COVERstory:
Ascent of a Woman
Tatler, February 2000
Winona Ryder is all grown up - she
has a new house (with gardeners) and Arthuer Miller's phone number and
is even prepared to discuss her childhood traumas with Jonathan Van
Meter.
Photographed by Brigitte Lacombe
When I arrive at Winona Ryder's house
in Beverly Hills, she has only been awake for 10 minutes, so I guess
that the make-up (racoon eyes, pale foundation, pink lipstick) is from
the night before. She's wearing a red and white Who T-shirt with no bra
and a turquiose A-line skirt, cut off several inches below the knee.
Her short, unwashed hair, flecked with blonde tips, is pushed up with a
black hairband: on her right wrist are a rubber band and a
beaded-leather bracelet. Her elegant, diamond and gold earrings look as
if they belong to a much dressier outfit. In a word - a word which she
probably hates - she looks adorable. Some more Winona clichés: she is
tiny, doll-like, luminescent, with impossibly far-apart huge brown eyes.
Clutching a cup of tea, Winona heads
outside to sit at a table under a big white umbrella on her redbrick
patio next to an oval pool. "I live at this table, " she says. It
shows: there are piles of yellowing newspapers, an old candle with
cigarette butts stuck in it, a sketchbook, Time magazine, The Paris
Review, a copy of Richard Ford's Wildlife and the book she's currently
reading, An Underachiever's Diary, by Benjamin Anastas. Over the next
two days I, too, will live at this table, while Winona sips from cans
of Coke, smokes my cigarettes and chatters away about everything but
Matt Damon, who is off-limits.
Winona's house, modest by Hollywood
standars, is of the typical, two-story Spanish variety. She bought it
last year for £1,5 million ('a steal') from Rene Russo's sister, the
ex-wife of Bernie Taupin. Sir Elton John's lyricist. There's a lot of
rock 'n' roll history in these walls, a selling point that thrills her.
'Neil Young's Harvest was written here,' she says, as only a person who
lives and breathes music would. 'That's one of my favourite albums.'
Winona recently launched Roustabout Records, an indepenedent label
which her older brother Jubal runs. She lives with her room-mate of six
years, Brett Brook - a handsome menswear buyer at Fred Segal - and her
younger brother, Uri, a 23-year-old actor/writer. 'It's my first real
house,' she says. 'I have a pool. I have gardeners. It's an adult
house. I definitely couldn't live here alone.'
She stops suddenly and her eyes
widen. 'You want to go on a tour now?' she says, as if suggesting that
we open our Christmas presents a day early. And we're off on a tour
through all 10 rooms, complete with a meticulous narration of each and
every tchotchke, the provenance of every piece of art revealed, the
story behind each framed picture told. She uses the phrase 'my prized
possession' three times: referring to a W. Eugene Smith photograph of a
little black boy climbing up a street sign, circa 1950; a snapshot of
herself with her hero Tom Waits, taken a month ago at a concert; and a
Sullivan's Travels poster featuring Veronica Lake.
Scattered about the house are
memorabilia and artefacts from nearly every movie she has been in -
proof, perhaps, that the unreal, out-of-time life she leads, with its
ever-changing cast of characters, has actually happened. There, just
behind the bar, is a foot-high bronze statue from Alien Resurrection;
just off the kitchen, on a shelf, is a framed page of her narration
from Heathers, signed by the director and editor. Next to it is a
Polaroid of herself, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep taken during the
shooting of The House of the Spirits. Upstars, in her messy bedroom (a
mountain of beauty products next to her bed and many pairs of shoes),
we find a photo her mother took of Winona and Daniel Day-Lewis in full
period costume on the set of The Age of Innocence. And, of course,
there's the requisite photo of Winona and Marty (Scorsese to you), 'My
show-off thing,' she says. Most endearingly, she has framed Arthur
Miller's bank-deposit slip on which he wrote his home phone number
during the filming of The Crucible. Under his number, he wrote: 'Call!'
