click for a slideshow ›

In a quiet corner of a SoHo tavern, Sandra Bullock is sitting back, relaxing, ordering up a late breakfast (or early brunch, depending on how you look at it) of bacon and eggs. By relaxing, we don't mean I've-got-nothing-to-do relaxing—that's not Sandra Bullock's relaxation style. Workwise, she's just wrapped one movie, The Lake House, and is entering the final phase of her latest, a film based on the life of Truman Capote, called Infamous. Then there's her production company, which, among other things, is painstakingly putting together a biopic, to use the industry term, about Grace Metalious, the fifties New Hampshire author whose life was engulfed by her then-scandalous novel Peyton Place. Bullock is doing all this, meanwhile, while traversing between New York, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas—where, incidentally, she is about to open a bistro, even if lately she somehow survives mostly on decaf. Sandra Bullock's relaxation style is more along the lines of I've-planned-to-relax-today relaxation. She has none of the harried panic you saw, for instance, when she first blockbustered in Speed, and likewise offers no sign of the haughty intolerance of her recent, critically acclaimed performance as the bigoted wife of an L.A. district attorney in Crash. As you sit down with her at Fanelli's, the almost 160-year-old tavern on Prince Street, her easy barroom hospitality immediately inspires you to order the same—a bacon-and-egg sandwich, to be precise, with the cheese, sure. And she further inspires amazement when, after you follow her order, she goes ahead and orders another one. "And can I have it to go?" she asks the waitress.

No, she's not suddenly running out.

"This is for the better half," she says, by which she means Jesse James, the person with whom she's usually seen strolling around New York City, L.A., or Austin. For many Americans, Sandra Bullock and Jesse James are the unlikely pair of the moment. She was raised by an opera-singer mom and a voice-coach father, and he is, well, a guy who customizes choppers and has a lot of tattoos, as well as pet sharks, pit bulls, and a past that includes a stint as a bodyguard for bands such as Soundgarden and Slayer. (David Letterman recently asked Bullock if she'd lost a bet.) But they are not an odd couple to people who know her. And not if her casual mood, sitting here in this tavern, after the first bacon-and-egg sandwich arrives, is any indication of her general state of happiness. "Relax," she says as she stops herself from rushing. "I've got lots of time."

Today Bullock is wearing a pretty batik dress of no particular origin that she is aware of, Lanvin flats, and a purse that is, in her words, "my $5 gold lamé skull-and-crossbones-where-the-zipper's-already-broken bag.

"I have nothing to do but screw in bulbs today, new light- bulbs," she says. If this sounds like drudgery, or at least banal, it's pure excitement to Sandra Bullock, who has called home-repair magazines her own personal erotica, so infatuated is she with subjects like flooring. "I found vintage bulbs to go with the light fixtures, and that's all we're doing today." That and eating. And, as mentioned, relaxing. Aside from being so relaxed, she's also funny, self-deprecating even, pointing out, shortly after the sandwiches arrive, "I'm getting egg on my face." But there is no egg, and in fact she is perfectly composed, charming, quick-witted, and steady. When you sit before her in the dark, wood-paneled room—especially if you've just seen her portrayal of Harper Lee in Infamous, the writer and director Douglas McGrath's version of the making of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood—you might feel as if you've just landed in Capote's tavern seat. Harper Lee was Capote's confidante since childhood. In McGrath's film, Capote spends most of his New York life sipping cocktails in nightclubs and uptown restaurants with high society. But for advice, for intimate writer-to-writer brainstorming, he sat in an old tavern sharing a burger and a beer with his oldest friend, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Infamous, of course, is already just that: a biopic that fearlessly (some might say awkwardly) follows last year's biopic about the same thing. That version, Capote, featured the Oscar-winning performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote and Catherine Keener as Harper Lee. In Infamous, a considerably less well-known British actor named Toby Jones plays the novelist. Fortunately for all concerned, Jones is also superb. While Hoffman portrayed a dark and brooding writer, Jones is flamboyantly funny. Bullock, meanwhile, deftly plays Harper Lee as the listener—a character deep enough to stand in for the viewer so that as we watch the film, we are proud of Capote, then worried, and finally enraged, like Harper Lee, as he attempts to steer what happens in real life for his own authorial purposes. The dark turns, though, are preceded by the unavoidably comic meeting of Truman Capote and the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, where both sides are surprised at how much they end up respecting each other. "I think Sandy got right into that idea of the delight Lee feels for her childhood friend," Jones says, "as she watched and witnessed the negotiations with these people."

