Nicole Kidman

Strangers

Iam talking to an Australian, a woman, about Nicole Kidman, and the crucial mystery is there at the start: I've known her twenty years, and I've spent a staggering amount of time with her, but I feel I don't know her. Because what she gives you is what you want. A lot of actors are like that. They don't exist when they aren't playing a part.

This book is about acting and about an actress, but it must also study what happens to anyone beholding an actress—the spectator, the audience, or ourselves in any of our voyeur roles. And the most important thing in that vexed transaction is the way the actress and the spectator must remain strangers. That's how the magic works. Without that guarantee, the dangers of relationship are grisly and absurd—they range from illicit touching to murder. For there cannot be this pitch of irrational desire without that rigorous apartness, provided by a hundred feet of warm space in a theater, and by that astonishing human invention, the screen, at the movies. And just as the movies were never simply an art or a show, a drama or narrative, but the manifestation of desire, so the screen is both barrier and open sesame.

The thing that permits witness—seeing her, being so intimate—is also the outline of a prison.

This predicament reminds me of a moment in Citizen Kane. The reporter, Thompson, goes to visit Bernstein, an old man who was Charlie Kane's right-hand man and who is now chairman of the board of the Kane companies. Thompson asks him if he knows what Rosebud, Kane's last word, might have referred to. Some girl? wonders Bernstein.

There were a lot of them back in the early days … Thompson thinks it unlikely that a chance meeting fifty years ago could have prompted a solemn last word. But Bernstein disputes this: "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember.

You take me, he says. One day, back in 1896,1 was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since, that I haven't thought of that girl.

Bernstein seems to be single—to all intents and purposes he was married to Charlie Kane. I daresay some beaverish subtextual critic could argue that the girl in the parasol stands for the sheet of paper on which the young Kane sets out his Declaration of Principles. Yet the reason why the anecdote (and the actor Everett Sloane's ecstatic yet heartbroken delivery of it) has stayed with me is that it embodies the principle of hopeless desire, and endless hope, on which the movies are founded. Of course, most little boys (even those of an advanced age) feel pressing hormonal urges to satisfy desire. And I would not exile myself from that gang. Still, there is another calling—and film is often its banner—that consists of those who would always protect and preserve desire by ensuring that it is never satisfied. For those of that persuasion—and it is more than merely sexual—there is no art more piquant than the films of Luis Bunuel, one of which is actually entitled That Obscure Object of Desire. (In that light, let me alert you not to miss this book's vision of Belle de Jour as if Nicole Kidman had played in it. In fact, I have dreamed this film with such intensity that it matters to me more than many films I actually have to see.)

Anyway, the subject of this book is Nicole Kidman. And I should own up straightaway that, yes, I like Nicole Kidman very much. When I tell people that, sometimes they leer and ask, Do you love her? And my answer is clear: Yes, of course, I love her—so long as I do not have to meet her.

Now, that proviso could be thought hostile; it might even conjure up possibilities of an aggressive streak, a harsh laugh, or even a regrettable body odor in Ms. Kidman that one would sooner avoid. That's not what

I am talking about, and it's nothing I have ever heard suggested. I suspect she is as fragrant as spring, as ripe as summer, as sad as autumn, and as coldly possessed as winter. Much more to the point, you see, I am suggesting that getting to know actresses is a depressing sport. The history of Hollywood could be composed as a volume of melancholy memoirs all made ruinous when Alfred Hitchcock, say, actually met Tippi Hedren, or whomever. Actors and actresses are seldom marriageable and too little thanks has been offered to the profession for the steadfast way in which its members sacrifice themselves to each other. It is as if they understood the spell put upon them and knew that anyone raised in any other craft or system would collapse with incredulity if confronted by the endless fascination performers only find in themselves. They go to the altar—they do not alter.

Laboring with movies for six decades now, I am coming to the conclusion that this medium has been steadily misunderstood. Yes, it has some semblance of being an entertainment, a business, an art, a storytelling machine—and so on. But all of those semirespectable identities help obscure what is most precious and unique, and what is absolutely formulated by the simultaneous presence and denial on the screen: that a movie is a dream, a sleepwalking, a seance, in which we seem to mingle with ghosts. And here is the vital spark: whenever we seem within reach of these intensely desirable creatures, their states and moods, we ourselves resemble actors as they come close to redeeming their terrible vacancy by assuming parts, or roles.

