Sunny Side Up: An Interview with Jamie Lee Curtis
At Jamie Lee Curtis´s Home
"Hello!" comes a voice from above. I look up and see a head popping out of a second-story window. "It´s me," Jamie Lee Curtis says. "Would you mind moving your car away from the garage, in case my husband needs to get out?"
I tell her sure thing, enjoying the neighborly feel of the exchange. Her home is on an unassuming street in Santa Monica, shady, blooming with vines, with a sign nailed to a tree at the bend in the driveway: "Caution: Please do not squish the small black dog." (The word "small" has been crossed out, replaced by "chubby.")
Curtis´s elder sister, Kelly, emerges from beyond a hedge, introducing herself as Jamie´s assistant or, more accurately, "assisteraunt," which is how her business card reads. She introduces me to Frances, the decidedly chubby black mutt, and Henry, a yellow Lab pal, and I´m whisked into the house, a place of high energy, big thoughts, no nonsense, all business and yet, somehow, tremendous warmth.
When I see Curtis I´m taken aback. She´s, well, thin. She certainly didn´t look like this for her last cinematic outing, 2004´s Christmas with the Kranks. Not skinny, but very trim, glowing with the healthy good looks of someone who works out and eats smart. Dressed in clingy black, she looks pretty amazing.
At 48 she still sports her signature short pixie cut, unabashedly silver. If she wears any makeup I don´t detect it, and her only jewelry is a wedding ring -- she has been married to actor and "mockumentary" film director Christopher Guest for 22 years -- and a necklace medallion etched with the names of her children, Annie, 20, and Thomas, 11.
What do you say to a woman who has lost weight and looks terrific? If you say "you look great!" would it mean you didn´t think she looked good before?
Not that she really gives me a chance to say much of anything. "Come on," she says, "let me show you around." She takes my purse. "I love this purse!" she says, slinging it over her shoulder. It´s large, in shiny patent leather, vaguely obnoxious but, I thought when I bought it, in a cool kind of way. "Kelly! Look at this!" she says to her sister. Jamie models it and Kelly applauds. Now they both want one. "We could have a club!" Jamie says, inviting me into the sister laughter the two have obviously shared forever.
Motherhood and Work
Born and bred in Hollywood, with famous parents -- the legendary Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis -- she broke into films in 1978 in Halloween, transforming herself over the years by turns into vixen and comic and dramatic actor in such films as Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda, True Lies, Freaky Friday -- more than 35 movies in all. Recently she announced her decision to bow out of acting altogether, unless something comes along that´s not too time-consuming, shooting close to home, and doesn´t take her focus away from her family -- or her multiple charities. She´s keenly devoted to organizations serving the young and the ill, volunteering her time to many groups, including Children Affected by AIDS Foundation, Starlight Starbright Children´s Foundation, and What a Pair. It is perhaps with children that she has found her most authentic voice, having written seven popular children´s books that have spent as long as 37 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list.
I didn´t ask for a tour of her lovingly renovated, unpretentious 1920s Spanish-style house, but Curtis takes me through every bright and airy room, stopping short of the bedrooms, which, she decides, might be going too far. Nearly all of the walls feature large framed black-and-white photographs, most of which she has taken. "Put it this way," she says, "if there was another path for me, I would´ve been a photographer. I´ve taken photographs my whole life. Here´s my son´s and my feet, which I love. My little boy´s feet. And me. That´s my daughter. She´s really developed into an extraordinary dancer. She´s a sophomore at a college I can´t name. It´s somewhere where they grow corn. These are some of my favorite pictures, among the best I´ve ever taken. My daughter when she was 8. My son when he was a...when he was just a little sprite. Kills me." With zero prompting she talks about being an adoptive mom, about how it was to suddenly hold Annie, and later, Tom, and when I tell her I´ve got two adopted kids of my own she turns to me with eyes that are pure compassion. "Oh, so you know," she says. "You know."
With that I´m whisked quickly on past fish she can´t name, a photo of Nelson Mandela she pays tribute to, windows overlooking vines I´m told to note. "You´re throwing so much at me so quickly!" I say, breathless.
"That´s my job, baby, that´s my job," she says. We head back to Kelly, who is in Jamie´s office, a converted patio, sunny and gleaming. Kelly is standing over an odd-looking cooler sitting on the floor. "Okay, this," Jamie says, pointing to it, "this is why you have to know me! This is how I know people know and care about me. My girlfriends got me an in-car refrigerator that you plug in. I´m serious. An in-car refrigerator so I can eat lunch in my car in the carpool lane. Because I´m obsessive. I´m the first person in the school line every day. I´m compulsively early.
"I´m also hyper-ly aware of time. So, like, given that we have an hour and a half to get to know each other...."
She steers me into the dining room, where lunch is waiting, a gorgeous spread of poached salmon, rice pilaf, fresh greens, and strawberries. I don´t get a chance to say much. Jamie Lee Curtis is an entertainer, first and foremost, seemingly determined to show me a good time, and she has a lot on her mind: motherhood, work, fitness, alcoholism, drug addiction, women who work, women too busy for their own kids -- a woman she used to be.
Her Drug Addiction and Alcoholism"I look back on A Fish Called Wanda," she says, scooping up some salmon. "An unbelievably funny movie, great movie, without question one of my biggest successes. I actually made money from that film. I mean, all of the things that you hope for and want. People say, ´Oh, this must´ve been the greatest time of your life.´ And all I remember is crying in the car to and from the set, an hour´s drive from London. What I remember about that movie was that my daughter was a baby, 6 months old. There were often days I´d come home and she was asleep already. And I thought what the frick am I doing? My memory of that is horrible. Not that I wasn´t grateful for the gig. Not that I wasn´t grateful to John Cleese and thank him continually to this day -- I send him funny fish presents to say, ´I remember what you gave me. Thank you.´ But it doesn´t take away from what I knew -- knew -- at that point what I was doing. And yet I couldn´t stop myself. And I didn´t have a guide. I didn´t have a mother saying to me, ´Sweetheart, after this movie, take a year off at least to bond with this baby.´"
No, her own mother led that same frenzied life -- movie after movie, a work ethic of the highest order -- and Curtis thinks of herself as the less-than-perfect product of it. She was determined, somewhere in the back of her mind, to be a more-present mom for her own kids. She tells me that, at least in the beginning, she failed at that.
"My daughter was not the priority. I would take jobs wherever I had to take them and I would work all the time. You can talk about working for the greater good of the family and all of the spin you want to put on it, and yet I was just following my mother at the expense of my daughter.
"So one day, it was almost as if Annie put her hand up and went, ´Stop in the name of love before you break my heart. Think it o-over.´ You know. She was about 8 and she really said, ´Look at yourself.´
"She said, ´Don´t think you´re being a good mother just because I look good and I´m a good girl and a good student. Look at the way you´re living your life.´
"The only thing children need is their mother. They don´t need stuff. They don´t need the accoutrements. They need the consistency of their mother. The hard, boring, repetitive, day-in, day-out teachings. I missed all that. I would come in, make a big splash, it all looks good, and then I´m gone. It was like, ´Was she here?´ and I wasn´t there for the hard stuff just like my mother wasn´t there."
Annie´s declaration 12 years ago caused Curtis to reevaluate her priorities and become more of the mom she always wished she had. She cut back on work and opened her arms to a newborn son, Tom. She tells me that it wasn´t until several years later, however, that she faced her worst demons: alcoholism and drug addiction.
"I sought refuge from what was difficult in life in alcohol and painkillers," she says. "No one knew it. It was that kind of silent escape valve. I kept thinking that I deserved it because I was working so hard and now I had these two kids and I was really trying to be a much better mother and dat dat dat dat dat dat dat dat, trying to keep all the balls in the air, and yet I was still addicted to drugs and alcohol."
Getting Sober, Gaining Weight
She hit bottom when she began imagining dying this way, leaving her children without a mom. She sought help and found it, conquering her addictions eight years ago. She relates nearly all of the profound changes in her life to her sobriety.
"All of a sudden I realized I exist," she says. "The idea of having your own mind. A mind of one´s own, that it isn´t your mother´s mind, that you´re not just aping the family value, or the husband´s value. I have a mind of my own. And it has taken me a long time to figure that out. And of course I´ve done it very publicly. So what happens is you then become the person who ends up developing like the Polaroid in front of millions of people over the course of a career."
She thinks it´s ironic that she is so well-known for a 2002 photo spread depicting her less-than-toned self.
"It was misunderstood and continues to be misunderstood a little bit. At the time I might have been two years sober. I put on 20 pounds when I got sober because of all the sugar that you don´t get in alcohol I needed in cereal or crackers or something. And at that time I had a young child and I didn´t have the free time to dedicate to a kind of more physical life.