What makes this quietness even more impressive is that it's not the kind of performance you might expect from a big star whose box-office numbers have typically been built on a kind of cuddly slapstick, a warm regular-gal comedy, the kind that raked in multimillions for Miss Congeniality. "America is not a country where the small gesture goes noticed," notes the Harper Lee of Infamous. "We want everything you have, and we want it as fast as you can turn it out." And yet in the majority of Bullock's scenes, as Lee and Capote huddle over those beers, as they camp out in a Kansas hotel, as she assuages the relationship between the fame-hungry Capote and the wary Kansans, Bullock works the lightest touch. Bullock's Harper Lee makes moral judgments with the gentlest squint of her dark eyes and with the delicately sharp remarks that come in hair-down conversations between friends who grew up together. Today, at a tavern that feels a little like a setting in the film, Bullock easily confides that this Capote biopic was worth it for her—despite, even because of, the other film. "There could be another five films made about that period of his life," she says. "I mean, make a film about the Black and White Ball, the setting up of that! You could take so many pieces of that pie and still not get at all the truth."

The truth being the answer to the question, What happened? Why, when Capote returned from Kansas after writing his masterpiece, did he divorce himself from the circle of society women with whom he once lunched and then excoriate them in Answered Prayers, his final work? Why did he seem to break away even from Harper Lee? "In his life, there seems to be a split," says McGrath. "He broke with almost every close, important friend he had. He was working at the top of his game, and then after In Cold Blood, he goes away. What happened to this guy?"

The answer to that literary mystery—and the mystery that haunts Bullock's performance in Infamous—involves the always elusive, and still-living, Harper Lee. In other words, who is Harper Lee, the famous writer who has so impressively skipped the trappings of fame? Who is this woman who may have aided Capote's career more than anyone previously believed? (Until old letters proving the contrary were discovered, and the rumor killed definitively, the opposite idea was often whispered: that Capote ghostwrote Mockingbird.) Like Catherine Keener before her, Bullock tried her best to figure out Harper Lee, a tough task given that Lee is as reclusive as Capote was spotlight-seeking—and given that Lee has never been filmed or recorded—but a task that eventually brought the 42-year-old actress to imagine that a certain resolve characterizes the 80-year-old author, a resolve that has all but disappeared in our fame-obsessed culture.

"It's the same thing that allows a person like that to step back," Bullock says. "Or not step back, but step toward the life they want, which no one else understands, because it's not about selling out. But if you've seen the few articles she's written"—the very few short pieces, such as one Lee wrote for Vogue, in 1961, on the subject of non-romantic love—"you see the humanity and the understanding she has of life and her respect for people, which is above most other people's thinking. She knows something else that allows her to step back and do what she did. It's extraordinary." To discover her own Harper Lee (whose first name, in the film as among friends, is Nelle, pronounced "Nell"), Bullock consulted a dialect coach, and then started calling friends. "Friends with fathers who are great writers," she says, "and I'd say, 'Who can I call?' I called Michael Mailer and said, 'Go ask Norman who can get me information.' And once we just sat down—well, I knew she was from Monroeville, Alabama. Monroeville has this very distinct accent. My family's from Birmingham, but I have family that lives right in Monroeville and in the outskirts. At the time the accent was different than it is now. You know, we have the infusion of so much television, colloquialism. And we found interviews with a lovely woman, a teacher who knew Nelle and worked with her. And in the interview, she said something, and then she looked off camera and she said, 'Isn't that right, Nelle?' And you hear this laugh. And then Nelle saying something like, 'Oh, yeah.' But this laugh is in the dialect. You went, 'Oh, there it is!'"

Still, the end result relies as much on the knowing glance as on the perfect drawl. "Because Harper Lee," McGrath says, "in our portrayal of her, just absorbs it privately and makes a private decision." Not that Bullock absolutely trusts her own portrayal, or anyone else's. "I love Catherine," Bullock says of Keener. "We know each other, and we just sort of laugh and say how great is it that it takes two of us to play Nelle, and we probably haven't hit the tip of the iceberg!"

