When she walks through West Hollywood's Cafe La Boheme on a Friday night,
the customers gawk. At one table, a man cocks his thumb in her direction,
pointing her out to his companions. At the next, a woman stops mid-bite,
puts down her fork and whispers to her party. Across the room, heads turn
and fingers point. There's a strange, palpable buzz.
In a town where studied indifference is usually the reaction of choice
when big stars walk among us, Calista Flockhart inspires something else
completely. Maybe it" says Greg Germann, who plays the proudly loutish
Richard Fish on Ally McBeal. "The obvious things are that she's really
talented, she's beautiful, and she's in this show that's edgy and somewhat
controversial. And she is Ally McBeal, so the controversy tends to flow
around her." He pauses and adds: "It's a curious thing. We went to the
Super Bowl together and needed bodyguards to get us out the back door of
this party."
Tonight, things are considerably calmer. Flockhart settles into a secluded
booth, shrus," she concedes, "when it's a bit inhibiting, and you feel
invaded--no matter what you do, it's going to be twisted. But in some sick
way, maybe it's flattering. God forbid the day I walk out of a restaurant
and nobody's taking my picture and I get depressed." She laughs. "Then
I'd be in trouble."
It's unlikely Flockhart will confront this danger anytime soon. Ally McBeal
has settled in for a long run as one of the pop culture litmus tests of
the day, and Flockhart is now costarring as the comically lovelorn Helena
in a sprightly, luminous film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed
by Michael Hoffman (One Fine Day). Flockhart shares the enchanted Tuscan
wood with the likes of Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Stanley Tucci and
Rupert Everett.
Hoffman, familiar with Flockhart's stage work, had never even seen Ally
McBeal. "I cast her because she's a very gifted actress who has a remarkable
facility with the language," he says. "I didn't even understand that she
meant anything at the box office."
This movie marks a crucial move for Flockhart, a way to dilute the public's
intense identification of her with Ally McBeal. People assume, she says,
that she, too, must be ditsy, needy, confused about life and love. The
tabloid innuendos that swirl around her--that she's anorexic, that she
had an affair with McBeal creator David E. Kelley, or, oops, maybe it was
one of the show's other producers, Jeffrey Kramer--further paint her as
stressed, jittery and fragile.
But the woman perusing the menu tonight is far more forthright and fun
than her image suggests. She laughs at the overly solicitous staff and
jokes that "I have so many boyfriends in the tabloids, I always say that
I live vicariously through my rumors." This dismissal is as close as she'll
come to discussing the myriad rumors about her love life, which lately
have linked her with Ben Stiller. She hums quietly to herself and jiggles
her leg under the table, but little about her is ditsy or quirky.
"The last thing Calista is, is fragile," says Germann. "Between the pressure
of the show and all the tabloid stuff--with a lesser, more fragile person,
we would have been on hiatus a long time ago. But we're still working.
I think she gets tagged as being fragile because she's a woman, and she
doesn't have the typical physical frame that a lot of other starlets might
have. It's a sort of physical prejudice that says because of the way she
looks, she must be fragile. I think, actually, the way she looks has made
her incredibly tough." Still, it's impossible to look at her, exceptionally
thin as she is, and completely dismiss those rumors. Flockhart washes down
a lean but healthful meal of seaweed salad and grilled ahi with a glass
of merlot, asks for butter instead of olive oil for her bread and finishes
her tuna without complaint, even though the kitchen added a black pepper
sauce she'd requested they serve on the side. But when she looks at the
empty plate, says she already ate dinner on the McBeal set and adds, "Wow,
I had two dinners tonight--I guess I was hungrier than I thought," it's
clearly time to address those anorexia rumors.
"When it first started happening, I was shocked," she says of the talk.
"I took it personally, my feelings were hurt, and I didn't understand why
everybody was being so mean to me, why everybody hated me. And after about
a week, I realized that they don't know me, so it has nothing to do with
me. But I've been really angry about it, I've felt that people have been
incredibly irresponsible, and I often wonder about accountability. And
it's been frightening, because it's potentially damaging to my career,
and to Ally McBeal."
She shrugs. "Ultimately, I do believe that the truth prevails and these
things die out, because people discover that it's not true. But it's vulgar
and twisted and perverse. Accusing somebody of having a disease is fundamentally
wrong."
And don't try to convince her that this kind of scrutiny is simply the
price of fame. "People like to say, 'Well, you wanted it,'" she snaps.
"And that's a very unfair thing to say. You don't know what I wanted. You
don't know me. Nobody knows what I wanted."
Then again, Flockhart herself isn't entirely sure what she wanted. Born
in Freeport, Illinois (she won't say when, but most reports put her at
34), the only daughter of a Kraft Foods executive and a schoolteacher,
she was raised in Iowa, Minnesota and finally New Jersey. She was a cheerleader
in high school and didn't pursue acting until after she'd graduated from
Rutgers University in 1987. Asked what her aspirations were at the time,
she says, "That's impossible to answer. I feel very comfortable onstage,
and I have a passion for it. There's something really rewarding about communicating
and hoping that you can reach people. There are times when you think, This
is frivolous, it's all about me, why am I doing this? But ultimately, people
need to escape. I love to go to movies to escape from my life, to see that
other people are going through the same things that I am, and I don't feel
so alone."
