Flower Power: True Drew

TheImproper.com's Honie Stevens chats with the down-to-earth actress.

NEW YORK (TheImproper.com)--With a string of acclaimed romantic comedy hits and action adventures to her credit, Drew Barrymore has emerged as a veritable showbiz powerhouse. Once a child star who gained notoriety for her prepubescent imbibing, she now runs Flower Films, producing blockbusters like the “Charlie’s Angels” franchise, “50 First Dates” and “Fever Pitch.”

“I started Flower Films 10 years ago with Nancy Jovonen in the laundry room of my home in Los Angeles. And it is in this decade that I have found I’ve been the happiest and most productive in my whole life,” Drew declares, albeit in a soft-spoken voice. “My 20s was about producing and acting, and I’m determined to challenge myself now that I’m in my 30s and take all of it higher. I think that the older I get the better I get and whatever - like gravity or wrinkles or anything – is nothing compared to the wisdom inside my head and heart. There’s plenty of work out there to be had.”

Drew’s movie is “Lucky You,” a contemporary dramedy that explores the red-hot poker phenomenon. Written by Oscar-winner Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) and meticulously directed by Curtis Hanson (“8 Mile,” “L.A. Confidential”), the story is set in the world of high-stakes professional poker. Drew plays a struggling lounge singer whose older sister (Debra Messing) is dating a poker whiz (Eric Bana) as he deals with his estranged father (Robert Duvall) at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Not surprisingly, Drew soon becomes the pivotal emotional influence in his life.

“It’s kind of about how the skills that serve one well at the poker table – the ability to be deceptive and hide your emotions and have no mercy on your opponents – are the exact opposite of the skills that one needs to be successful in human relationships,” Curtis Hanson noted to Vogue magazine. “What will be arresting for people when they see this movie is (Drew’s) total womanliness that I don’t think we’ve seen before. The complexity that I think is unique to Drew is that she projects an innocence that is extremely engaging and likable and, at the same time, you feel that those eyes see the truth. In an odd way, it is something she even projected when she was six in ‘E.T.”.

“One of my goals is to work with film-makers that I really admire,” Drew explains, “and Curtis Hanson is the epitome of an incredible director. He’s completely inexhaustible. Whenever I’m with Curtis I feel like I’m in the right place. He’s so special in that way and his films reflect that. There really is an old-fashioned gracefulness to his work, a type of filmmaking that is very hard to find nowadays.”

What may surprise her longtime fans is that Drew has learned to sing. “I’m the worst singer in the world,” she says. “I break glass. I upset people.” Nevertheless, encouraged by Hanson, she worked with several vocal coaches and then trained, diligently practicing every day, for six months. On-screen, she fearlessly warbles a Waylon Jennings country tune and two George Jones songs.

Drew also lent her voice to the animated film “Curious George,” an animated feature based on the children’s book about the world’s most adorable little monkey, as well as the recently revived “Family Guy” TV series.

“I did ‘Curious George’ because I really like doing voice work,” she says. “I’m like the female lead, and love interest, to Will Ferrell’s Man in the Yellow Hat, as he tries to save the fledgling museum he works at. It was just a tremendous opportunity. I called (“Family Guy” creator) Seth McFarlane to interview him for a documentary about voting that I directed. We became friends, and I was like, ‘Can I please be on ‘Family Guy’? So I’ve been going into the booth there and doing work. I really actually enjoy that.”

Off-screen, Drew lives in a two-story, mid-century ranch home, actually a 1.5 acre compound with spectacular views from downtown L.A. to the Pacific Ocean. There’s the cheerfully decorated, four-bedroom main house with its own motor court and a two-story living room, plus a guest house and a guard house that’s staffed full-time. The lavish, $4.5 million estate, estimated to have about 9,000 square feet of living space, also has a gym, five fireplaces and a billiard room with a bar. The capacious yard is filled with winding pathways and cultivated gardens.

But Drew splits her time between Los Angeles and Manhattan, because her longtime boyfriend, Brazilian-born Fabrizio Moretti, drummer for the rock band, the Strokes, calls home his cozy, one-bedroom, $675,000 condo with 12-foot ceilings in the American Felt Building on East 13th Street in the East Village.

“I love him, so I just go back and forth,” she shrugs. “These are the lives we chose. We go to the airport together.”

Drew met “Feb” or “Fabby,” as she calls him, backstage at a 2002 California rock festival and they’ve been together ever since. “He was just as attracted to her as she was to him,” confides an actor friend. “Ever since that first date, they have been inseparable.” Indeed, he often accompanies her when she attends public functions, softly murmuring “bellissimo!” in her ear and making her feel beautiful and desirable.

In an unusually candid interview with Jane magazine, Moretti confessed, “I had sex (with Drew) in the bathroom at the opera a little while ago, in New York. We went to ‘La Boheme’ and it was wicked boring. So we decided to go to the bathroom, and we got caught, and it was embarrassing. If we’d gone to the men’s room, people would’ve heard it and said, ‘Good on you, man.’ But we were in the ladies’ room, and when we heard an old woman start to tinkle, we couldn’t help but crack up. I guess she told the security guy – and he came in and was, like, ‘Just go.’”