In other words, acting and being at the movies are mirror images, and they are the persistent, infectious forms of nonbeing that have steadily undermined the thing once known as real life in the last hundred years. So the study of acting is less a record of creative process or artistic eloquence; it is a kind of drug-taking, very bad for us—yet absolutely incurable. I daresay this sounds a touch odd or obscure at first—or maybe it is just alarming—but it will creep up on you as this book proceeds. It is an insidious process, such as ought to be banned everywhere by churches, schools, parents, and the law (all those institutions that claim to be looking after us). On the other hand, it has entered the bloodstream; it goes on and on—and some would say we are hopelessly lost to fantasy already, and so thoroughly immersed in desire that something like real, practical improvement (surely a good thing?) has been befuddled.

And yet there is something enormously positive and creative that can come from it, a mixture of calm and insight. It is to see that we can entertain the idea of strangers in our minds—if only by wanting to be them, or be like them. The movies are about beholding strangers and in the process losing touch with those real people one happens to meet and has the chance of knowing. I believe now that I learned to fall in love by watching actors and actresses, and that is not a wholesome training. It is one that prompts a rapid dissatisfaction with the thing or the person present, or possessed. Their charm can never compete with the allure of the unattainable. Thus, to follow desire is to give up the ghost on relationship. Just as you reflect on that, and consider how far it is a restlessness that has you in its grip, you will remember from so many life lessons that it is also a very bad thing. This is very dangerous territory, even if most of us are already there—in other words, there is still a weird kind of polite respectability that is possible in life from denying it.

Let me tell you a story that helps explain this. In my last book about the movies, The Whole Equation, I was feeling my way toward this point of view, and I included a chapter, By a Nose, which concerned Nicole Kidman in The Hours. I offered it as a testament from a fan, a love letter, from someone in the dark to one of those beauties in the light. As a matter of fact, she was not my true favorite. Indeed, I feared in advance—and I still think it likely—that if I were to write about my real favorites, my movie sweethearts, I would be rendered speechless and helpless, because the fantastic intimacy is too great. So, yes, I do like Nicole Kidman, but not quite as much as Catherine Deneuve, Julia Roberts, Grace Kelly, and Donna Reed (I am tracing sweetheartism back to when I was about eleven).

Nevertheless, when Michiko Kakutani reviewed The Whole Equation in the New York Times, she saw fit to call my crush on Kidman ridiculous. (You see how brave authors must be.) Well, maybe, but I am owning up to it, because I think it is the only way to get at things that need to be said (somehow in all the turmoil of desire, I have retained the semblance of some educational purpose). Going to the movies and believing may be foolish, or worse. It may be crazy. But I think even book reviewers have been formed by its risk.

At the moment, as I try to write this, just behind one layer of my computer screen there is an AOL home page in which I have the chance to catch up with the diet secrets of Jessica Simpson and Denise Richards. There are their pictures—lean yet carnal—Jessica and Denise, would-bes who maintain a presence not always in movies, per se, or shows, but in celebrity newsbreaks, in fashion follies, dietary secrets, and scandal scoops. That supporting atmosphere is as old as movies, but it is more intense now just because of the Internet. Moreover, one of the most intriguing things about Nicole Kidman is that at least one of her ample size ten feet is firmly planted in that electronic wasteland. Nicole can be great and serious. She is an Oscar winner. Sometimes you can believe she might play any part. But she is also heart-and-soul a sexual celebrity, someone who, close to forty, is not just ready or eager but proud to give her sexy come-hither look to some magazine. Her appetite for life is not snobbish, or elitist, not ready to act her age. I mean, we do not see Vanessa Redgrave or Meryl Streep or Miranda Richardson (her colleagues as actors) in glamour pictures, not these days. Yet on the Internet you can get a lubricious roundup of every nude or seminude scene Nicole has ever done. You may know the curve of her bottom as well as you know your child's brow. Nicole does expensive perfume ads; she does eye-candy covers; she will drop her clothes if only to air out that elegant Australian body (she does wish she were a few inches shorter, with those inches added on her breasts—but there you are, she is very human). That's another reason why the world, for just a few years, has been crazy about her. How can I put it? Let's just say she has not flinched from the duty of a great celebrity to be on public display. There are thousands of hits on her every day, not real hits, blows to the body, but the hits of our day, the fantasy contacts, the I want to know more about Nicole pressures on the mouse.