After moving to New York in the late '80s, Flockhart worked at several
small theater companies and made her stage debut alongside William Hurt
in the drama Beside Herself. She first appeared on Broadway playing Laura
in a 1994 production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and costarred
with Jeanne Tripplehorn, Amy Irving and Lili Taylor in Chekhov's The Three
Sisters in 1996.
Director Mike Nichols, another theater vet, cast her in his film The Birdcage
that same year. She played a drug addict in Jane Doe, a straight-to-video
caper due for release in June. And then producer-writer Kelley came calling
with an offer for a TV show--but Flockhart, who had grave doubts about
leaving the stage for television, kept turning him down without even reading
the script. "I was busy rehearsing for Three Sisters," she says, "but every
time I turned around, they had called back. And finally I sat down and
read it, and I saw this opportunity. It's about a woman--she's the protagonist--and
her inner thoughts, and it's emotional, and it can be pretty much whatever
I want it to be. It's this huge playing field full of contradictions and
complexities. But then there was the reality of, What if it goes? So the
entire cast of Three Sisters spent a weekend deciding whether I was going
to fly out to L.A. to audition."
In certain ways, she says, it was a huge decision. "And in other ways,
I felt . . ." She trails off. "I was really tired of being poor. It's very
difficult to make a living in the theater, and I was so sick to death of
living hand to mouth. I thought, What do you have to lose?"
Two seasons later, she's still looking to squeeze a return to the stage
into her McBeal hiatus. Last summer, she went to Italy to film A Midsummer
Night's Dream. It didn't give her much time off, and she was relentlessly
carsick on the winding roads of Tuscany, but she didn't mind. "It felt
like time off," she says. "Doing Shakespeare, in a movie, with that cast,
in Italy--it was pretty perfect." (Unfortunately, she and Kline only overlapped
for half a day, and Pfeiffer, who is married to Kelley, had gone home before
Flockhart got to the set.)
As Helena, who relentlessly pursues--on bicycle--the uninterested Demetrius
until some fairies work their magic, Flockhart even learned to appreciate
a play that had always struck her as "frivolous and silly and dumb." Now
she sees a different side of the work: "You have to go in and know that
anything goes and not look at it with a realistic eye," she says. "But
I think there's an intrinsically dark side to it. Helena is obsessed with
Demetrius. If you look at it in our modern world, with all the 12-step
programs and codependency and obsession, she's classifiable. Demetrius
is abusive, and she just keeps going back for more; she says, 'Treat me
like your dog.' I thought that she's just really smart--she has this special
sense and knows that Demetrius really loves her. But him being a boy and
all, she has to wait for him to come around." After the plates are cleared
away, Flockhart checks the pockets of her blue jeans. "Oh, no," she says.
"I'm gonna have to borrow money for my parking. Do you have three dollars?"
As it turns out, I have only enough cash to pay for my own parking. "How
did I manage that?" she moans, as we scrape together as much change as
we can. "I changed my jeans at the last minute and left my money in the
other pocket. What does one do in a situation like this? Beg? Or do dishes?"
Well, I say, I don't think they'll make you do any dishes. "But they'll
write about it," she says, laughing. "They'll say, 'She went to a restaurant
without any money! That's proof she's anorexic!'" She calls the waiter
over. "Remember when you put the sauce on my fish?" she asks. "Well, now
you have to loan me two dollars for parking."
"That's a pretty good trade," he responds. "This is good, because you're
punishing me." He goes off to find a couple of ones; while she waits for
him to return, Flockhart considers the risks inherent in significantly
stepping away from the part that's made her the object of strangers' stares.
"I think it's getting easier to get beyond a television role," she says
quietly. "Certainly Helen Hunt has done it, and other people. You just
have to trust that it will be okay, that people are open-minded enough."
Hoffman is convinced she can make the transition. "I don't know whether
a long time on a television show really damages an actor with overexposure,"
he says. "My sense with Calista is that she'll have chances to do other
things. She's a wonderful comedienne, she's got the chops to be a great
dramatic actress, and I think she's got a lot of ability as a character
actress. I'd love to see her as a villain--as a vulnerable, airy creature
who is in fact capable of tremendous evil."
Flockhart absently fiddles with the handful of quarters in front of her,
hums softly to herself, then looks up. "I've been thinking a lot about
what it's like to play the same part for 10 months at a time," she says.
"It's very . . . strange. I think they've actually done studies on the
psychological effects on actors playing the same part for a long period
of time. I don't know what the conclusion was. It probably said that they
go insane and have identity crises." Flockhart laughs. "That hasn't happened
to me yet," she says. "I keep saying that when my mother calls me Ally,
then I'm in trouble. And so far, she hasn't."