This gives her no end of joy.
There are other, more personal
effects in her bedroom worth mentioning, such as a tiny framed picture
of a three-day-old Winona. 'My mom's a Buddhist and I'm in this
position that the Buddha is in, and she's like, "Noni, I know that
you're special because of this..." and I'm like, "Mom, you probably
positioned me like that." But this is what's really cool.' She takes
the picture out of the frame and turns it over. 'My dad was on the lam
with Timothy Leary during this time and he showed this picture to him
while they were in Switzerland skiing, and that was when he asked him
to be my godfather, and Tim wrote: "Love to the beautiful newest Buddha
girl from..." - I think he meant to write "Godfather". They were
probably both really high.'
There's one framed picture that's
lying face down on a shelf. She turns it over and panicky giggles issue
forth. 'That's... that's... Matt.' It's a picture of Matt Damon, the
boyfriend. 'Trying not to talk about it,' she singsongs, putting the
picture back, face down. The final stop on our tour is a room that she
says is - with air quotes - 'the "office" I never go into. This is the
embarrassing room'. The sources of her embarrassment are two framed
Academy Award-nomination certificates hanging on the wall, one for Best
Supporting Actress in The Age of Innocence and one for Best Actress in
Little Women. 'Totally mortifying. Don't look in that direction. Brett
talked me into putting those up.' Embarrassment - usually to do with
issues about fame - is a recurring theme in Winona Ryder's life.
Some facts about Winona: she does not
sign autographs (except for children), because she thinks it's weird.
She has taken a vow not to repeat negative gossip, though this remains
a struggle (I caught her once, telling me that she had heard Britney
Spears has breast implants). She does her own hair and make-up for
premieres and award shows. She swore she would never get a tatoo, but
broke down two years ago after dreaming about one every night for six
months. The result is dime-sized, elegant and sits on the top of her
left forearm. It's a combination of the Indonesian symbol for
compassion and the Tibetan symbol for enlightenment. She is 28 and has
had three serious boyfriends thus far: Johnny Depp, for four years,
Dave Pirner of the band Soul Asylum, for four years, and now Matt
Damon. She is a natural blonde but dyes her hair dark brown.
Is Winona all grown-up? Yes and no.
She clings to a kind of spacy, lazy, California-teen-girl cadence,
still uses words like 'totally' and 'awesome' and 'like' and 'lame'.
She smokes each cigarette as though she were 13 years old and it was
her very first one: awkwardly (in Woody Allen's Celebrity, she was
quite good as a sexual predator and, at long last, seemed like a grown
woman - until she moked a cigarette). A few times in conversation, as
we were sitting on her patio that first day, I found myself wishing she
would get to the point, and answer my question, stop drifting away, be
more articulate. Apparently she read my mind because the next day, out
of nowhere, came: 'I've never been that good with interviews, and I
know that I've probably been really inarticulate. I was reading this
interview with Sharon Stone last night, and she's just really great at
it. And I was like, "Man, Jonathan's gonna think I'm so lame." I wish I
could talk like that. This is me, but I just wish I could be more...
like Sharon Stone.'
On the other hand, Winona is
obviously a woman who is in control of her career and, in some ways,
always has been. 'Right from the beginning, she chose what appealed to
her,' says one of her dearest friends, the interior designer Kevin
Haley, who has known Winona since she was a baby and used to take her
to auditions before she could drive. 'She has always had her own taste,
and she sticks to it.' At 14, she did Heathers against the advice of
everyone around her, and she was right. The recent landslide of dark
teen dramas is, in many ways, the progeny of Heathers. She seems to
have a knack for choosing offbeat, or dark, or literary material that
exists just this side of mainstream, like Beetlejuice, Mermaids, Edward
Scissorhands, Reality Bites, Little Women - classics, really. Even her
big mistakes, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Alien Resurrection, are
interestingly camp.