I daresay that as she grows older she will become weathered, a great lined old lady like Katharine Hepburn, a mistress of the art of acting and of the cult of her own high-mindedness. But this book was conceived and composed while she was still hot and hittable, and likely to be in every tabloid and on every magazine cover because the rumor industry—our essential river of story—could not leave her alone. Even if she becomes that great old lady Dame Nicole Kidman, in those greedy eyes of hers the hunger will persist for the good old days when she was in everyone's virtual bed. Millions more have had that palpable illusion help them make it through the night.

But note this, please. She is, as I write, in addition to everything else, a fun-loving thrrty-nine-year-old with a cheerful eighteen-year-old's attitude. I mean, she has not grown up or old—she has been kept young by attention. She would like to go skiing; and for a moment at least she might like to go with you! One of the more hideous things about what happens to actresses and celebrities is that, somewhere around forty, the tissue-paper safety net dissolves and the star suddenly has to go from being a nymph to being an adult. Nicole's own name is already part of that terrible future, and I daresay she wakes up some nights screaming because she felt it was about to happen. (Not that I can be there to witness it—or stop imagining it.)

But just because of that vulnerability, it would be improper or cruel for a biography to grind too remorselessly close or fine. Let her live while she can. Why pretend to be censorious over every fleeting love affair, or any toke she might take? Let time take its course. Let her awkward teenage years off lightly, and know that, as with all actors and actresses, the idea of the real life is, anyway, the ultimate tragedy, the terminal desolation. They are too busy being the center of attention to have a life. So, I will be gentle and tender on passing over some things. If I elect to say little about the movie Far and Away, for instance, then understand that there are films made for no other reason than that the people involved were in love. It is their business. Sometimes it ends up looking like Pierrot le Fou or an Ingmar Bergman picture. Sometimes it's Far and Away —enough said. It is so very much more interesting to explore films not actually made, such as Nicole Kidman as Belle de Jour or Nicole Kidman in Rebecca. In a way, the best admiration we can give her is to imagine other parts she might play. That is adding to her creative soul.

One final word. You will want to know, Did I talk to her?, no matter how ardently I have stressed the point about staying strangers. Well, at the very outset, I approached her through her representatives, asking for an interview. There was silence, and then there was a Well, yes, she is interested. But she was so busy … and time passed. So I began to write the book, and I had an entire draft done before hearing a word from her. What happened? Well, what do you think happened? One day in February 2006, my phone rang and I heard, It's Nicole, as if she were a languid, superior, but amused prefect who had called a naughty boy to her study to see what he had been up to.

I think it's true: she tries to be what you want her to be.

Just Like Us: Not Like Us

If pushed to the wall, would you sooner say My wife is a very good actress or My wife is a rather poor actress? If the case fits, please substitute husband. We are talking about spouses, but deep down, these days, I can't get over the feeling that all these words—wife, husband, spouse—are out of order. Perhaps what I really mean is lover, or desired one. Many of us, particularly in middle age, are shy about saying those young words out loud. Companion comes up more and more these days, proud of its own correctness. But if you've ever reached out in the middle of the night to be sure that he or she, or anyone, was there, then companion doesn't seem adequate or accurate.

But consider actress a little more. You are goingto tell me that in all your life you've never actually met or spoken to an actress, a professional—apart from the giggling girls in that school play. And it is in the nature of things, and something taken for granted that you, or I, never met Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Tuesday Weld, or Nicole Kidman. They seem profoundly un-meetable, because they are protected, and because they don't have time or boredom enough for commoners; because they don't quite see us. For most of us, I think, that unlikelihood is necessary: it's easier to entertain our desirous dreams without any risk of contact. In a way that's what the movies are all about, with the actor and actress like a parent, knowing the children are watching behind the dark curtain, but pretending not to notice. Because voyeurs hate to be identified. Their secret is their rapture.

By the way, I misled you a little in the last paragraph. I did meet Katharine Hepburn. I went to see her at her Manhattan house one day in the late eighties, to talk about David Selznick, the producer, the man who brought Hepburn to Hollywood in the first place. I suppose we got on, or she trusted me enough, because after an hour, she announced (this was her normal way of speaking), Well, I think you should see Laura.

She meant Laura Harding, Hepburn's companion on that first train journey to California in 1932 and her long-term friend. The reason I needed to see Laura was because she and David Selznick had had a romance, which was not a well-known thing.