Gleefully known as a goofball, Drew recently poked fun at her braless Golden Globes wardrobe malfunction on TV’s trendy “Saturday Night Live,” when she appeared unannounced wearing huge fake breasts just after comedienne Tina Fey joked that the buxom actress had arrived “with two Golden Globes of her own.”

“I can’t believe you guys are making fun of me. Don’t you know it’s not cool to make jokes about women’s bodies?” she quipped. “You guys are supposed to be feminists and you’re supposed to be pro-lady. I am totally disappointed in you.”

Drew elicited more laughs as she prodded one of her huge breasts into Weekend Update anchor Amy Poehler’s face and hung another over Fey’s shoulder. The comedy newswomen then agreed to a truce with Barrymore – by shaking her false breasts. Actually, Drew had planned to be in the audience because Fabrizio Moretti was scheduled to perform with The Strokes there that night.

With an awesome theatrical heritage, Dew was born in Culver City, California, on February 22, 1975, as Hollywood Royalty. She is the granddaughter of John Barrymore and the grand-niece of Ethel Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore.

“I never knew my grandfather,” she admits, “but he is my moon, my stars. He watches over me and is my guardian. I worship my grandfather to an insane degree. I’m either his reincarnation or he’s waiting. He won’t pass on to the next plane until he knows I’m OK. I sense his need to touch and feel everything and take it in with passion and emotion and tears.”

Drew appeared in a Puppy Chow commercial at 11 months and made her screen debut at age three as William Hurt’s daughter in Ken Russell’s “Altered States.” She then catapulted to stardom as cherubic Gertie in Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial,” followed by Charles Shyer’s “Irreconcilable Differences” and Stephen King horror stories “Firestarter” and “Cat’s Eye.” But the pressure led to the drug and alcohol abuse, which she chronicled in her harrowing 1990 autobiography, “Little Girl Lost.”

“I’m proud that I survived those teenage years,” she says. “I experimented. I was young, and it was public. But if it hadn’t happened, I don’t know that I would have the priorities that I do now.”

Drew endured a difficult childhood, often estranged from her alcoholic father, the late John Barrymore Jr., and her sometime actress mother Jaid. Her parents had split before she was born. At age 15, she became a legally emancipated adult, severing ties with both and moving into her own apartment. But when she discovered her 72 year-old father, who had a sporadic film career in the 1950s (“The Big Night,” “While The City Sleeps”) and was reported to be living like a hermit or beggar, was battling a rare form of bone marrow cancer, she reached out to him, emotionally and financially.

“My dad was a cool cat. His passing definitely made me go, ‘You’ve got to let bygones be bygones,’” she told USA Today. “It just made me have a more open mind and an open heart. It matured me.”

Since her father’s death in 2004, Drew has reconciled with her volatile mother, who once tried, unsuccessfully, to auction off her daughter’s baby clothes, the red cowboy hat she wore in “E.T.” and other family mementos, including a Christmas card sent by Jack Nicholson, over the Internet.

Turning 30 also made Drew contemplate her life. “It made me want to look at myself and see what behavior I wanted to bring into my 30s and what I wanted to leave in my 20s,” she mused to People. “Because I’m such a people-pleaser and from an unstable background, I translate too many things into guilt – and I’m ready to let go of that.”

Hopefully, her resolve will help her combat persistent insomnia, the sleep-depriving disorder that has plagued her for years. “I’m getting older so those dark circles are really starting to show,” she says. “Before, it was just evident like inside in the feeling. Now I’m starting to look like ‘The Night of the Living Dead.’ I sit there at, like, four in the morning, and I’m like, ‘Why can’t I sleep? Why?’ I guess I’m just nuts. I’m a workaholic. The only thing that calms me is reading. My greatest tool is a book. When I read, even if it is for two hours, eventually, I will get to sleep.”

And perhaps, in the future, her romantic life will cease to resemble her rocky childhood. She was married to Welsh pub-owner Jeremy Thomas for a little over a month. She went with actor Luke Wilson for a couple of years, then was married for five months to Canadian comedian Tom Green. Her other beaus have included Eric Erlandson and Jamie Walters.

“I have problems with trust. I know that,” Drew admits. “My therapist said, ‘When the people who are supposed to introduce you to trust are not there, you have a problem finding trust the rest of your life.’ I totally get that. It’s just like walking into a classroom and there’s no teacher. You’ve got to figure it out for yourself, and it takes ten times longer. It’s our parents’ responsibility to teach us the fundamental things.”

Never mincing words. Drew has been outspoken in areas about which she feels strongly. One is celebrity adopters, like Nicole Kidman, Diane Keaton and Calista Flockhart. Drew has expressed her doubt about these stars’ altruism, fearing they may be avoiding natural births because of the unpleasant physical consequences.

“Do you think they do it because of their bodies?” she asked WENN rhetorically. “That’s so f***ed up. I would never adopt because I was vain.”

Sometime in the future, “when I’m really selfless,” Drew plans to have a family of her own, insisting “I still think that if I wait a little bit longer, I’ll be better suited to the job.”