"So I think what some people took from those photos was: Love yourself, no matter what. And the problem with that is: What if what you´re doing is unhealthy? Are you to accept what you look like kind of in a militant way, like, this is what I look like -- stop it! If you´re 50 pounds overweight and you have diabetes in your family, was I telling you that´s okay? No. But unfortunately what got distilled from this moment was every person who comes up says, ´Thanks a lot for keeping it real.´ A lot of people misunderstood me -- that being overweight was okay because that´s who you are.
"And the problem is that how many of us are killing ourselves every day? Who here has high blood pressure and is still eating salt and french fries? Who has been told that her liver is enlarged and unless she stops drinking she´s gonna end up with liver disease and/or need a liver transplant and/or die? We create senseless acts of violence against ourselves daily. And we live in this amnesia that we´re not.
"If I was a doctor today sitting with a woman who says, ´Oh, yes, I smoke.´ You do?! Really? Then I don´t want you as a patient. It´s my job to take care of people. But I want to take care of somebody who wants to live."
Eat Less, Move More
"She´s on a tear about this, excited and full-on preaching. She could make a mint as a motivational speaker.
"You know, I say to alcoholic families all the time," she says, "if you want to avoid your 14-year-old child drinking, make sure that you don´t drink in front of your 14-year-old child. If your children see that you can celebrate something without alcohol, or mourn the loss of something without alcohol, they will not know that the first thing you do when something good happens to you is pop a bottle of Champagne and/or the first thing you do when someone dies is get a drink. Just don´t drink in front of your kids. Right away that can have an effect."
I ask her how she changed her body into the svelte version sitting before me today. "Just by making healthy choices," she says. "You know, in Freaky Friday, the only line I ad-libbed in the whole movie was, ´Make good choices,´ when the mommy is dropping the daughter off at school. And I wasn´t making good choices.
"Here´s the book title. I´ll bust it out now and never have to write the book. Ready? Eat Less, Move More. Period. Half the book is the eat-less part, half the book is the move-more. Period. Eat less, move more. Period. That´s it. We´re sedentary. We don´t walk enough. We don´t drink enough water. We get sedentary, we eat salt all day long. We go to the doctor, we get a blood test. We get a heart test. We get diagnostic tools that medicine has now to tell us how we are, and what do we do? We don´t do anything. Or we take a drug. And that´s not what I´m talking about. Take a drug so you don´t have to change. No! I´m saying change. Change it right now.
"So, for me, I´ve done it under the radar, and I don´t want attention for it. I look for no external validation anymore. This is about how I feel. It´s about being healthy. I swear to God my cholesterol was, like, 220 or 230 or something. I´m now probably like 160. And I started winning on the tennis court."
Her Body Image
She looks at the clock, tells me she knows instinctively -- always -- what time it is. The photo shoot is to start in a half hour, so we´d better get going. She wants to sign books for my daughters. She stands up, says we have to hurry. She and Kelly lead me into the basement.
"This," she says, "is the inner sanctum."
"Yeah, you´re not going to believe this -- " Kelly says, eyes wide.
The basement is a fortress of organization. Trunks lined up with typewritten labels: Annie´s dolls, Tom´s sweaters, Chris´s shoes. Archives of books, films.
"You ask why God invented me," Curtis says. "Why God invented me was simply to organize. Everything is cataloged, and this is my husband´s archive, our archive, everything. And it´s constant. Systems excite me. If I get an idea for a new system it´s like -- "
"Look at her!" Kelly says. "She´s excited just thinking about it! She´s getting verklempt!"
"I am!" She hands me some books, grabs a Sharpie. We head to the car. She pulls another book out of her bag. "This is my trip to Mexico," she says. "I´m so compulsive that within an hour of being home, the 500 digital pictures are downloaded and then by 6 the next morning I´ve created the iBook." She flips through a masterfully produced hardbound book of a trip taken just two weeks earlier.
"I have more energy than anybody," she says. "That is true. I mean my real genetic gift was, you know, the Energizer Bunny kind of stuff. By the way, I´m like a child. I have all the energy in the world, and then I drop like a light switch. Okay, let´s go. We´ll take a right out of the driveway."
We talk in the car, while she navigates. "You know, the one thing I wanted to address about eating is: There is obviously this obsession in this country with people´s bodies and I perpetuated that. I feel badly that my early career was so focused on what I looked like and my body. I do regret the message I sent."
"You feel that you contributed in some way to women´s need for a perfect body?" I ask.
"Of course I did," she says. "Of course I did. But again I was contributing to it in a genetic form, meaning that it was the currency of my family. The currency of my family was what you looked like. My father was arguably one of the most handsome men, my mother the most beautiful. My mother was known for her incredible figure. My beautiful mommy with her enormous breasts and tiny waist. And my father with his beautiful physique and blue eyes. Elvis copied his hair, you know. So your looks were your currency. And they became my currency, even though for me it was trickier because I obviously was not classically pretty the way my parents were."
Adoption, Family Life, and Priorities
We talk about her son. "My son has learning differences and therefore he has a most unique and fascinating mind, and it has been a challenge to find how he learns best. And we are in a great environment for that to happen. He has a great team around him and we are working very hard to help him, as we work very hard to help both our kids."
"Do you think adoption is an issue for your kids?" I ask.
"I think adoption is an issue for everybody at all stages," she says. "There´s tremendous loss and great love and great warmth."
We talk about Madonna and Angelina Jolie and the way international adoption has been portrayed, lately, by the media as a kind of fad.
"It´s just hateful," she says. "Just hateful. It´s just a hateful thing to say. It´s obscene to question motive. These are human beings helping other human beings. Period. End of story."
We arrive at the photo shoot five minutes early. "See?" she says, "right on time." We´re greeted by some people she knows and others she´s just met, and all say some version of the same two things: "Wow! You look fabulous!" And, "You´re so skinny!" She shoots me a glance, comes up to me and whispers: "Do you hear it? That´s what I get. All the time." She seems vaguely disgusted by the comment, but also vaguely grateful, a confusing mix of emotions. "I had a friend of my mother´s come up to me this Christmas," she says. "She´s a dear woman, she has a heart of gold. She came up to me and whispered in my ear: ´You look like you again.´" It was not, to her mind, a compliment. "I didn´t know what to say. Because the problem is that´s what I traded my life on. That´s what I get everywhere I go. Everywhere I go. Am I nothing but a body? Am I nothing but someone who talks about her frickin´ body?" "No," I tell her, "of course not."
She opens her arms for a hug, says "thank you," and then she´s gone.
A few days later she calls me at home. It´s a Sunday morning and she just has a few things on her mind. World peace. And the idea that it should be a requirement, in a time of war, that everybody do community service. She talks about World War II and how it must have felt back then to be in a war that the whole country sacrificed for. "It doesn´t feel that way now. It feels like a few in the collective are shouldering the burden, both as families of people overseas and the brave men and women who are actually fighting and dying for our country." She talks about love, what it feels like to know that you´re loved. "Seen and Heard. There´s another book I could write. Seen and Heard. There it is. You know? You are your own human being, you have your own mind, your own fears. You have a feeling, and you´re allowed to have it." She talks about being an old lady some day. "My goal as an old lady is to be a grandma. I imagine myself photographing a lot more. I can imagine myself traveling the world, photographing. I can see myself living in solitude. I have found that I am a very quiet person, who needs and cherishes quiet. Peace. Quiet. And I never could own that before. Because I was always running. I was always a people person. But I´m not. I´m really quiet.
"If I´m alone I read. I could do nothing but read for the rest of my life.
"And this," she says, finally, "is where I have to get off the phone to make breakfast for my family. Good-bye. Thank you. Make good choices."
Jamie Lee Curtis: On Growing Older & Wiser
Four years ago, Jamie Lee Curtis made magazine history by revealing her true body – even a poochy midriff – in More. Could she get any more real? She could. She does.
Jamie Lee Curtis Gets Real
The first thing I notice is her hair. When she greets me at the door of her Santa Monica home one overcast afternoon, Jamie Lee Curtis´s hair is cropped, as it has been for as long as anyone can remember. But instead of the golden brown she maintained for years with the help of a colorist, it is now mostly silver and 100 percent chemical-free. At 47, this actress turned children´s book author makes no secret of her desire to get real. Her hair is only the latest sign of how well she´s succeeding.
Four years ago, Curtis and I collaborated on a piece for More that set off a tidal wave of publicity. The article was titled "True Thighs" – a twist on the title of Curtis´s 1994 movie True Lies – and in it, Curtis did what actresses almost never do: She admitted her flaws. In the accompanying photographs, the woman who once starred as an aerobics instructor with a Barbie doll silhouette in a film titled Perfect, revealed she was anything but. Wearing unflattering spandex underwear and not a dab of makeup, Curtis looked straight into the camera, a big smile on her face, her midriff pooching slightly. Tired of the hype, she said, she wanted to reveal herself, thighs and all.
The article was pegged to the publication of her fifth book for children, I´m Gonna Like Me: Letting Off a Little Self-Esteem, a funny, wise primer on the importance of being your own biggest fan. But Curtis´s decision to expose herself was more than a publicity stunt. It was an earnest attempt to remove herself from the swirl of celebrity that makes so many women – including Curtis – feel they can´t measure up.