Whereupon Ms. Hepburn put in a call for her car and her driver, Jimmy, so that within a short space of time, and with a plastic tub of Hepburn's borscht, the three of us were en route to see Laura Harding in rural New Jersey, an hour away. By then, Ms. Hepburn and I were chatting about anything and everything, just like friends. She was kind, funny, direct, and very likable. She was full of her vivid character. I felt drab and fake beside her.

As you come out of the Lincoln Tunnel on the Jersey side of the Hudson River, there is an amazing array of highway intersections. And it was there that our car blew a tire. Jimmy was as calm as could be. He pulled over onto the shoulder, asked us to get out and sit on the curb, and began to change the tire.

Thus, one of my best chats with Katharine Hepburn was in the unlikely position of sitting side by side on the low curb, shouting to be heard in the roar and slipstream of hundreds of passing trucks. It was not long before some of these trucks started honking their horns as they passed. I thought at first that they were marveling at two idiots sitting so close to death. But that was not it. For Kate waved gaily back, and in truth she was being recognized and hailed. (Maybe the tire always blew at that spot?) You have to remember that Katharine Hepburn at this time, before she elected to sit looking at the wall, was still active and probably the most beloved woman in America.

And as the unlikely cavalcade passed by, she said to me, They love me. I don't know why. She was radiant, sublime, transcendent, and it was plain that the they meant more than the truck drivers. It meant all of the rest of us. It included me. And I would not have argued one bit, just as I will always treasure my day with Kate and the very ordinary things like sitting on the curb and thinking to bring a tub of borscht for lunch. She was so normal—and Katharine Hepburn always took pride in that, in never putting on airs or letting her fame go to her head. At the same time, she was utterly extraordinary, because—without bothering with a script or learning lines—she treated everyone like an audience. It was her way of loving us.

Katharine Hepburn is the name Nicole Kidman often invokes as her idol or her model. She might have played her in Scorsese's The Aviator but for scheduling problems. It's easy to see how any actress might aspire to a working career that covered six decades, that never lost touch with the theater, that collected four Oscars, that is famous for a romantic involvement with Spencer Tracy marked by loyalty, sympathy, and support, and that made her so widely loved. And Kidman has a rich, muscular, ordinary side to her. She does not hide that Australian accent. She can come on very glamorous and then collapse in giggles— like the girl next door who was just trying on a famous older sister's gown. She cried at winning her Oscar, and turned away from us and the cameras. It was normal and human and touching. It seemed very real. But a stealth comes upon the real woman who is an actress who wonders whether she is acting naturally or acting, naturally. Before the age of forty, however much she might have tried to resist it, Nicole Kidman had some understanding of the nearly tidal force that makes her an idea in the sky, a real person over whom the most outlandish and ridiculous rumors gather, as if somehow an actress cannot help but be colored by the roles she has played. Or is it by that willingness, that need, that demand, that helpless calling, to be someone else? Being someone else is not what we are expected to find ordinary. Is it?

So ask yourself again: Would you rather be married to a good actress or a bad actress? Or, to put it in a slightly different way, a good liar or a bad liar? I know, those people who groan and sigh and blame them- selves for being bad liars, they are the endearing ones, the ones you're more inclined to trust. Whereas the good liars are so smooth, so cool, so perfect, you never notice the lie until years later, perhaps … when the whole thing comes apart. There you are, it's an intriguing question, and one at the heart of many great works of art: Would you rather be married to someone who tells you the truth, or who lies kindly to you? Finding an answer can easily outlast your life. And maybe the dilemma is a little more pointed after a hundred years in which one of our formative influences—at the movies and on television—has been watching people act.

You'd have to assume that, as a species, we enjoy that pastime. I mean, a lot of us have spent four or five hours a day doing it most of our lives. Apart from being awake or being asleep, there aren't many things that so occupy us.

Now, I know, sometimes people are startled by this suggestion. Good Lord, they say, that doesn't have any real effect—it's not that we've become more like actors and actresses. I never argue, it's not worth the time. I just wait a moment or two until they say or do something for effect, as if they were playing themselves. Just watch yourself, and think about the subtle ways in which we know we are being watched, that we are in a play, that we too can get over awkward spots in life by putting on an act. You still don't believe it? All right, read on.

I misled you twice in that earlier paragraph. I met Tuesday Weld, too, and that was far more dangerous than sitting on a curb beside Katharine Hepburn as the eighteen-wheelers hurtled past. This was in 1983, when the San Francisco International Film Festival gave a tribute to Ms. Weld. I was forty-two then and she was thirty-eight: immediately that's a lot more dangerous, I suppose. And my wife was out of town.