Drew has lashed out at reports that she was thrown out of a baseball game last season following her rude and drunken behavior, claiming her accusers were repeatedly photographing her, Moretti and a group of friends who were sitting in a luxury box at Shea Stadium in Queens, trying to watch a New York Mets game.

The New York Post ran a story that Drew was allegedly drinking and smoking “like a chimney” so the people near her asked the security guard to tell her to put out her cigarette because there were young children present. “Suddenly she stormed into our suite with a lit cigarette and berated one of my friends in front of his young daughter for taking a picture of her. Thankfully, one of the stadium staff kicked her out of our box,” Michael Delvecchio told the Page Six gossip columnists.

“The family who made this claim were constantly taking pictures of me. And I politely asked them to stop, so that the people I was with would not be bothered,” Drew retorted. “And now they are making claims about my behavior, which is outrageous. This family obviously has a chip on their shoulders and another thought should not be wasted on this.”

That’s not the only harassment Drew has suffered recently. A 43 year-old Santa Cruz man, who allegedly became obsessed with her 17 years ago, has been charged in a federal court in California with sending her threatening letters with fake anthrax spores because Drew would not respond to his many messages.

Paul Charles Steeves was previously accused of sending white-powder-filled letters to an FBI office as well as a drug-rehabilitation center. The white powder was apparently intended to spark fear that the letters carried the deadly anthrax microbes. Local law enforcement, fire officials and the FBI’s hazardous-materials investigations team responded when they were summoned, and tests later showed that the white powder was actually harmless Arm & Hammer baking soda.

As part of her truth-telling, Drew also admits she “loathes” reality television, refusing to watch it, and she’s really bad at returning phone calls. On a positive note, Drew is a vegetarian (“I don’t eat meat, fish or dairy.”) who believes in astrology, yoga and psychology, referring to “Annie Hall’ as her favorite movie of all time.

“I believe in fate. I believe that everything happens for a reason, but I think it’s important to seek out that reason. That’s how you learn,” she says. “I think that you probably experience many lifetimes, and I know that each reincarnation counts. I’m lucky to have experienced what I have.”

Another area of concern to Drew is the agony she suffered during her teenage years. “I was very awkward growing up, especially physically. I was short (5’4”) and I really didn’t know how to move my body. I had braces on my teeth and was overweight, really uncomfortable with myself,” she told Teen People. “Once I went up to a boy with all of these girls who I thought were my friends but who were really setting me up. They covered my eyes as I told the boy I really liked him – and they all made fun of me while my eyes were closed. I ran away humiliated. But (experiencing) that moment made me realize that you have to go after what you want and be willing to tell people how you feel. If you like somebody, express it. There’s nothing wrong with taking that risk. It’s almost like you need that to build character – even though it’s painful to go through it.”

Now an acknowledged Hollywood beauty, Drew has signed a lucrative deal to be the new face of Italian fashion house Missoni. Several months ago, reporters spotted her on a shoot on the Spanish island of Ibiza as a part of Missoni’s spring advertising campaign. Drew was posing for celebrated snappers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot. Previous modeling contracts have linked her to Guess clothing and the cosmetic house Lancome, as well as posing nude for Playboy magazine in 1995.

“No more ‘Playboy.’” Drew laughs. “No more standing on (Dave) Letterman’s desk on television and revealing myself. I don’t regret any of it. I’m just past it.”

Looking to the future, Drew has bought the rights to former “Sex and the City” writers Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo’s popular relationship self-help book, “He’s Just Not That Into You: the No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys” with a view to turning it into a movie. She’s signed both Behrendt and Tuccillo to pen the screenplay, which will be produced by her Flower Films company, although she has no plans to actually star in the project.

Instead, she’s ready to go to work as Hugh Grant’s latest love interest in a romantic comedy from “Two Weeks Notice” writer/director Marc Lawrence. In the film, titled “Music and Lyrics,” the duo will play songwriters who fall in love while collaborating on a music project. Shooting starts the end of March in New York City. Drew’s salary is now $15 million per movie, making her the fourth highest-paid actress in Hollywood, ranking behind Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon.

As for another “Charlie’s Angels,” Drew says, “I would love to do a third. I know Cameron (Diaz), Lucy (Liu) and I would all sign up if there was, but there are no plans in the works at the moment. All three of us hang out all the time anyway, so we might as well be filming it.”

And more than 25 years after the original, Drew would love to reprise Gertie Elliot, now grown-up, in an “E.T.” project but only if Steven Spielberg would oversee it. “Drew has spoken to Steven about it,” a Hollywood insider says, “Although he thought she was joking at first, he’s actually giving it serious thought. Drew feels the world needs another feel-good movie like ‘E.T.’ right now, and she’s prepared to work with Steven to make it happen.”

While declining to comment on the “E.T.” sequel idea, Steven Spielberg still marvels at Drew’s talent: “Drew has been part of my life for most of her life. She is a dynamo who has gone from ‘E.T.’ to entrepreneur with barely a moment to catch her breath. Like her company name, she personifies the best sense of flower power.”

http://theimproper.com/Template_Article.aspx?IssueId=3&ArticleId=1108