A few celebrities kept showing up on the cover of Movieline magazine every couple of years. Why? Because they gave good interview. Drew Barrymore did six covers for the magazine between 1992 and 2003. This is the first of those interviews from the Young Hollywood Issue. At the time, Barrymore was staging a comeback after years of being known as a troubled, hard-partying child actor. In this interview, Barrymore dishes on the casting directors who mocked her, the rivals who took all the good parts, the father figure who abandoned her and her then-current crush.

Barrymore starts out by reliving one of her real-life nightmares for me. “I walked into that audition and the casting director just sat there laughing,” she recalls. Apparently this woman didn’t even bother to hide her disdain for the kid who had seemed to metamorphose overnight from America’s sweetheart star of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial into a troubled, boozy, cokey, bloated tabloid princess.

Drew tells me she could almost hear the casting director’s unspoken digs. In fact, smiling venomously at me in imitation of the powerful Burbank bitch exec, she utters out loud what were silent slurs that awful day: ‘”I can’t believe you have the balls to walk into this audition, Little Miss Drug Addict. Right, like we’re really going to give you this job.'”

After a few beats, Drew shakes off the memory. For an instant, she looks almost disoriented, surprised to be sitting across from me in a funky Mexican restaurant. It’s a great moment, beautifully played: She’s one of those vintage movie dames snapping out of a harrowing flashback sequence in a show biz biopic about a career gone haywire. Call it I’ll Cry Again Tomorrow, say, or Love Me or Leave Me II. “I was blacklisted, bigtime,” she says, throwing back her head to blow a perfect row of smoke rings to heaven.

“I had two, three years of casting directors telling me I’d never work again in this town. Even after I’d do a good audition, they copped an attitude like ‘Well, you’re not going to get this film, but you’re not as bad as we thought you were gonna be.’ That shit only made me angrier, made me put that much more into my work. But I’m a little termite. You cannot get rid of me. I am a person without pride, someone who will do what it takes to get a film. I swore to all those people who made me eat it: Someday, you’ll want me. And, through pure ambition, I showed those sons of bitches that I can do it. Success is the best revenge in the world. And I’m back.”

Drew did have somewhere to come back from. When she wasn’t starring in such movies as Firestarter, Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye, or Irreconcilable Differences, she was, very much in the tradition of her illustrious grandfather John, great-uncle Lionel, and great-aunt Ethel, swilling champagne. That was at age nine. At 10 she was out clubbing with her attractive mother and smoking pot. By 12 it was coke. She attempted suicide at 14. Thereafter came the trips in and out of rehab for addiction problems. And, when the gossip papers blew her cover, she cowrote . heart-wrenching memoir, Little Girl Lost, that became a New York Times bestseller. It was certainly enough to make a casting director snicker.

These days, though, it’s Barrymore who’s doing the laughing. With starring roles in three new movies due this year–Poison Ivy, Guncrazy, and Sketch Artist (for Showtime)–the sons of bitches are asking her to read for parts. No wonder. For starters, there are her looks. With a Cupid’s bow mouth painted a singular shade of umber, skin like bone china and dreamy blonde locks, she is nothing short of a lollapalooza. When she strides across the room to replenish her stash of Marlboros, every patron in the joint swivels his head in awe. The girl can’t help it. She covers her face when I ask how it feels to lay an entire room to waste and says, “I’ve never been one of those people who looks in the mirror and goes, ‘Hey, foxy, you’ve got it goin’ on.’

But, in the middle of doing Poison Ivy, the whole industry was saying, ‘You gotta see Drew Barrymore. She’s got a decent bod, she’s pretty, she’s got long blonde hair, she can act, and she knows how to shake it.’ I was very flattered, on the one hand; on the other, I wasn’t, because I immediately got offered every overboard sexy role around. So, when I was getting ready for my second audition on Guncrazy–in which the girl is going to find cool because she’s so uncool–I thought: ‘What if I’m just sexy with all the hair? And what if the producers think I can’t do the role because I have long hair?’ So, I took scissors and cut it all off.”