This time when we sit down in the dining room of the home she shares with her husband, actor-director Christopher Guest, and their 10-year-old son, Tommy (their older daughter, Annie, is away at college), the occasion is Curtis´s seventh book, Is There Really a Human Race?, which hits stores this month. Before we get started, I have something for her: a copy of a pricey college textbook, The Meanings of Dress, in which the 2002 More article is reprinted. I assume she has seen the book before, but flipping to the page that shows the photos of her, she´s clearly stunned. I realize that for all the accolades she has won as an actress and as a best-selling author, Curtis is still surprised to discover that she has been taken seriously.
The Impact of Curtis in Spandex
Curtis: Wow, Amy! Wow! Well, that makes me feel like this may have some life. This has some legs.
Wallace: It does indeed. It has some thighs.
Curtis: It has some big old chunk thighs.
Wallace: So, the last time we met, you decided to take on the oppression of body image and, through your own example, debunk it. The reaction was astounding. Tell me about the aftermath for you.
Wallace: Do people still mention it to you?
Curtis: Probably once a week. Just today, in the market, somebody came up and said it was important. Because I think it gave them a bit of permission to be who they are.
By the way, I do Pilates, I do yoga, I exercise, I eat very carefully. I´m not saying obesity or lack of exercise is fine. I´m saying, "This is what I look like and I do that." I´ve had to accept that part of me. I have a name for my middle here. [Pats her tummy] Her name is Midge. When I do Pilates, we talk about Midge. "Pull in Midge."
Some critics misunderstood the More article a little bit. They thought of it as being psychobabble – analysis-driven action. But it had nothing to do with some need on my part to expose. That photo shoot was tied to my book about self-esteem. How can I sell a book about self-esteem if I´m not willing to acknowledge that I too have self-esteem issues?
Curtis on Parenthood & Her Career
Wallace: Your new book with illustrator Laura Cornell is about competition. Are you competitive?
Curtis: I am really competitive. But this book was born because my little boy, Tommy, came home from school one day with tears in his eyes, looked up at me and said, "Is there really a human race?" The subtext of what he was saying was, "Why didn´t you tell me I´m just here to perform?"
Tommy is a child with a profound learning difference. He´s in a special school for kids who all learn differently. And I think this question was prescient of him. I think it was clear that he couldn´t do the monkey dance like everybody else, and he was starting to feel, "What´s wrong with me?" He´d gotten a message that it was a race, and he was losing. I said, "It´s not a race, Tommy. You misunderstood, Sweetheart. It´s not a race. That´s just an expression people use."
I´m not saying there can´t be healthy competition. But the obsession with competition is what this book is about.
Wallace: One of my favorite lines in the book is "Sometimes it´s better not to go fast. There are wonderful sights to be seen when you´re last."
All of us are on a hamster wheel. There´s no stopping and taking a deep breath and going, "Why am I here?" If anybody runs as fast as they can to keep that hamster wheel going, it´s me. But ultimately, all that hamster running left me empty.
Wallace: Are you finished with acting?
Curtis: The great majority of my time now is spent advocating for my son. Even with his wonderful specialized school, he does need extra help, and it´s my job to help him get it. This is a time in my life to focus almost exclusively on Tom. He deserves it. I deserve it. Our family deserves it. Chris told me someone came up to him the other day and said, "Hey, I´ve got a script for Jamie. Can I send it to her?" And he said, "Where is it being shot?" They said, "Canada, for two months, this summer, and she´s in every scene." Chris said, "If you can shrink it to two days in Santa Monica, she might take a look at it." And that´s really where I´m at. Up the street from our house last night, they were shooting a movie. And the trees were illuminated with bright light. And I looked at Chris and I said, "I´m so happy that I´m not the one in that trailer." I know it´s fun for some people. And I hear some actors in their seventies say that they still love to go to the set. But I don´t love it anymore. I just don´t. I like it. I´m happy to do it, if it works out. But I am so protective of my time.
Now, a lot of women are going to read that and say, "Oh, sure. Thanks a lot for making me feel that because I´m working, I´m somehow not doing right by my children." I know that I am lucky. My point is, if you can afford to, you have to look at how much time you´re spending. There is nothing you will regret more in your life – nothing – than not being present for your children.
Curtis on Creating a Life for Herself
Wallace: You made a point, the last time we talked, of noting that this house was bought with money you and Chris earned, not inherited family money. Why is it so important to you that people know that?
People often feel that because my family is a particular kind of family, I have to be a particular kind of person. But off that calcified lump of a family, it´s very hard to create an individual life. The essential you may be very different from that calcified lump that you´re attached to. That´s where my hope lies.
A friend of mine gave me a book of meditations. I´m not a big meditator. I´d like to be – it´s a goal. So far, I´m resisting. But I picked up this book, and it said that at the time of death, people who live mindfully ask themselves just two questions. Period. Now, every single day, I ask myself the questions: Did I learn to live wisely? Did I love well?
Curtis on Her Parents´ Influence
Wallace: Your mother died in 2004. What changes has that brought for you?
Curtis: It´s been two years now since she died. I´ve been able to let her go. And because of that, I´ve been able to take care of her husband, Bob, in a way that would have been hard for her to do, and I´ve made changes in her house that she might not have been comfortable making. But I also appreciate my mother deeply for what she was able to do, given her circumstances. I have been able to honor her more.
I need to be careful here. My father had nothing to do with my raising. That isn´t a statement of anger. I have a perfectly lovely relationship with him. But my mother and my step-father raised me and my sister, Kelly. My mother instilled very good qualities in both of us, and I give her all the credit for it, although we may not have had this deeply emotional bond that you would like to have with your mother.
So I clearly have sought that bond from other people. That´s where my girlfriends have come in. I have learned to be the woman I am today because of my girlfriends. My mother taught me a business ethic, a professional ethic; she taught me a basic kindness and gave me a very grounded sense. But it was my women friends who taught me how to be a woman. They have really shown me the way that you would hope a mother would.
Wallace: When you adopted your two kids, did you feel as if you had to teach yourself how to parent?
Curtis: Yes. As my friend Naomi Foner [a screenwriter and mother of actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal] says, "Raising a child is the only relationship you have where if you do it right, it will end in separation." The goal is that they have their own mind. Not your mind. Not your parents´ minds. Their own mind. That they go to a school that they want to go to, not that you went to. That they are doing jobs that they are interested in, not because that´s what my mom or dad did.
Curtis on Friendships & Marriage
Wallace: You´ve called Foner and your other girlfriends your Estrogen Posse.
Curtis: Yes. My friends have basically fertilized me. In every way. And out of all of that, I´ve come to exist as an individual flower of my own creation. I always thought I was some sort of cutting from each of those plants. But I have truly come into my own. For better or worse, by the way.
For example, I am a decent cook now. My mother, let´s just say, was very thin and leave it at that. Food was not something that was a pleasure in life and therefore not something that was a pleasure in our growing up. So I´ve had to learn to enjoy food and to cook.
Wallace: You´ve been married for almost 22 years. How have you learned to make that work?
Curtis: Marriage is an evolution, and you only hope that you evolve with it – if not intertwined, then on parallel paths. When we married, we were both actors. Since then, Chris has become a director who rarely acts in other people´s movies – although he was wonderful in Mrs. Henderson Presents. And I´ve done commercial endorsements, written seven books for children, become a recovering alcoholic publicly, and we´ve had two children. Both of us have lost parents – he lost his father right when Tommy was born. And all of that yields different people at different times. If you´re lucky.
Wallace: Do you think one of the keys is, for lack of a better phrase, to give each other space?
Curtis: There´s a lot of space in our marriage. When we first got married, we were reading William Safire´s "On Language" column in the New York Times, and he mentioned that a syzygy is a pair of opposites. We named our company Syzygy Industries, because Chris and I are that in every way. And it has been challenging to find common ground. It´s not been great all the time. It has been an almost-22-year untangling. Me untangling myself and him going, "Hey, wait a minute! Who are you now?" He has had to learn who I really am. And it´s maybe not the woman that I pretended to be. He´s had his mind blown that I read Us magazine, you know what I mean? Because for years, I would only walk around with The Nation in my hand. But we´ve navigated it. In that has been the hope, because I can always reach out and there he is. And he can always reach out and there I am. And because we´ve untangled a lot of the knots, there´s also been some real appreciation on both our parts for who that other person is becoming, is daring to be.
Curtis on Finding Her Own Voice
Wallace: What else have you untangled?
Curtis: Well, at one point, I hung out with really smart lefty people and the next thing you know, I was this lefty girl. But you know what? I don´t know where I stand on abortion. I know I don´t believe that the state has any right on any level to decide what happens in a woman´s body. But I am the mother of two adopted children. My life has been immeasurably changed by being a mother to these two kids. And I wouldn´t be a mother if someone had aborted those two kids. So it´s complicated. For years, whatever my friends said, I said, that´s what I believe too. But I actually have a very personal, emotional, opinion about it.