Bullock never expected a response from Harper Lee about the film, but when a response came, it was, not surprisingly, fashion-related. To deemphasize Lee's glamour, the film's costume designer, the meticulous Ruth Myers (who worked previously with McGrath on Emma and Nicholas Nickleby), ended up stuffing Bullock's costume with birdseed, and outfitted her with rather dowdy short wool socks. "I have a friend who is neighbors with Gregory Peck's widow, who is good friends with Nelle," says Bullock, taking another slug of decaf coffee, "and apparently—again, apparently—Nelle saw a picture of me in those socks and she said. . . ." Here, Bullock puts on her Southern drawl. "'I never wore socks!'" "And I went, Oh, genius!" Bullock continues, her hands in the air. "She didn't mention anything else. We were off by one thing!" Infamous is a New York story, though much of it is set elsewhere. The Kansas scenes, however, were mostly filmed in Austin, the town that has lately become a home base for Bullock. She grew up in Virginia, but the family spent a lot of time in Bavaria, where her mother was from and sang opera. Bullock likes to joke that opera was her day care. Indeed, Bullock's first role was famously as an urchin, a beggar dressed in rags, and as a child opera extra, she was initially unaware of the importance of deferring dramatically to the lead tenor.

"He had this big aria," Bullock recalls. "I think it was in the end, and what they did was throw up these chocolates, Mozart Kugeln. They would throw them onstage, like a bravo. Well, I see that. . . ." From her table at Fanelli's, she now makes a small lunge to illustrate the scene she is recalling. "I see that," she continues, "and I hit the ground, crawling. But I'm rolling in front of him, between him and the orchestra, and I'm on the ground, crawling, picking up the chocolates. So my mother had to pull me aside in the end and say, 'We never upstage the tenor.' I was like, 'What is upstage?' I was a miser. I was in character. It was Method!"

A side effect of growing up surrounded by opera was being surrounded by costumes, and sewing, among other crafts. "My mother had the best costumes," she says. "All my mother's costumes are here in the city. My sister and I just went through all the costumes she had made for operas. I mean, the seamstresses, and the beauty of turn-of-the-century outfits with bustles." And her mother, who died of cancer in 2000, often made her costumes. "My mother was also a great seamstress in that she would make all these amazing clothes, but she would make the matching version for me. And we have them all—every dress from every prom, every event was made by Mother. We'd pick out the pattern, the McCall's pattern. We'd cut it out and pick the fabric. There was never anything we bought for an event until I was a teenager, and still she was making my dresses and I was in misery. But now I am so thankful because I have a closetful of them." Bullock is also thankful for her ability to sew. "When I was living here with my dad on the Upper West Side, before I moved downtown, when I was waitressing, I would buy vintage clothing and tailor it," she says. "Because in Germany, we had to knit and crochet by the first grade. So I would make people sweaters; still do. And you know, essentially I didn't have a lot of money, but I had some cute outfits because I was able to buy something for $11 and make it into the hottest little number."

Bullock moved eight years ago to Austin, where, despite the Texas Hill Country heat, she chilled. Infamous comes after her success with Crash, and after her surprise wedding (even to the guests) in California to Jesse James, a man she herself was initially surprised to be dating and who now owns a Los Angeles organic fast-food place, Cisco Burger, named for his pit bull. "You know, organic high-end, at affordable prices for the neighborhood," she says. "But you still get the great fries, soft-serve ice cream. It's my nemesis. I try to drive around it." The idea that she is married to a descendant of an actual Western outlaw is something she is only just beginning to grapple with, metaphysically speaking. "Someone said I need to become a gun moll," she says. "You know, there was a book written in the sixties on the whole family, and it's really cool because there's the family tree, and then the writer or someone did an addendum to it, and it had the latest generation with my name attached to it, and I went, Whoa!"

As the great-grandson of a cousin of Jesse James has taken to Sandra Bullock, so has he taken to Austin, where the two are frequently seen eating ice cream at Amy's (an ice cream store so good that a marriage could very well be built on it), or shopping at the old antiques stores that run for miles and miles into the countryside.

Prior to marriage, Bullock attempted to build her dream house, alongside an Austin-area lake. As opposed to the fake house in The Lake House, the romantic thriller that recently reunited her with her Speed costar Keanu Reeves, this house was a horror movie. She stayed in it only one night and subsequently sued the contractor for shoddy workmanship, the result being a legal victory for Bullock and a semi-triumphant turn at the controls of the bulldozer that mowed down the place last year. "We're not going to rebuild it, and I'm looking at it as a big expensive metaphor of what not to do," she says. She donated the remains to Habitat for Humanity, and started over again, emotionally and architecturally, with the guest house that remained on the property. "We don't need a lot of space," she says. "There's gonna be a garage, barn doors opening to the lake, where you put an old farm dining table, and a shop and that's it. There's a little house there that was originally built by a German family in the thirties. That's still there, and that was like the guest house, which always felt better than the main house—we'd migrate. The family name still stands etched in the glass, and that's gonna stay that way."