Barrymore needn’t have worried. What she’s got, scissors won’t touch. If you haven’t caught her act since the cute, sullen poppet years, brace yourself. In Poison Ivy, out next month, she hauls the ashes of 58-year-old Tom Skerritt on the hood of a red Corvette, helps Cheryl Ladd do a fatal swan dive off a balcony, and, for a rip-roaring finale, deep-tongues Sara Gilbert, the “Roseanne” daughter. The releasing studio describes it as “Lolita meets Fatal Attraction.” Barrymore sells it better. “I mean, in most movies, it’s like ‘Ooooooh, did you hear she takes off her top in it?'” she says, clasping her mouth and batting her lashes in mock horror. “Well, we cross so many boundaries in this little number, it’s going to shock the shit out of America.”

And what attracted her to the piece that she calls “a total art film”? “It says on the first page of the script that Ivy, my character, has a tattoo of a crucifix with ivy growing through it,” she explains, rising slowly from her seat, sliding her right leg across the table, lifting the hem of her skirt and dropping her ankle into my hand. On it is the very same tattoo. “It symbolizes pain, death, life and love,” she says, laughing throatily, very Lola in The Blue Angel, pretending to ignore the rapt attention she’s attracting from onlookers as she sits back down. “I figured it was meant to be. Besides, it’s every girl’s fantasy to be that person who walks into a room, awes everybody with her presence, and can manipulate any person with the blink of an eye.”

When I tell Drew that her Ivy had guys howling like Arsenio Hall groupies at a marketing screening I attended, she says, “Tell me more,” vamping over the table, at once betraying and satirizing the insecure kid she used to be. When she was puffed-up and drugged-out, she tells me, she used to torture herself by plastering her walls with stupendously gorgeous poses of model Paulina Porizkova. Some of those old “Am I a pretty girl, Mama?” wounds must have reopened when her Poison Ivy producers hired a body double for one of the movie’s four sex scenes in which appear big, fat closeups of breasts.

“Those breasts are not mine,” she announces, cupping her hands over her mouth, and leaning into my tape recorder.” I was a little nervous about doing it in the first place and the company just felt it would be better. Those shots were only supposed to be for European distribution, so I thought: no problem. But now they’re in both versions and, well, no offense to the girl, but I have prettier boobs than she does. I’m pretty bummed that America’s gonna think those are mine.”

Still, the things that are indisputably Barrymore’s in the movie may set America’s collective jaw agape. I mean, how will audiences cotton to seeing their little Gertie grinding and grinding and grinding her bad-girl high heels into the crotch of Skerritt’s pleated trousers? And the spontaneous combustion she created playing one of Stephen King’s creations was a brush-fire compared to the scene in which, buck-naked, she and Skerritt (a long way from Alien and Top Gun) merrily engage in a position you’ll find in no safe sex manual. “All that grunting, grinding, crotch-rubbing, that’s all me,” she says, ice-cool, laughing, between noshes on a cheese burrito.

It’s also all Drew in the kiss scene with Sara Gilbert that had guys at the preview I attended slumping down in their seats.” Sara and I are really close friends and both adventurous girls,” she says, grinning slyly, letting the innuendo ring around our table. “The director was paranoid to ask me and Sara to do the kiss, but we were like, ‘So, what’s wrong with that? Lots of girls kiss, you know.’ I got totally excited about doing it, thinking, ‘We’re going to shock every man in the audience to pieces.’ After a couple of takes, the director said, ‘I have a really hard time asking this, but could you get more into it?’

Next take, I took Sara’s face in my hands and started licking her lips and suddenly she opened her mouth and I stuck my tongue in. A full tongue, major kiss. And the crew went wide-eyed. I mean, I don’t know a lot of actresses who would stick their tongue down another girl’s mouth on-screen, do you? When the director asked for another take, we went at it even more and I could feel the crew cringing. Sara and I watched the playback on the monitor, we were like: ‘Oh, my God, that’s us kissing and it’s hot.’ Two women kissing–and I don’t think any man will disagree with me–is the ultimate fantasy.” She takes an old time movie star-type drag on her cigarette and drawls like a bull dyke from a women’s prison movie, “I suppose now I’ll walk into auditions and it’ll be like, ‘Check out this lesbian.'”