Wallace: You´re on a roll. Keep going.
Curtis: Okay. Hang me out to dry, but I´m a big believer that all kids should wear uniforms. Kids get in a lot of trouble with clothing, status symbols, the demarcation lines that make people feel less than, more than. I think it should be based on a lot of other factors and not on what you wear. Now, that´s an unpopular point of view for liberals. They want everyone to be "free to be you and me" all the time. I want them to express themselves. I just don´t want that horrible demarcation line that happens in life to happen earlier than it should.
Curtis on Self-Esteem
Wallace: Again, it´s about self-esteem. Back in 2002, you told me that you hoped that someday soon, you´d feel sure enough of yourself to "look like just me. There is a me that I will get to that will say to the editors of magazines, ´This is what I wear, this is how I wear my hair.´ . . . I´m going to look the way God intended me to look – with a little help from Manolo Blahnik." When I saw your beautiful silver hair today, I wondered: Are you there yet?
Curtis: I´m almost there. I virtually never have to put on other people´s clothes anymore. [She looks down at her feet. Instead of Manolo Blahniks, there are flip-flops. She laughs.] I´m wearing Reef flip-flops with orthotics in them. That´s how pathetic I am! But I feel much more authentic. I´m not saying I´m a spiritually perfect person. I´m flawed and contradictory and fraught in many areas. But I´m better. I´m growing, and that´s all I really want.
Wallace: On the jacket of your first book, you described yourself as "a mother, wife, daughter, actress, director, equal opportunity employer, inventor, friend, and now, an author." The author´s biography for the third book called you "a moody actor." The fourth book said, "Jamie Lee Curtis moonlights as an actor, photographer, and closet organizer." How is this book going to describe you?
Curtis: Maybe I have to write it right now. It will say: "Jamie Lee Curtis is a card-carrying member of the human race and proud of it. She is also proud to be the mother of Annie and Tom and the wife of Chris and friend to many." That´ll probably do it.
Jamie Lee Curtis Turns 50
And she´s an exuberant crusader for aging wisely and well
On a chilly afternoon in a rustic canyon in Los Angeles, Jamie Lee Curtis´s house buzzes with activity. As she makes a pot of tea in the kitchen, 12-year-old son Tommy whizzes by. Upstairs, electric-guitar sounds throb as husband Christopher Guest, the "mockumentary" film director (Best in Show, A Mighty Wind), helps daughter Annie, 21, sing and record a song as a gift for her mother.
"It´s a surprise," says Curtis, carrying the tea tray into the living room. "I´m going to have to pretend I haven´t heard it." In black slacks, sweater, and high-heeled boots, and wearing a wedding band of tiny diamonds, Curtis is a picture of understated elegance. In Hollywood, where middle-aged actresses are expected to resort to extreme measures to look younger, her short, naturally silver hair is subversive. By local standards Jamie Lee is letting her freak flag fly. The straight-talking actress and author is embracing her upcoming 50th birthday (November 22) with characteristic zest. "I have not one second of anxiety about turning 50," she says.
Radiantly healthy and easy in her own skin, Curtis is gifted with a trenchant wit and self-awareness, which she deploys when sharing her own life struggles. The daughter of movie stars Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, she was born a Hollywood princess. Fame came at 20, when she starred in a spate of horror movies, including Halloween. Later she came to be known as "the body," displaying her voluptuous figure in such fare as Perfect. Eventually her skill with a well-timed wisecrack became her claim to fame in comedies such as Trading Places. In her biggest success, True Lies, she played a mousy wife who transforms into a sexy action heroine.
In her early 40s, addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol, Curtis entered a sobriety program. Self-searching led to transformation, as she deepened her commitment to what meant most to her. She scaled down her acting career to raise her kids. "Jamie always wanted a regular, serene home life," says her friend the author Lisa Birnbach. "I remember visiting her when Annie was little, and they were making heart-shaped pancakes with Annie´s initial in jam, and I thought, ´I don´t do this for my kids.´ She sets a very high bar for herself as a mother, a wife, and a friend, and she´s totally sincere about it."
In 1993 Curtis began to publish children´s books, including Today I Feel Silly & Other Moods That Make My Day (HarperCollins Children´s Books, 1998), a New York Times bestseller.
While Curtis costars with a dog this fall in a comedy called Beverly Hills Chihuahua, she is limiting her acting to roles that don´t require long hours. She has a new gig as a spokesperson for Dannon Activia yogurt, she volunteers at her son´s school and for several children´s charities, and this September she will publish her eighth book – Big Words for Little People.
An accomplished photographer, Curtis collaborated conceptually with the photos on these pages, asking that they represent her quest to "shed skin," to jettison what no longer serves her. She says she aspires to "essential being. Nothing extraneous."
A few days after the photo shoot, Curtis e-mails an eerie photo she took of a pet reptile´s discarded skin. "It happened today," she writes. Oh, and another thing – remember those black boots she was wearing on the day of the interview? "I´m giving them away," she reports. "No more high heels. Too uncomfortable. Don´t need ´em. Gone."
Jamie Lee Curtis – growing older, becoming new again. "I want to be older. I actually think there´s an incredible amount of self-knowledge that comes with getting older. I feel way better now than I did when I was 20. I´m stronger, I´m smarter in every way, I´m so much less crazy than I was then.
"Years ago my husband and I were at the Golden Globes. I was wearing some borrowed dress that wasn´t me, my hair was done in a way that I never wear my hair, and I had earrings on. And my husband said, ´You know who is the most beautiful woman in the room?´ And I was hoping he was going to say me. And he pointed across the room at Jessica Tandy. She was sitting at a table wearing a cream-colored silk-shantung pantsuit. Single strand of pearls, short white hair, a little lipstick – nothing else. And I thought, ´He´s totally right.´ There was none of the pretense, none of the trying so hard.
"My style is a distillation. I´ve etched out who I am through myriad haircut attempts, outfit attempts, beauty attempts, diet attempts. It´s been an evolution. I´ve let my hair go gray. I wear only black and white. Every year I buy three or four black dresses that I just keep in rotation. I own one pair of blue jeans. I´ve given away all my jewelry, because I don´t wear it.
"The same way that midcentury modern architecture was in the ´50s, I want to be as a human being. New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines. "If I can challenge old ideas about aging, I will feel more and more invigorated. I want to represent this new way. I want to be a new version of the 70-year-old woman. Vital, strong, very physical, very agile. I think that the older I get, the more yoga I´m going to do.
"I saw a picture of me in a tabloid, where they had actually given my weight. I was like, ´How dare you – I´m not 161 pounds!´ I was indignant. I got home and I went on a scale and I was 161 pounds. There´s a lot of Lycra in clothing, so I didn´t notice the weight gain. I was in denial about it. This was two years ago. "Then I went to the doctor. And my blood pressure had risen a lot, and my cholesterol was crazy. I had gotten lethargic. But I wanted to play tennis again. So I started a really healthy way of eating, just avoiding things that I had been shoving in my mouth. Over the course of a year, I dropped about 20 pounds.
"Now, I get up at five o´clock in the morning every day, filled with energy. I play tennis three times a week, and I do yoga. I´m never going to be an athlete, never going to be running triathlons – I´m not that person. But I walk with girlfriends, and walking is incredibly good for you.
"That was a moment of truth and a big shift, taking care of my physiological life.
"My biggest concern is that I will calcify as I get older. I am a creature of habit: I wear the same clothes; I eat the same food; I am very regular in all of my activities. I can get lulled into complacency. Decalcification means constant evolution, where I´m constantly trying to shed skins and shed ideas.
"I look at my relationships all the time. If a relationship is really negative on an ongoing basis, what am I doing in it? What am I protecting? Am I protecting someone from the hurt and sting of losing me? Because that´s not healthy. It´s not good.
"The one benefit of being around fame my whole life is I´ve seen the façade of it. I know what people look like before they get all duded up. I see these people duded up and they´re talking differently, as if they´re titled aristocracy. They´re a girl from New Jersey, and it´s just hilarious. What are you doing in the gown, with the fake English accent?
"I´ve been an inconsistent parent at times, and it´s my greatest regret. When my daughter was small, I worked too much. I was replicating what my own mother did. A woman I admire tremendously named Dr. Susan Williams has a great phrase. She says, ´Children are paparazzi. They take your picture when you don´t want them to, and then they show it to you.´ My daughter showed me pictures, aspects of myself that I didn´t like. It was Annie who went, ´Hello, this isn´t working.´ And I made adjustments, and then she did it again, and I made more adjustments. An unflattering picture of you is incredibly helpful.
"My mother was just freaking beautiful. That was her burden, to keep that going. She had two kids, and then naturally life took over, and there was a lot of alcohol, and other things took their toll. [Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis divorced in 1962; she married stockbroker Robert Brandt later that year.] I respect that she survived all that, with no real help. She had a couple of good friends, but this was a generation of women that didn´t trust a lot of other people. I feel badly for her that she didn´t have any of the support I have. At the end of her life she was miserable, miserable. But coming where she came from and achieving what she achieved was a huge accomplishment.
