assessment of her as a "great bona
fide movie star in every sense of the word. No matter what role she's
playing, with Drew, you feel involved. Especially in romantic-comedy
roles, it's like she's holding up a mirror to the audience with all
their flaws and foibles—she knows your story, and she's telling
it."
When they formed their company, Juvonen suggested they focus initially
on romantic comedies. It was, she says, a no-brainer: "Drew loves love
more than anyone I've ever known. It's euphoric, and everyone gets to
share in it."
I know what she means. On the phone, when she and Long are looking for
lunch, Barrymore asks me, "Can you feel me smiling? My cheeks hurt, I'm
so happy." In the background I hear Justin saying, "She makes my cheeks
hurt, too, and you can quote me on that." Somehow, I am not only not
nauseated by this whole exchange, I am tickled to death for Drew.
Especially when she brings it back around to the clan. She has inherited
their talent, but, generations later, there are also, it seems, lessons
learned. "I have no sense of traditionalism, but I'm learning it on my
own, slowly but surely. I'll be the first Barrymore who will tell my
children, 'I'm going to pick you up at three' and actually turn up."
"Positively Drew" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story
appears in the March 2008 issue of Vogue.
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