Barrymore, who once donned boy’s drag for a magazine photo spread and who cuts a dashing figure in the vintage men’s suits she sports around town, can throw off sophisticated, androgynous heat worthy of Marlene Dietrich. Now, anyone who’s read a tabloid or newsweekly in the last five years knows her history of rifling through such young lads as both sons of Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, one of the De Laurentiis kids, Corey Haim, Corey Feldman and Leland Hayward, with whom she lived for almost a year. She’s even sent a very favorably-received mash note to Jason Priestley.

But could she ever see herself being with a woman?” I mean, I loooove men,” she observes, spewing more smoke rings. “I’m utterly fascinated by them. But I think I’m even more fascinated by women because I’ll never truly understand a man. I can totally see how women fall in love with women because it’s like exploring yourself. I’ve wished sometimes that I could be a man, so I could take a woman. I don’t know if that’s why I’m always in men’s clothes. I really have a male mentality. Sometimes my mother says I was really meant to be a boy–that it starts from my name and goes to the clothes, right through to my whole mental outlook.”

Such candor might help explain why Barrymore, who calls herself “a very old soul with a young heart,” and such important figureheads in her life as Steven Spielberg, her forever young, forever presexual godfather, may have come to a fork in the road. More about him later. It’s near midnight now and Barrymore, racing us down streets in her new black BMW, is talking about the importance of family to her. In her book, Little Girl Lost, she poignantly describes growing close to her movie coworkers but, then, when the productions ended “being torn from them without any consideration of how much I needed their companionship.” It’s easy to read her life as a search for parenting. When she mentions William Hurt, with whom she made Altered States, her first movie, she says he was “like a father to me.”

George C. Scott and Martin Sheen on Firestarter were “uncles.” Ryan O’Neal (whom she loved) and Shelley Long (whom she didn’t) on Irreconcilable Differences were like “nightmare parents, who constantly fought.”

Right now, though, Barrymore is talking about her real father. We’re zipping along in her car, bucking stinging cold headwinds, and, though I take it she usually pays little attention to such details as red lights (we’ve run two) and stop signs (who’s counting?), her driving betrays her runaway emotions. John Drew Barrymore–the handsome, volatile son of the greatest Hamlet of his day, who was also the star of Grand Hotel and Twentieth Century–began an abortive movie career in 1950 while still in his teens, and later landed in jail for drunken driving and marijuana possession. Though Drew’s mother Ildiko left him before she was born, Drew as a tot suffered at her father’s hands–like the time he hurled her against a wall. For years, Drew and her father didn’t speak. Clearly, it’s taken a lot of therapy for her to admit, “In a flash, I can be an incredibly sour person for all the stuff I’ve had to go through at such a young age–for all the pain I got from my father, with whom I’ve had an impossible battle my whole life.”

As Drew drives, her gaze darts toward tumble-down, beat-looking street people huddling in doorways, hunkered down under cardboard. “Sometimes, I can’t even hold a conversation with him because he’s so out in the ether, you know? Since I was born, he’s never worn shoes because, in the planet he’s on, intelligent people know not to wear shoes. He has actually gone into another dimension and stays there. You cannot go to his level and he will not invite you in. He’s out somewhere, crazy, with blue eyes that just suck you in, riding around barefoot with a torn-up duffel bag on a little bicycle. I sometimes wonder where I got all my shit from, until I think for one second of his name or his face. Then, I no longer wonder.”

For three weeks now, her father hasn’t returned her calls–which she must first channel through a friend. “On the one hand, it’s really hurting me on the level of ‘Why isn’t my Daddy calling me back?’ On another level, I’m like ‘John, what’s up? Why are you fucking dicking me around?'” But she has something urgent to say to him. “I know that he isn’t going to be around for much longer,” she says, haltingly. “On the one hand, that makes me feel like I should totally distance myself from him. On the other hand, I want to be as close to my father as possible. You know, for so long after my grandfather died, I beat myself over the head that I did not get the chance to truly tell him one last time that I loved him. I don’t feel that it’s important for me to tell my father, ‘You’ve totally fucked up my life. Bye. See ya.’ But as crazy as he is, when you say something to him from the heart, in time it will register. I just want to say something simple: ‘You’re my father. I love you.'”