"My daughter is in college. Annie is a beautiful dancer and choreographer; her real talent, I think, is her ability to create a feeling from movement. She´s a talented girl and really bright.
"My son has some learning issues, and we´re in a [specialized] environment educationally. So that´s a whole new learning curve for all of us. And it´s been fascinating. I work hard with his school, helping and learning and fighting on behalf of these kids.
"When my kids leave I would like to go back to school. To me, a great boomer fantasy would be creating courses of study, like book clubs, where people come together in small groups, for lectures, reading, movies, music, art, and then travel to that place. We would do Italy, we would do the Netherlands, we would do Russia. We would study Nazi Germany, then watch Schindler´s List and The Diary of Anne Frank, then see my girlfriend Deborah Oppenheimer´s documentary, Into the Arms of Strangers, and hear about stories of the Kindertransport, then read four or five historical fiction books and then travel there.
"As we get older, we say goodbye to a lot of people. We say goodbye to our friends, to our family, and discover our capacity to love and communicate and have intimacy – real intimacy, not the superficial intimacy we had in our youth. Strip away the bulls---; be done with that. Ask yourself these two questions: Did I learn to live wisely? Did I love well? "Service is another way to get out of the calcification of your life. I am the spokesperson for two children´s charities – the Children Affected by AIDS Foundation and Starlight Starbright, which does wish-granting for ill children. I host a lot of charity events. There´s a lot of personal satisfaction in being of service to other people. It´s the complete opposite of being for sale.
"If I get the chance, I would like to evolve as a public voice, to find a way to talk about making better choices. It is very difficult to talk about people´s personal choices, and the addiction to having what we want when we want it. For instance, diabetes is an Armageddon. Where did this come from? It came from us. We need to live the example more. Giving up something that makes us feel good in order to keep us alive as a species. We need a surgeon general who challenges the way people eat. I don´t know why doctors don´t say, ´Oh, you smoke? I´m not going to treat you. It´s clear that you´re not interested in being alive.´
"I´m going to give myself a breakfast birthday party. I´ll serve my favorite meal of the day: cereal and waffles and bacon and pancakes and scrambled-egg-white omelets and protein shakes and cappuccinos. My friends will come with their kids. The little children can get their hands dipped in wax, and they can watch the wonderfully talented candy carver swirl the liquid candy into dragons, and they can leave with a dragon lollipop.
"To celebrate, I´m making a book of 50 of my photographs and giving it to each of my friends. It´s not for public consumption. People have been very complimentary over the years, and many have said, ´Oh, you should have a show.´ I thought about it, and I thought, no. I don´t need more attention. I don´t ever want to make taking pictures into another way of saying ´Here I am.´ Because I´m as here as I want to be."
Peeling away the layers
"Getting older means paring yourself down to an essential version of yourself," says Curtis. Not only has the author and actress distilled her own style down to a simple, black-and-white wardrobe; she has restricted her own activities to those that mean the most to her: raising her children with her husband of 23 years, Christopher Guest; volunteering at her son´s school; writing children´s books; and helping raise funds and awareness for children´s charities. She does enjoy acting but no longer allows it to interfere with her personal life, declining film work that requires long hours or extensive travel without her family. Says Curtis: "If you told me I was doing a movie and I had to shoot tomorrow night, all night, I´d go, ´No, I go to bed at 8:30. I get up at 5:00. No, I can´t, so sorry.´ "
Midcentury modernista?
Curtis would like to invent a new way to grow older. As she nears her own half-century birthday, she hopes to steal a page from the modern design movement of the mid-20th century and become, as she says, "New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines."
Just an old-fashioned girl?
As a teenager, Jamie Lee Curtis was flat-chested and gawky. Then she grew up to be a sex symbol – but one with a brain and a happy marriage. Lesley Salisbury met the feisty star. Main photograph by Greg Gorman
Look at her. Just look at her. And this is a woman who says her best features are her eyes. Closely followed by her toes. Which will soon, if you believe her, meet her more visible assets as they obey the law of gravity. "My breasts are dropping, I´ve got cellulite in my butt and hips, I have short mousey hair and skin that breaks out. I´m like any other normal working mother just trying to keep it all together, " says Jamie Lee Curtis.
This is the Hollywood princess who never felt comfortable with the way she looked. The gawky, ugly duckling who wanted to swan around like all the other curly-haired, cute celebrity kids. She was the flat-chested schoolgirl who dreamed about fame, the teenage starlet desperate to be a big star.
And then she grew up. And out. Her spectacular statistics were highlighted in films like Trading Places, in which she was nude for seven seconds (she´s counted) and freeze-framed on video for even longer; as a figure-happy fitness instructor in Perfect and in A fish called Wanda, which had her showing her body and her vocabulary (there´s no one in Hollywood with a more colourful one) beside John Cleese and Kevin Kline.
Suddenly the ugly duckling ("Goofy", she called herself) was a sex object. And she loved it. She was that rare creature, a sex symbol with a brain and a sense of humour. She thought it was hilarious that men couldn´t look her in the eye any more (their sights were pinned lower).
"People think I blow these up or stick ´em on with Velcro", she said. But it was hard work being a body beautiful.
"I started getting into the whole obsessive body-perfect trip", she says now. "Up until Perfect I was reasonably sane about my work outs. And I did my share of drinking and illegal substances.
Then suddenly I was in the gym for five hours a day, every day. I hung upside down by hooked boots, I did hundreds of squats and sit-ups and hip thrusts. I lifted weights, I did two 90-minute aerobics classes a day, I went home and swam 50 laps. I gave up smoking and drinking and drugs. I´d eat only fish, fruit, vegetables and salad and never after 7pm. I was in bed by eight. And I was no ****ing fun...
I felt you could be loved only if you had the tightest inner thigh. I was totally obsessed by my body. I was outraged if I saw an ounce of fat. I became obsessed with my jeans fitting to skin thight perfection. Luckily, I came to my senses."
Ask her how she did it and she´ll tell you tenderly that her husband, British actor-writer Christopher Guest, and their adopted four-year-old daughter Annie were the reasons.
"We´re like Mutt and Jeff – total opposites," she says of Christopher, whose father is Lord Haden-Guest. "But we have a good marriage – not perfect, but good – and for the first time in my life I´m happy to be me. And happy to be normal, as far as someone as goofy as me can be."
"I never felt comfortable with how I looked. I still don´t I never had much of a self-image. I was never known as me, I was always Janet Leigh´s and Tony Curtis´s daughter, Queen of the Ghouls in horror movies, and The Body. Now, you know what? I´m happy to be 33, enjoying my daughter, my marriage and my career."
She has a new film, My Girl, out this month, co-starring the cute Home Alone child star Macaulay Culkin (so cute he had a swear box installed on the set and made out like a bandit every time Jamie Lee opened her mouth). She´s also very proud that her US TV series, Anything but love, is doing well, and prouder still to be directing some episodes.
"I hoped this was how my life would turn out but I never really expected it – and I took a few wrong turns on the way," she admits.
Funny, feisty and strong, she´s no one´s sex toy these days (except, perhaps, Christopher´s: walk into her bedroom in her spanish style house on the edge of Beverly Hills, past a pile of Annie´s toys, and you´ll see a pair of handcuffs by the bed. "Just for the pictures," says Jamie with a naughty gleam in her eyes). She´s a fascinating contradiction: she looks like a sex symbol, walks like a tomboy, talks a blue streak like a sea captain´s parrot, turns somersaults to amuse Annie, eats fish and chips with a passion and thinks her perfect body is, to paraphrase, a load of codswallop.
She zips around in a new Mercedes convertible with her motto – "Life Should Be A Dream, sha-boom, sha-boom" – on the licence plate and, for Jamie Lee Curtis, for now, it is.
"I´m not an exhibitionist," she says, despite the blonde-in-fishnet picture session that had her giggling and flirting ("innocent flirting helps keep a women content in a relationship," she says. "Flirt a lot. Your sexuality is like a volcano – you should let the stream out sometimes") and sent her home to Christopher with a smile.
But she still enjoys being a sex symbol from time to time. And while there still is time. "It´s fun while it lasts," she says. "The important thing is that I´m secure enough now to realise that it doesn´t last. After 30, everything starts going south. I used to say that one day I´d wake up not caring whether or not I had the best, cutest little ass in Hollywood, and I´d order a great big piece of chocolate cake and let somebody else take over having the cute body. Well, I´ve been eating that cake for some time now." And – since someone´s got to say it – she´s having it too...
Jamie Lee Curtis now Lady Haden-Guest
Introduces us to her two children at her L.A. home and talks about adoption and the aristocracy
You can call her Jamie Lee Curtis, or, quite properly, Lady Haden-Guest, courtesy of her marriage to British actor Christopher Guest, who last year became the Fifth Baron Haden-Guest of Saling, Essex. And if celebrity is indeed a close cousin of aristocracy, Jamie Lee, daughter of not one but two Hollywood legends – Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh – is almost to the manner born.