After the long and demanding shoot of
Alien Resurrection in 1997, Ryder, exhausted, decided to take some time
off. Her career went into a slump, and a few months turned into almost
two years. 'The stuff I was being offered was like, the Rookie Cop,'
she says, laughing. 'Or this whole craze of super-violent independent
movies that I thought were ridiculous. They were just excuses to show
the most disgusting images and people shooting up, and I was just so
repelled by them.' When she finally went back to work, she made a film
called Lost Souls, directed by Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer she
had worked with on How To Make an American Quilt. 'I wanted very much
to work with Janusz, who's a friend,' she says.
Last winter, she began filming Girl,
Interrupted, based on the bestselling memoir by Susanna Kaysen. Ryder
had been attached to star from the beginning, but after her display of
canny instinct on Little Women - which she single-handedly persuaded a
reluctant Gillian Armstrong to direct, and handpicked much of the young
cast, including Claire Danes - she was made an executive producer. 'I
don't think I am going to be some great producer,' she says. 'My main
reason for wanting to produce was to not let anyone fuck up the
material, and there were a lot of people who wanted to make it
something else.' After six years, several prospective directors and
many drafts of the script, Girl, Interrupted finally made it into
production with Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg and Vanessa
Redgrave. 'Her act as a producer was pulling together a great vehicle
for herself because the world wasn't doing it,' says James MAngold, the
director and screenwriter, whose previous credits include Heavy and Cop
Land.
Girl, Interrupted, published in 1993
to much critical acclaim, is an intense and surprising little book
about 18-year-old Kaysen's two years on the ward for teenage girls at
McLean, a psychiatric hospital in New England, in the late Sixties.
Kaysen's prose is spare, elegant and, at times, darkly funny. Through
her eyes we meet a bizarre cast of characters: doctors, nurses, and the
other girls on the ward. The book raises more questions than it answers
- about what it means to be 'crazy', who is and who isn't - and yet it
manages, through Kaysen's clear-headed and egoless insights, to be
deeply satisfying.
'I read the book when I was 21 and I
freaked,' says Ryder. 'It was like, "Oh my God, my whole life I've
tried to say that and I've never been able to."'. Ryder's connection to
the material came through her own unravelling at an early age. She
started making movies when she was only 12. By 17, she was having
'horrible' anxiety attacks. Over the next few years, things quietly got
worse. 'I was working constantly,' she says. 'I didn't take any time
off. When I did, I was really stressed out. I went through my first
break-up with a long-term boyfriend [Johnny Depp]. It wass really
difficult and weird, and it was amplified because it was in the press.
I really thought I was losing my mind. I became a terrible insomniac. I
lived on aeroplanes and in hotels. I didn't really have a home.'
One morning she woke up felling 'too
sensitive to be living in the world' and checked herself into a
psychiatric hospital. 'I only stayed a week because no one was talking
to me,' she says. 'They were just trying to medicate. I was like, "No,
I need to address my life right now; it's a mess." It was a very
dramatic move, and my friends really made fun of me. But I needed
help.' Ryder started seeing a therapist she met at the hospital, and
her life eventually evened out. 'Right as I was coming out of it,' she
says, 'I read the book. I realised that what had happned to me is not
unusual. I had the money and the time and a lot of people don't. Part
of what the book says is 'Everyone's crazy; they just pretend to be OK
so they can get by.'
Mangold explains: 'We look for people
and moments that are about to blossom, and I couldn't get past the
feeling that Winona was someone who was really ready to reach
someplace. There are tremendous parallels between Winona's experience
and Susanna Kaysen's. I love it when I find actors who are ready to
address the larger issues about themselves and their choices in the
material. She operates very much from the gut. She's very free that
way. And she gets the architecture of film on a profound leve.'