It’s early morning, and we’re sharing a table in one of those storefront coffeehouses that have sprung up around Hollywood like stripmalls. A woman at a nearby table is feeding two-buck croissants to a mangy Chihuahua on her lap; a guy in a Sufi turban is muttering four-letter words to his laptop computer as he works on a script. Barrymore wants to talk about her godfather, Steven Spielberg. “I’ve only seen him maybe three times in the past eight months,” she says of the director whose E.T. made her a star, as she slicks back her hair, eyes hard and shiny.

“Growing up, I practically lived at his beach house. He was the only person I considered to be my father figure, the only man that was ever close to me the whole time I was growing up. Before his first child, Max, was born, he said: ‘You’ll always be my first child.’ Now that I’m older, we’re not as close and it’s a hard pain I have to deal with. I’ve gotten older and it’s incredibly hard for him to accept. I walked into his office a couple of months ago wearing red lipstick and he made me take it off right there. On the one hand, I’m like: This is my father. I can’t say no to him. On the other hand, I got really angry and wanted to stand up once and for all and say, ‘I have grown up. I wear red lipstick. It’s my style.’

I looked at his picture recently on a magazine cover at the newsstand and started crying because it doesn’t feel like he’s my father anymore. And this is a man I would have done anything for, who felt like the one person I could really depend on. It’s hard because I love him so much.” Her anguish over the relationship is palpable. She takes minutes to regain her composure.

Suddenly Drew says she wants to switch topics. We don’t succeed, really, but she doesn’t seem to realize that. Not at first. She tells me about auditions, how she hates them and how, as a kid, she went up for and lost Annie, just as, more recently, she was passed over for Heathers, Great Balls of Fire!, Cry-Baby, Edward Scissorhands, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Cape Fear–four of which she lost to Winona Ryder. “When I was growing up, I was one step behind her while she was getting everything,” she says.

“When she got Great Balls of Fire! and she was 18 years old playing 13, I was like, ‘I’m 13. So, why I’ve watched other actresses take parts right out of my hands because they’re older. You can’t help hating your competition and any actress who says they don’t get jealous is lying. I mean, people think Julia Roberts is so wonderful because she’s tall and pretty and all she does is shake her ass and smile. Believe me, I can shake my ass real well and lots of us have decent smiles. I’m sure people get pissed when I beat them out of things, but, when you don’t lie, you think: ‘That bitch.'”

Barrymore gets so riled up about the career moves of one of her rivals that she… well, let her tell it. “There was one actress in particular whom I could not stand,” she says quietly, of one of the hottest women in town. “Anytime I saw her, anytime she got a role, I hated her. I wanted to kill her. The time and energy I spent on hating this person was ridiculous. I was in Hawaii and I picked up a rock and pictured it as being her. I said, ‘Fuck you. I hate you. I’m so jealous of you. I wish I had what you have sometimes. But you’re you and I’m me.’ I threw the rock into the ocean. I mean, how stupid is that? But, you know, I’ve never had a resentment against this girl since.” Not even when she snags good roles? “Well,” she says, blushing, “that rock does keep bobbing up, that’s for sure.”

Warming to her theme of fellow actors, and still sticking with the surreal, she tells me about doing her Showtime movie, Sketch Artist, co-starring Sean Young, whom she describes as “fucking honest and brutal.” Within minutes, she will use the exact words to describe her own mother. “I hadn’t even met Sean when I heard that she gave the director her pantyhose,” says Barrymore, whose boyfriend of six months that director happened to be. “I was like, ‘What? How dare this woman give my boyfriend her fucking pantyhose.’ It’s her tradition to do that on the first day shooting all her movies. But it didn’t bother me ’cause she was so whacko, so fucking honest and brutal, that she should wear a suit of armor. She’s bitchy, totally arrogant, full of herself, but you know what? Those are her true colors and she lets them shine through.”

Perhaps Barrymore recognized in Young some of the best qualities of her mother, Ildiko, a striking actress-painter better known as “Jaid,” who raised her reading Lolita instead of Where the Red Fern Grows, and grooving on Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and James Taylor instead of “Sesame Street,” and who once acted as her manager. “Kids I knew from school had little white bedspreads and Holly Hobby pictures on their walls,” she says. “I had up a picture of Jim Morrison naked with love beads. I grew up thinking, ‘I’m totally retarded. I don’t relate to anybody.’ Now, I appreciate my incredibly different upbringing. Nothing was exciting to me and I was always out for excitement. I still am. And it’s gotten me into trouble.”