The 38-year-old star of A fish called Wanda and True Lies views her new status in British society with nothing short of complete respect. She takes it all quite seriously. Tradionally, Jamie Lee has been refreshingly free of airs and graces, and that has not changed now that she has a title. She answers her own front door and, in a close-fitting black sweater and pants, looks quite simply stunning.
She, her actor/writer/director husband of 13 years and their children, Annie, 11 and Thomas, not yet two, commute between Los Angeles, their work base, and Idaho, their getaway. If Lord Guest is desperately, passionately, perhaps mildly fanatically private, Jamie is only marginally less so – especially when it comes to protecting their children. But for herself, she knows some attention is essential and she is affable, relaxed and accommodation when HELLO! visits her wood-beam ceilinged, Spanish-style LA home, where crisp Pacific Ocean breezes waft through lots of open windows. Strains of Van Morrison drift through the house, as do four dogs and a friendly grey cat.
That desire is what prompted her to write her whimsically illustrated children´s book, Tell me again about the night I was born. Just published in Britain by Scholastic (£9,99), it is her second book but her first to be released in Britain. Its predecessor, When I was little &ndah; A Four Year Old´s Memoir Of Her Youth, will be out next year. Today I Feel Silly and Where do Ballons Go? are in works. And Virus, a sci-fi thriller, is soon to be published.
A true Hollywood veteran, Jamie justifiably considers herself used to dealing with the media.Yet she is positively itching to address what she considers a blunder she made last year when her father-in-law died just three weeks after Thomas was born.
"My family was in shock, we were in deep mourning and I had a new baby to look after," she explains. Only because she was obligated did she speak to reporters about a film, but she did so with a heavy heart. And one overly zealous reporter, hell-bent on getting her reaction to becoming Baroness Haden-Guest, really got to her. In frustration, Jamie retorted that the title would get her a good table at Claridge´s. She instandy regretted the flip remark, which has since been reprinted ad infinitum, and is anxious to correct her record.
"Nobody addresses me as Lady Guest anywhere except perhaps in the House of Lords. It´s what they do there – and it´s probably the only place in the world where anyone will address me in that manner even if I say to them, " Oh no no no, just call me Jamie."
Why does your little remark about getting a table at Claridge´s bother you so much?
"It shows no respect for the institution to which my husband recently swore an oath. He proclaimed his allegiance to an institution that I have tremendous respect for, and if I read that comment, I´d say, Who the bleep does she think she is!"
"And it´s not like me. I´m a serious person. I´m not a flippant person who makes some cheap comment to get a laugh. It was literally made on the heels of my father-in-law´s death and it really bothers me now."
How do you feel about the House of Lords perhaps disappearing?
"It seems to me that Tony Blair was elected with the agenda of clearly reforming the way it operates, whether that means abolishing the voting rights of hereditary peers or abolishing the House of Lords. I´m not sure what he intends or what the Queen intends, so until we have a clear idea it would be stupid of me to comment.
Was the ceremony impressive?
"It was a very quick oath-taking ceremony, which I almost missed simply because I happened to be so in awe of being in this beautiful room! I fully assumed that the event would be announced and I was trying to find my seat along the wall in the upper tier at the time. I happened to look right and there was Chris standing at the podium, his hand was in the air, and then it was over! It took maybe ten or 15 seconds, then he was able to take this seat on the cross-benchers and we watched a little bit of a debade.
"I was with Annie and Chris´ mother and I was very aware that it must have been very difficult day for his mother – and yet also a wonderful day in that her son was taking his seat. Then I was thinking about my daughter and what it meant for her to be there with her daddy. And then there were my own feelings of How did I get here? And, because I´m a very puplic figure, I was trying not to draw any attention to the fact that I was there. So I kind of shrunk. It was a complicated day, but it went off beautifully."
"No. I don´t fantasise. I´m not a dreamer, really. I´m much more of a realist. Always have been, since I was little.
Why write about adoption, since you consider it such a personal and private issue?
"It really was born out of many people´s misunderstanding of my daughter´s life and how we became a family. I respecht Annie´s privacy and felt odd writing a book about adoption which was obviously based on the experience of our family, but at the same time keeping our family history very private. It was a complicated balanced act.
"It´s a book which is really written to open people´s eyes and ears and hearts and minds to something that most people still talk about in hushed voices. The story has never been told in a humourous and celeratory way before. I´m tremendously proud of my books – they´re the closest things to who I am as a human being. It is my sensibility. It is how I look at the world.
Why do you hate the word "adopted" preceding "daugther"?
"I think it´s a label, a way of separating a child from its family, a way of somehow taking something away from being like any other family."
Doesn´t it signify special people who´ve extended themselves to offer a child a home?
"No. I don´t look at us as being special people, I look at us as being parents who, for whatever reason, have chosen to adopt. I look at all parents as special. I respect all people who decide their lives to their children. I just don´t think that adopting a child is any more heroic than giving birth to a child.
Do you see adopted children as somehow chosen?
"I have very specific feelings about the term chosen one. I know that people like it, or certainly they did in the past. It was a safe haven for talking aabout adoption because nobody wants to use the term a child who was given away. That´s the truth, though. The truth is that another mother chose to give a child to you to raise because she could not care for it.
"I don´t believe it´s my right to say, I chose you, honey, therefore you´re special. I think it´s too complicated a relationship. Also, I think it´s wrong to assume that adoption is without heartache.
"I wrote my book so that another child won´t drive in a car with an adoptive child and mother and say – as I´ve had happen to me – She´s not your real mom, is she? Which, no matter how innocent the question, is hurtful.
"I´m not an adoption activist, I´m an advocate. And I´m using a personal experience hopefully to help open that up. Period. I´m not on the hill lobbying for legislation, although I could imagine that when my children are grown up I will become very public spokesperson for removing even more of the discriminations. I don´t choose to do that now."
"The people giving up a child and those adopting one share a common human being, so to pretend that the birth mother doesn´t exist and is in some sort of closed file is, to me, just not enlightened. It was very important for me to be open. I truly believe in the goodness of people. My fame has never been something I have hidden from.
"There´s story after story of horrific adoptive experiences, yet, I was having a complicated, but very positive and fulfilling, experience with my husband and – because I didn´t have my son yet – my daughter. I believed there should be a celebration here and that´s why I wrote the book.
"I asked my daughter her permission and she thought it was a good thing. Both books are a story of her life, althought facts have been changed. And I hope that people in those books being about her makes her feel good, not bad."
How did Annie react to having a little brother?
"Probably the same as every other ten-year-old when a new baby is brought into the house. There is a mixture of excitement, bewilderment, jealousy, great love and connection. I think there´s a combination of all of that going on in my family.
"One of the thrilling aspects of adopting a child, as well as one of the most difficult, is that it often happens very quickly, as was the case with my son. In a way, the gestation process occurs after a child has been born and everyone in the family goes through a change, which is a difficult time. It´s difficult to have a new baby in the house. It´s to difficult when you didn´t know there was going to be a baby a week before."
"The only disappointment I´ll talk about publicly about not going through childbirth was missing the unbelievable love and affection you get from the world around you, and the delicacy with which people treat woman who are about to give birth. I have particpated in this lovefest with many, many women.
"But when you´re an adoptive mother, no one knows that you´re about to become a mother. No one understands that you´re going through the exact same fears about the health of the child, about your ability to be a parent, about the changes in your life and marriage, the changes with your other child, the financial restraints, the Do I have enough room in my house? sort of worries.
"Every pregnant woman has nine months to deal with those problems, while adoptive mothers often have no time. That´s small price to pay for the joy I´ve never talked about. For me, it was significant."
You were talking about breather from work when Tom came along...
"I´d decided that I´d take a significant amount of time off after Fierce Creatures. I´d saved some money and it seemed like Annie really could use time with me in a way that we hadn´t had. I also needed the time with her – she was developing so fast and I felt I was missing to lot. I didn´t like it and made a choice. Luckily I had the financial means. It was 18 months and, during that period, it was a case of then there were four!"
Would you do another TV series after Anything But Love?
"Today! Right now! I´m very happy that I´ve been able to participate in every area of acting that I´ve ever wanted to, in a fairly successful way. I´ve had very varied jobs and I´m not a snob – I don´t think that True Lies is necessarily betten than my Hertz commercials.
"Also, I think the horror movies I did were wonderful. I´m going to do another one to mark the 20th anniversary of my first film ever – it has to come out on October 31, 1998, 20 years to the day after Halloween appeared. Why not?"
"If we play our cards right it will be pretty scary because, of course, there´s a revisit. The horror movie market is really strong again and I thought doing this sequel was a way to be respectful to the audience who gave me my career to begin with – and a career I´m very proud of. I had a really good time doing those films."
Do you entertain much at home?