During the making of Infamous, Bullock and Jesse James were happy to direct other cast members to local music venues, since they know the way so well themselves. "No matter what you are in the mood for," says Bullock. "You say, 'OK, I want to go out and hear ukulele,' and you'll find it." She pointed Toby Jones toward Antone's. "I saw loads of bands," he recalls. "It is a great town for when you can't get to bed at night when you are anxious about the character you're playing."

Apart from its music scene, anybody who knows vintage knows that Austin is an antique-clothing capital—as well as a capital of new clothing, as far as Bullock is concerned, and even of jewelry-making, given designers such as Anthony Nak. "I've bought some of the best hand-tooled cowboy boots," says Bullock. "They were even a size and a half too big, but it didn't matter. And you've got great boutiques, and young designers are coming out of Austin and there's great jewelry and clothing. And now I'm finding a lot of stuff I find here, in New York, that I find in Austin."

It's an easy place to live; in the fall, winter, and spring, the weather is easy, and although there are paparazzi in Austin (because there are paparazzi everywhere), they are maybe not as prevalent as they are in L.A., or even in SoHo, where, if you walk around with Sandra Bullock, or any film star for that matter, you can't avoid hearing the shuttering sound of America as it gasps for every last detail of celebrity—the gasping that Harper Lee, a person who is infamously unfamous, has so triumphantly and forcibly ignored. You can tell that the paparazzi-stalked actress is amazed at what Harper Lee has managed, as far as publicity goes.

"People don't understand why someone wouldn't want to be photographed or talked about," says Bullock. "It's got to be so strange to have all these people thinking they know you, when they don't," she says. "The thing that she still does is involve herself in worthwhile causes, and she's still inspiring young kids and writers and people in her community. She cuts out the one element that drives everyone crazy, which is the media and public recognition. She's someone who says, 'Let my book speak for itself.' There's nothing else to say when you write something like that. Nothing."

Bullock speaks as the recent target of the media spotlight: SO IN LOVE, shouts one headline on the occasion of their one-year anniversary. There's nothing like a happy (seeming) celebrity marriage to get the gossip pages going about things like, just for instance, babies. The irony of playing a person who is smartly secluded hasn't escaped Sandra Bullock, a person who prides herself on avoiding questions about her personal life, and especially about relationships. "I'm really good at not answering," she says. "The thing about relationships, whether I am talking about my mother or my father or my sister, nine times out of ten I know it'll be misconstrued, and I know it will be quoted, and people will come back and say, 'They said you were a hermaphrodite.' No, I said I was out late last night."

Still, it seems safe to say that Bullock is surprised (a) to find herself married—by all accounts she had all but written off the idea—and (b) married to Jesse James. Such surprise developments seem to have taught her to enjoy surprise developments. "Again, you are talking to a recovering control freak," she says. "I mean, I say one thing this week because it applies to life now, and next week all hell could break loose on many levels, on a personal level, on a global level, and everything that I said this week is completely moot."

It's safe to say, too, that because neither she nor anyone is likely to get answers from Harper Lee about her relationship with Capote, Bullock is all the more tantalized by Lee—and, perhaps, inspired by a good relationship. "The great love and care for this man in her life, this partner or friend that she has, and yet she fights with the issues that she disagrees with," says Bullock. "You look at the life choices and direction, and you understand at some point—and again, I'm assuming, and we'll never know the story of why they split, and I don't want people to know the story of why I had rifts with people—but you see why they fit so well together. They came from that small place. They understood, they nurtured each other. It was just such a great relationship." Lunch is done. The final sandwich appears in a paper bag—the to-go sandwich for Jesse James. Bullock, the former waitress, is extremely courteous with the current waitress. And she is soon out on the streets walking home for a happy afternoon of home repair, avoiding the paparazzi as usual. But before she gets up, she is looking at the bill. "Tip well," she says. "Always tip well. Tip a little more."

"Sandy Gets Serious," photographed by Steven Meisel, has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the October 2006 issue of Vogue.

more vogue features