And how. Barrymore is no more anxious to dredge up the details of her wild past than I am to hear them. You could, as they say, look it up, because she’s written about them in her autobiography. Still I wonder, in the aftermath of all that, how she feels the press has treated her mother, who let her dress like a model when she was in prepuberty, who took her dancing at Helena’s and the China Club, who left her at the homes of friends who offered her dope. The damning headlines said it all: “Drew Barrymore Dancing at Two A.M. Shouldn’t She Be in Bed?” “Drew Barrymore Cocaine Addict at Twelve Years Old.” “Barrymore Burns Out in Teens.” And worse.

“My mother is an incredible, powerful woman,” she asserts, assuming, as if on cue, a more parentally-approved posture, and not firing up another cigarette. “From what I put her through, any other woman would be totally grey and senile in a fucking wheelchair. I would have liked one of those reporters who gave her shit to have had to deal with me for a month, let alone 16 years. Most of them don’t even have kids, so they don’t know what it’s like when a kid keeps asking her mother, who is also her manager, ‘Do you love me or do you just want to make a buck off me or live your life through me?’ Or a kid who literally walks over her mother to get out the door? What would they do if their 12-year-old had come home on cocaine or their 13-year-old tried to kill herself? There was no way my mother could have stopped me. The more she tried to, the more I rebelled. She handled it in the best way she knew how. Those ways might not have always been right in the eyes of some people, but they didn’t have to be there with me. It’s pathetic when someone stands outside and judges.”

Her indignation practically rattles a roomful of cappuccino cups. “Hollywood is a town where bullshit walks and money talks,” she snaps when I ask how she would characterize the industry’s response to drug problems.

“You know what pisses me off? This bullshit facade of the ‘I’m not on drugs’ stance in the industry. Being a sober person, I can very easily get resentful of adults–whose names I will not say, but we all know who we’re talking about–being excused from a film and being put through rehab, with somebody there to cover up their shit by saying they were ‘exhausted,’ ‘sick,’ or had a ‘nervous breakdown.’ It’s very irritating for me when I know certain actors are totally fucked up on drugs and are working in movies back to back, yet it gets covered up. Why the fuck wasn’t I excused for ‘exhaustion’ or ‘the flu’? Why didn’t somebody or some company put me through rehab?”

For today, she seems to keep her demons at arm’s length. “I live in the program just like everybody else,” she says, referring to the AA-based counseling sessions at which she regularly checks in. “When I’m 80 years old, after 60 years sober,” she says, shrugging, “people are probably going to say: Drew Barrymore, ex-drug addict. It doesn’t bother me because I know I am an incredibly simple person with an amazing capacity to love. I enjoy simple things: bowling, going to the swings at parks at night with my friends, talking to myself, seeing my breath on a cold night, hugging, kissing, laughing over nothing for an hour straight, like when I ponder questions in my head like: How do those goddamn ‘M’s’ get on the M & Ms?” So how do they? “Gotcha,” she says, giggling. “No one could tell me until I found someone who had been to the factory: They spray-paint them on.”

Drew and I meet again one weekend at a hip neighborhood restaurant where patrons at nearby tables pretend not to notice perhaps the most controversial member of a Hollywood family so renowned they’ve appeared on commemorative stamps. Drew describes herself as a “total old movie freak,” ticking off such favorites as Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s–from which she reenacts scenes and imitates actors to a fare-thee-well–and letting drop that the thought of one day meeting her idol, Audrey Hepburn, might make her “start crying and bowing at her feet.” In the past weeks, when some half-dozen people have remarked on her resemblance to the young Bette Davis, another Barrymore idol, she had a dream, perhaps incited by seeing Davis win so many awards in her decline while looking like holy hell. “I had this dream that I was getting my Life Achievement Award at the Oscars,” she says, without a trace of modesty.