'I'm very proud of my performance,'
says Ryder. 'This is the first time, aside from working with Martin
Scorsese, that I really let everything go. I was incredibly raw. I
delivered myself on a platter to him. There's stuff that I did in this
movie that I've never done before. I did a scene where I'm in bed [with
a guy] and I'm naked, and I was the most comfortable. I did a couple of
scenes in a bathtub, naked.' She pauses: 'And it's certainly not a
beauty-shot movie for me.'
Other Winona facts: she was born in
Winona, Minnesota. She's Jewish - Ryder is a stage name. Her real last
name is Tomchin, but half the family goes by the name Horowitz because
of a snafu at Ellis Island. Don't ask; it's complicated. She has an
unnatural fear of being separated from her family, which she believes
comes from having lost relatives in the death camps. She is obsessed
with World War II. Ethel Horowitz, her 99-year-old Russian-immigrant
grandmother, lives in Brooklyn and enjoys a friendship with Daniel
Day-Lewis. Dave Pirner, her ex, is her best friend. She still loves
Johnny. She gets asked about her 'falling out' with Gwyneth Paltrow
every day. It's not as dramatic as you think, but it's complicated -
don't ask. Most of her friends are gay. When she was 12, she was beaten
up and called 'faggot' by a group of kids who thought she was a boy.
When she got home from school, with a bandage on her head, she went
into the bathroom, lit one of her father's cigarettes and did a Jimmy
Cagney imitation in the mirror. She was discovered by a casting
director at Salmagundi's ('very Lana Turner'). She has a substantial
collection of vintage Hollywood costumes, including Leslie Caron's
dress from An American in Paris, Claudette Colbert's gown from It
Happened One Night and Olivia de Havilland's blouse from Gone with the
Wind. She has worn a much-altered Ava Gardner dress to three different
Hollywood events, for which she came in for some grief from the press.
When not working, Ryder goes to the
movies every single day, or she and Brett rent a video, open a bottle
of champagne and make a night of it. 'I'm at the point where I have
seen every movie in the video store,' she says. 'And I'm not kidding. I
can't find a movie that I haven't seen - except the really cheesy
Eighties teen movies.' The American Film Institute sent Ryder its 100
Greatest Movies collection on video as a gift. 'I was so excited.'
Pause for effect. 'I'd seen every movie in it. That's 100 movies, and
that's just the tip of the iceberg. When I was growing up, my mom kept
me home from school to watch movies. Kept me home. Like, I would want
to go to school. I remember trying to explain to my teachers: "I saw
Imitation of Life, and it's this incredibly story." And they were like,
"You missed school."'
In conversation, Winona refers to
movies constantly. Clearly they were an unusually important and
formative part of her childhood. Now that she's an adult, movies are
her job, her life-blood. And if she has been criticised, as she says,
'for playing one too many brown-eyed waif girls', who can blame her?
That's what the movies - that's what we - wanted her to be. But perhaps
playing a teenager when she was well past her teens slowed her process
in real life. She has seemed, for a long time, to exist in some strange
lacuna between girlhood and womanhood.
One afternoon, we are sitting in her
living room in front of a gigantic television watching dailies from
Girl, Interrupted. As she runs through take after take of a spooky,
emotional scene, her face filling up the entire screen, she says: 'Ive
learned a lot about my face on this movie. My eyes are kind of big, and
I can express more than I want to. I do that in real life.' She turns
to me, makes her eyes huge, and cracks up laughing. 'See what I mean?'
Girl, Interrupted begins and ends
with a cab ride. 'When you look into Winona's eyes at the beginning and
end of this film, going to and from the hospital, there's such a
tremendous difference in this woman,' says Mangold. 'Indescribable and
lyrical and powerful in terms of the girl you see arriving at the
hospital, and the woman you see entering the world.' Ryder can no
longer play the little girl with the big brown eyes. And if, as Mangold
says, she 'grows this girl up' in the movie, perhaps Winona, herself,
has finally grown up.