"No. For somebody as loud as I am, I´m really quiet. I write children´s books and take pictures and raise two kids."quot;
Do you see much of your family?
"Yes. I saw my father this weekend and we had a great time with Tom. We see my mother weekly. She lives close, my dad lives close. One of my sisters lives here, my brother lives here with his baby, my sister Kelly lives in New York City, so I don´t see her as much. We have a normal, busy, scattered but close family."
Despite being enormously famous, you seem to manage to live so normally.
"I´m recognised a lot more thatn I ever ackhowledge. I don´t even see it. I´m reminded of it by people but I don´t see it. I also don´t draw a lot of attention to myself. I don´t attend a lot of premieres. I have been married for a long time, so I´m not out in public dating people. We travel privately. I don´t go to places where there are hordes of people waiting to take pictures. I choose to avoid that. I live a very private life.
"The day my husband took his seat in the House of Lords was a private day, obviously. A private moment. A lone guy on a motorcycle pulled up and said, My paper would really like a photograph of you, I promise I won´t jump you, would it be okay? I asked Chris and Annie and we said, Okay.
"Dodi Fayed was a very, very good friend of my father´s. His father is also a very good friend of my father´s and I knew Dodi socially with my dad. I woundn´t be able to handle that kind of intrusion in my personal life. I don´t know how I would deal with something like that. It´s just the worst."
Did Diana, Princess of Wales touch your life?
"What was inspiring for me was that she discovered her own mind. I didn´t follow her every move but I was aware of the discovery of her mind and the ability to say what she felt. She´s been called an icon for unhappy women and I understand the reference, but rather than that she represented someone who changed, who discovered that she had opinions. That is something I have taken from this horrible experience. It made me think twice before I shut my mouth. I am actually a lot less opinionated than people might think, and it really has given me some strength to pipe up a bit.
"I´ve thought about Diana often. I, like the rest of the world, have thought about her children. I wrote and extraordinary public display of affection for his big sister. It made me call my sisters and brothers and make that connection. In the simplest of terms, he stood up for his big sister. And it moved the world."
Jamie Lee Curtis on scream
Twenty years after she first starred in Halloween Jamie Lee Curtis is back
She has been famous since she was born. But when she sashayed that amazing figure through the scarier moments of Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis became an instant star.
Two decades on, as she prepares to star in a new version of Halloween alongside her mother, Janet Leigh, she´s a women who really has got it all.
First, there´s an impressive list of movies which took her from the horror genre of Prom Night and Terror Train, through sexpots with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd in Trading Places and John Cleese and Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, to fast-paced comedy with Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies. She has a happy marriage that has lasted for 14 years, and two children she adores. She also has a new career as an author.
The Queen of Scream, as she was once dubbed, will be 40 on November 22. And she has decided that the screaming is going to stop – and her real life is going to take over.
"I really am at the end of my movie career," she says. "I´m 40 this year, and we´re talking about the big screen."
She knows what she´s talking about. As the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh she saw the fame game from her earliest days – and learnt to cope.
"I´m really proud of myself right now," she says. "I´m at a good place in my life. I´m an emotional wreck, to be perfectly honest, but I´ve created this very strong woman to get through my career, because you have to be strong to get through in showbusiness. I think I´m really brave as an actor – I don´t have any training but I have never shied away from trying something, even if I might literally fall flat on my face."
The woman whom Hollywood christened The Body is keeping her curves covered up when we meet at the famous Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. She´s wearing a simple, mauve twin set and black trousers and plonks herself down in one of the hotel´s large and very luxurious chairs. "quot;Look at this – a Scream Queen throne!" she giggles.
There´s no screaming in her life away from the cameras, however. She and her husband, the comedian, actor and director Christopher Guest, dote on their two adopted children – Annie, 11, and two-year-old Tom.
I think motherhood is a very profound experience," she says. "It´s very hard for women to articulate what it is that makes it so worthwhile, but I do know that is has completed me.
"It has enabled me to find real happiness and the ability to go out into the world and try anything, knowing that I´ll always have my family.
"I have amazing good fortune and I´m really happy.
"My daughter is an amazing person. Annie is 11 and she´s Buddhist, a vegan and a diehard debater.
"I have a wonderful opportunity now to get to know someone in a way that is different from the relationship I had with my folks. I think I was pretty complacent as a child, but now I havve a very challenging daughter. I think she´s going to be a remarkable woman, somebody who I am going to be really excited to know.
"And then I have a baby boy and it´s wild. It´s just an amazing, deep connection to a person that I´ve never felt with anybody before. I have never been in a better state of mind."
The fact that she now has that most English of status symbols – a title – is merely the icing on the cake. But nevertheless she is officially Lady Haden-Guest of Saling, ever since her 50-year-old husband inherited the peerage when his father, Lord Peter Haden-Guest, died in April 1996, aged 82. Jamie Lee and Annie were in the gallery when Christopher took his oath at the House of Lords last year.
"I take it seriously – I take everything in my life seriously," says the new Lady.
"When I´m in England, obviously that´s my title now. When I go to the House of Lords the guard says, Good evening, Lady Haden-Guest. I tried saying, Just call me Jamie, but it didn´t go over very well. He went, Yes, MLady. I guess I just have to eccept it and try to be gracious about it."
She breakes into a laugh that lights up her face as the incongruity of being an English aristocrat hits her.
"I am the daughter of a Hungarian-Jewish emigre family and a very poor Danish family from Stockton, California. Their daughter is now Lady Haden-Guest. It´s an astonishing bit of fate to arrive on my doorstep."
Tony Curtis (real name Bernard Schwartz) and Janet Leigh (Jeanette Helen Morrison) divorced, when Jamie Lee was four, and she was raised mainly by her mother. Both parents have been married four times and Curtis, 73, has been in a realtionship for the past five years with 28-year-old Jill Vander Berg. Jamie Lee approves. " They´re very much in love,", she says. "They make each other very happy."
She says her 72-year-old mother is still beautiful. The two drove together to a recent film festival in San Diego, California, to support a movie starring Jamie Lee´s sister Kelly, who is two years older. "It was fun to have that drive with my mom and spend that time alone with her," she says. But she has had other chances to be close to her mother – because, for only the second time in her career, they are acting alongside one another. The first time was in The Fog in 1980. This time it´s in H20 – which stands for Halloween 20 years on. The films opens here on Friday. It picks up the story of Laurie Strode, the babysitter who survived her brother Michael Myers´ murderous rampage in the original horror film.
The 1978 Halloween was made for a shoestring £180,000 – in 1998 Jamie Lee is paid ten times that amount to star in it again."It´s my way of writing a 20-year thank-you note to the fans, to the genre, who gave me everything I have in my life,´ she says.
Her mother, who starred in the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho nearly 40 years ago, has a cameo role in H20.
"We knew that having my mother in the movie would be a great idea, but I resisted it because I didn´t think the part was right," Jamie Lee says. "I said, Make it worthwhile, make it clever and smart and funny and emotional and then, yeah, I´ll call her up.
"I knew that if they wrote the scenes correctly for my mother the fans would be thrilled to see the two icons of this genre, that it would be an unprecedented moment in film history." At one point, Janet has to tell her real-life daughter: "We all have bad things happen to us." After the showerscene in Psycho, she knows all about it.
"Just thinking about it makes me laugh," says Jamie Lee.
In H20, Laurie Strode has changed her name to Keri Tate, is divorced, a closet alcoholic and is headmistress of an exclusive Californian school, where her 17-year-old son, John (newcomer Josh Hartnett), is a student. When the entire student body boards tuses to go on a Halloween camping trip, John and three friends secretly remain behind. And that´s when the dreaded Micheal Myers suddenly shows up."I thought we had an opportunity to show what happens to somebody when this type of violence has been perpetrated on them," says Jamie Lee.
"Laurie Strode is supposed to be a survivor, but she´s not – she is a human train wreck because of what happened to her. It´s not just a make-a-lot-of-money horror movie, but a movie with integrity, depth and pathos. That was the only way I´d come back.
"Women have survived a lot of monsters, if you will, and I really do look at it as a metaphor for facing trauma, be it alcohol problems, drug problems, abusive relationships, unfaithful marriages, obesity or homosexuality. It sounds heavy-handed, I understand, and I have been criticised a couple of times by people saying, "Oh, please, it´s a horror movie, stop trying to make it poetry,. But you know what? This is the pitch I gave at every writers´ meeting."
The H20 cast-list includes Adam Arkin, Dr Aaron Shutt in Chicago Hope, rap star LL Cool J, Michelle Williams from Dawson´s Creek, Joseph Gordon-Levitt from Third Rock From The Sun, Adam Hann-Byrd and Jodi Lynn O´Keefe."It´s fun to work with young people because they´ll going to be famous and I´m going to be able to say, You know, I played his mother once, says Jamie Lee.
She has also been involved in a TV movie called Nicholas´ Gift, which has already been screened in the US. She plays Maggie Green, the mother of sever-year-old Nicholas Green, who was shot by bandits while riding in the back seat of a car during a family holiday in Italy in September, 1994.