“I’m sitting behind the curtain watching the scenes from my movies that the audience is watching, thinking how, once, I was a sex symbol at one point in my life, and knowing that I could never be that again. I kept hearing the audience whisper ‘used to be,’ ‘used to be’–like about how pretty I was once. It terrified me. In the dream, I started crying behind the curtain and I walked out and said to the audience, ‘I’m an old woman and I’ll never be like that again.’ I woke up crying.” Although she has an early shooting call on Guncrazy the next day, she admits she’s in no hurry to leave. I ask her whether she’d like to ask me anything, and she says, laughing raucously: “Have you interviewed any cute guys recently?” I haven’t, and tell her so. She looks crestfallen. Why, I ask? It seems that things appear to be over with her boyfriend. She’s been crashing at the home of Tamra Davis, her Guncrazy director. And?

“Whenever I go out, it’s slim pickings,” she says, still hedging. Finally, she drives home her point. “See, I’ve really been in love with the same guy–an actor–for eight years. We’ve only really met twice, both times he was with other girls. I had such butterflies that I didn’t want to be like, ‘Hi, I’m in love with you. Fuck–marry me,’ so I went, ‘Hi nice to meet you,’ and walked away.” She scrunches her face and sighs out exquisite teen angst. While she’s busy doing Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, I’m guessing that the object of her obsession might be a certain dreamboat whose name was linked, until recently, with one of Barrymore’s fiercest competitors. I name him. Her eyes widen.

“How did you know?” she asks, squealing, hiding her face, nakedly, delightfully 17–every heartsick high schooler who ever carried a torch for the dishiest guy in class. “A lucky guess,” I say, meaning it, even though this guy’s name did crop up in one of her past interviews. “Six years ago, I was dumbfounded by a picture of him the size of a postage stamp in a magazine. He’d only done a small movie at the time and I was in New York, and said to my friends: ‘That’s him.’ And my friends said, ‘What? Pass the popcorn.’ And I’m like: ‘He’s gonna be so famous.’ And they go, ‘He’s not that cute. Pass the fuckin’ Jujubes,’ and I said: ‘You don’t understand. That’s the guy I’m going to marry.'”

Hearing recently that her obsession’s highly-publicized romance had gone kaput, Barrymore took matters into her own hands. “I knew he was on location for a movie, so I called every hotel in the state,” she says, adding, dispiritedly: “I never found him. But I would have taken the risk to say, ‘Hi, this is Drew. You remember me, right? Great. Good. I’m just calling to see if you wanna go out on a date.’ I would have fucking embarrassed myself, swallowed my pride just to take the chance that he wouldn’t have said, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ Click. I have all these feelings for him and I don’t really know him. I ask my friends all the time if they’ve seen him around. I read every interview on him and he’s so sweet, so nice. I was even bugging the Movieline photographer today, ‘Are you shooting him soon?’ Oh, I am soooooooo crazy about him.”

In the end, she shrugs it off and reapplies a fresh coat of lipstick. “So far, the only thing that’s been compatible between me and every actor I have met is a fucking mirror.” After a moment, she confides, “You see, I have a problem with men. I’m obsessed with them, completely wrapped up in them, and six months later, I want nothing to do with them. And I just sit there in my shit, crying and talking to God: ‘Why have I lost this feeling?’ It’s devastating to me.”

With her career train back on track, Barrymore may yet build up the momentum she’ll need to realize her pet project, I’m With the Band, that ’60s rock groupie memoir written by her pal, Pamela Des Barres. She also wants to direct a movie in Europe. What’ll it be like? “Controversial,” she says, shutting her eyes, smiling, as if envisioning new ways to shock the shit out of America, then adding: “Not because I try to be, but because whatever I end up doing becomes controversial.” And, as an actress, she longs to play “a real bad girl, but one that you idolize–like Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success, who was powerful and just made people swallow it.” But it isn’t career moves that will truly make, and keep, little Drew happy at last.

“There’s this house I dream of owning in Brentwood that I’ve loved ever since I was little. It’s a cottage, not a mansion, with a big grassy area for a lamb, a horse, and ducks. Big things have never interested me. I’m a little person; I like little things. One night, it’ll be raining at that house on my field of daisies, and my loved one will be kissing me and I’ll feel the warmth of his hands on my face. Then, I’ll know that I have lived.”

_____________

Stephen Rebello interviewed Sharon Stone for last month’s cover story.

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