Well, the tribute was in the hands of Leonard Michaels, a resident of Berkeley then, and a marvelous writer. Without ever having met Tuesday, Lenny adored her and admired her, so the Festival invited him to choose a program of clips from her career and to interview her on stage at the Castro Theater one Saturday afternoon. I was there, though I had not been involved in choosing the clips. I was there because I thought then, and think now, that Tuesday Weld was one of the great American actresses. Lord knows where she'd be in our esteem if she had called herself Susan Weld, her actual name.

The tribute did not go well. For reasons I never understood, Lenny had chosen nothing from Pretty Poison or Play It As It Lays or The Cincinnati Kid. There was a small but vociferous band of Tuesday fans in the front rows who became annoyed and vocal at these omissions. And Lenny had not interviewed a movie star in public before. Anyone who has been in that business will know what I mean. Movie stars like to be regular—they often yearn to be—but they are not. Tuesday Weld was plainly very nervous, yet more than that. I don't know her well enough to judge, but I suspect that once nervous or unsettled she can become very defensive. The failure of the interview owed a good deal to her mounting edginess, even if it might have been allayed at the outset. That and the rather modest-sized audience hurt her. It was plain that in the minds of the San Francisco filmgoing public, there lingered some doubt as to whether Tuesday Weld deserved a tribute.

Shortly after the interview, I received a phone call from the people who were doing their best to look after Ms. Weld. She was distraught; she knew it had gone badly; she needed reassurance. Was I available? I think that I was being asked this because Ms. Weld had seen the program note I had written, and liked it. I said that I was already invited to the dinner to be held that evening, at Prego on Union Street.

I arrived early as asked, and became Tuesday Weld's companion for that evening. Yes, I am using that word ironically, and out of difficulty. She was tense. Her hand was very cold. I know that because she insisted that I hold her hand. It did warm eventually. She fixed on me, and we talked. She was beautiful and smart, and she was a frightened woman gradually relaxing, or she was a woman (also frightened) putting on that performance. I did not bother to determine which, and I did not know the way to do so even if I had had the determination. People from the Festival occasionally whispered to me their appreciation of my rescue act, but no one gave any indication of guessing that I might, sooner or later, be in need of rescue myself.

For our conversation became warmer and more personal. We went from my showing an awareness and admiration of her career to her asking me my sign. I do not offer that with any attempt to be funny. A lot of Hollywood people, I have found, take signs very seriously. And I have found myself that if I am ever talking to a beautiful smart woman I take whatever she says seriously. It is natural, and one hopes to behave naturally in those circumstances.

Now, this is a book about one actress and about being an actress and a star; but, inevitably, it is also a book about our response to those things. For most actresses and all stars depend upon at least the notion that they are reaching all of us. Of course, that is no longer as true as it was: so many more people went to the movies in the twenties, thirties, and forties than do so now. Still, there are other ways in which the audience is touched: at home, by VHS and DVD (put like that, the technologies could be infectious diseases), by television journalism, and by the steady way in which the media trust that we are obsessed with stars.

In fact, I think we are tricky, devious, and fickle. Yes, we like stars. In the last few years, at least, we have hurried off to see and be smitten by Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Elisabeth Shue, Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry, and so on. There are so many of them, and so many more who want to be in their places and who might do anything to be in their places. What does anything mean? Well, let's just say intense hoping and wishing and desiring.

But wait a minute. There are a couple of names in that list of stars who are already not quite as alive or as fresh as others. I admit, this is a delicate thing to talk about, for just as it is easy to celebrate success so it is edging toward bad taste to discuss its opposite—the thing called failure. But I need to be frank. Meg Ryan is no longer what she was.

Meg Ryan is nearly forty-three as I write, and I've heard a few people in the dark of theaters murmur that she looks it. Not that forty-three is the end of the world. But the movies are a street where young flesh is taken for granted: cellulite, varicose veins, double chins, wrinkles, narrowing eyes, hair losing its first color—all these are ordinary, normal things. But the audience does not approve of them. It likes perfect bodies, with breasts like young plums, and legs that are as shapely as the haunches of a Boxer dog. You can deplore this—as many women do— but you should also recognize that you are part of the audience that has maintained for decades the pressing demand for the sexiest young flesh, with the most