Nicholas, from Accrington, Lancashire, was left brain-dead, and his parents created world headlines when, in the midst of their grief, they decided to donate his organs.
Since the movie was completed, 24-year-old Maria Bettino, who was given Nicholas´ liver, has given birth to a baby boy – whom she named after "this little angel who allowed me to live again", Veteran English actor Alan Bates plays Nicholas´s father, Reg. So will these two contrasting roles be Jamie Lee´s screen swansong? Despite what she says, it is difficult to imagine her settling down to domesticity. But her third children´s book, called Today I feel silly (And Other Moods That Made My Day) has just been published... and she couldn´t be more fulfilled.
"My books come directly from me – from my head, from my heart, my soul, the way I look at the world, my sense of humour," she says. "I think that maybe for the first time I am seen and heard as an artist in a way that I´ll never be seen and heard as an actor. "I have no idea why I landed on children´s books. But my parents divorced when I was four and I imagine it unsettled me, so I think I can appeal to four-year-olds as some sort of sister in the struggle."
But will Jamie Lee Curtis ever stop struggling? Will H20 convince her that it is time that the screaming stopped? Only time will tell.
Jamie Lee Curtis Embraces the F-Word (No, Not That One)
Jamie Lee Curtis Turns 50
Jamie Lee Curtis sits in the dining room of a house in Malibu being primped and powdered for her MORE cover shoot. Her silvery gray hair, cropped close to the scalp, needs little attention, so her stylist, Sean, is entertaining everyone instead. He informs Curtis that he´s keeping a journal of his dreams.
"Am I in it?"Sean nods yes."What was I wearing?""Not much," he replies.They laugh.
Accepting the reality of your body is verboten in Los Angeles, but Curtis is famous for it. In 2002, she posed for MORE in her skivvies and became a spokesperson for women tired of trying to live up to a Photoshopped ideal. Today Curtis admits that she got so caught up in not caring about body image at that time that she stopped thinking about fitness. "So I made a change and lost some weight," she says. "And for me, the fun thing is to lift a 20-pound weight in the gym and think, I was carrying that around?" She´s taken up Pilates and tennis. "I´m competitive now. You get me on a tennis court, I´m going to give you some game."
Hers is a philosophy that resonates for many women, but it is especially meaningful to actresses struggling with the indignities of Hollywood. "I don´t want to be 60 and getting a call from a third assistant director telling me I have night shooting," Curtis says. "I don´t want to worry about what I look like, whether I´ve got my big boobies pouring out of a gown.
"I have watched, my whole life, people age and become buffoons," she adds. "When you crest in your 30s or 40s and then you don´t pull out of the public eye, you become a caricature. You have to have grace, dignity, and gratitude, and walk away kind of slowly, like you´re walking away from a bear." She mimics someone doing that: "´I´m going to go now, bear. Don´t kill me, don´t rip my fucking face off.´"
The next day, I head to Curtis´s home, eager to hear more about her freedom. She lives in Santa Monica with her husband of 23 years, actor-filmmaker Christopher Guest (Best in Show, For Your Consideration), and their son, Tom, 12. Their daughter, Annie, 21, is away at college. The house is white and airy, with sky-high ceilings and art by renowned photographers on the walls, and Curtis proposes a tour. She leads me first to the basement, where she has clearly exercised the organizational skills that friends say she inherited from her mother, actress Janet Leigh. (Curtis´s pal Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, screenwriter of Bee Season, was at Leigh´s funeral, in 2004, and says, "I remember Jamie standing up and saying, ´Janet planned her funeral. Even the order in which things were supposed to happen.´")
In the basement, transparent boxes are piled high. There is luggage hanging from the ceiling and a gift-wrapping area with pink and blue ribbon dangling on hooks. Curtis opens an impeccably arranged file cabinet and says, "If you asked to see a picture of me from The Heidi Chronicles, I would be able to pull that up for you." And like a magician, she produces just that.
Soon we settle into Curtis´s office. Dressed in black and white – she has pared down her wardrobe to those colors alone – she leans back in a chair. I´m not sure where to begin; even though I´ve read through 25 years of her press clippings, I don´t yet have a good sense of her. There are the milestones, of course: born to Leigh and actor Tony Curtis and showcased as an infant on a Photoplay cover; her stint as Hollywood´s "scream queen," starting with 1978´s Halloween; her years as The Body; in 1988, her emergence with A Fish Called Wanda as an accomplished comedienne. But it´s not apparent how she went from a young woman playing the Hollywood game to a mature woman rewriting its rules.
Curtis says her parents´ divorce, when she was nearly 4, was "a catastrophe for me. But I had no way of communicating that. In my home, you did not say ´boo.´ It was a very old-school upbringing in that way." She felt insecure in those years, the daughter of stars valued for their appearance and who valued appearance themselves. "I was intimidated by anyone who had beauty and intellect," she says. Even as an adult, she has joked in speeches about the fact that her combined SAT scores were 840. She fishes them out of a drawer and shows them to me.
There was one bright spot, in eighth-grade U.S. history. "I was giving an oral report about Paul Revere´s ride," she recalls. "I went in the bathroom and put on green tights, a green leotard, and little antennae. I walked into the classroom, and everybody turned and looked at me. I went, ´Hi, I´m a flea. I was on the horse that Paul Revere rode.´ And I told the story from the point of view of the flea. The teacher gave me an A-plus, and that was the only time in my academic life where I found my way of doing it."
Curtis has a new film, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, coming out this fall, in which a pampered pooch gets lost in, yes, the mean streets of Mexico. But these days her children´s books are her main creative focus. Her eighth, Big Words for Little People, hits stores in September. "When I started writing books, I never thought, wow, this is going to be a great way to make a living," she says. "I merely found a voice and a way to express it, and I was thrilled. I could´ve paid them."
She seems to. Curtis has worked diligently in recent years to free herself of superficial concerns – streamlining her wardrobe, weaning herself from high heels – but there has been a deeper transformation too. I ask her to explain how she got to where she is at 50. "Well, I´ve had the benefit of psychoanalysis," she says. But there seems to be more, and when I press a bit, she adds, "Sobriety. It´s the single most important thing I´ve ever done. When you gain sobriety in the middle of your life, you´re really reborn."
For years, off and on, "I had a problem with drugs and alcohol," she says. When she was 35, after complications from plastic surgery under her eyes, she started taking painkillers. "The feeling I got from [the pills] was, oh, wow, I feel better," she says. "So I rode that. No one knew. Chris didn´t have a clue."
By the time she was 40, she was ready to quit. At a New Year´s Eve dinner, her friends proposed they each write a list of things they hoped for themselves in the coming year. Sobriety topped Curtis´s list. She points to a framed two-by-four-inch piece of paper on her desk – she still has that New Year´s note.
She has delved more deeply into the writing of her children´s books and further developed a passion for photography. "We go walking in Santa Monica with our Leicas," says Diana Walker, who took the F-word pictures of Curtis for this article, "and Jamie can see things I can´t see. She´s like a laser." To celebrate her 50th birthday, Curtis is creating a book of her photos to give to friends.
One of her pals is California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, her costar in 1994´s True Lies, and she tells a story that illustrates how friendship in Hollywood can be both long-term and casual. "The other day I´m sitting in the back of my car doing needlepoint, and my phone rings and it´s Arnold, saying" – she breaks into her best Ah-nuld accent – "´I saw you on Oprah, and I want you to know you were terrific, honey.´ It was like, ´Thanks, Arnold. You good?´ ´Yeah.´ ´You´re doing a great job. Bye.´ That was the phone call."
As for what´s next, "I´m hoping that 50 and beyond is about reading and studying and learning," she says. "But I also hope that it´s relaxing and enjoying and participating without it being all about me. I´m not going to become a media conglomerate. I´ve opened myself up for some scrutiny, and now I want my private life." She looks out at the yard and smiles.
On a cool Tuesday evening, Curtis greets me at her front door and welcomes me to a dinner party with a dozen of her girlfriends. Kelly is there, as are Foner Gyllenhaal and Walker and several mothers from Tom´s school. Curtis flits from kitchen to dining room, stopping every so often to hug a friend and praise her work. "I feel sorry for people who don´t know Jamie," says her mother-in-law, Jean Guest.
Mint-and-rosemary lamb chops, giant asparagus, brown rice, and a salad have been laid out buffet style, and Curtis tosses out witticisms as the guests dig in. "This is for the women with hot flashes!" she says, opening a window. Talk meanders from American Idol to Marlene Dietrich´s old pad on Park Avenue in New York, which Curtis rented years ago. "I was dating her grandson, Michael Riva," she confides. "She had a platform bed in a room entirely filled with smoked mirrors."
After a few hours of merriment, we all wind down and Curtis announces she is off to bed. She will be getting up at the crack of dawn, as she does every day in this season of her life. She has – perhaps now more than ever – things to do.
