Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

  Like Van Sant, Luhrmann calls Kidman an ally. Recalling the Moulin Rouge shoot, which took place over nine months in Sydney, he says, “She never showed anything but absolute belief in the film, which I’ve got to say is one of the defining qualities of Nicole. She is absolutely at her best in the worst possible situations.” Little did anyone know how much she would be put to the test on this front. It was during postproduction on Moulin Rouge, sometime in February 2001, Luhrmann remembers, that he got a call from Kidman: “She said, ‘I’ve broken up with Tom’ or ‘Tom’s breaking up with me.’ She told me there were helicopters flying over the house, and she was genuinely devastated and shocked.”

  The public’s reaction to the breakup has been a lesson in how the movies and real life can converge. The timing of the marital implosion led into a period when Kidman was also in the public eye because of Moulin Rouge. The fact that in this film she died as a heroine passionately committed to her art, a victim of her time and her circumstances, carried over to the perception of her as a victim in real life—a perception to which there seems to be more than an element of truth. My conversations with Kidman about this tumultuous, painful time, which also included a miscarriage, showed her to be a woman genuinely struggling to understand why her marriage failed.

  I doubt that legalities are the only explanation for why this couple has been so respectful to each other in public. These are two people who understand good behavior and who are committed to their children’s well-being. Even though it looked at first as if they were going to land in an ugly legal battle, the couple settled out of court. Both parties have made it clear that they will not go into the nitty-gritty about what went wrong. But since their split played out publicly in such a bizarre way—with Cruise releasing cryptic tidbits to the press like “She knows why,” and Kidman seeming to be in a state of shock—one can’t help but still be curious. I asked Kidman point-blank, “Do you know why you broke up?” She said, “I’m starting to understand now. At the time I didn’t.” So I asked again, “It came as complete news?” She said yes.

  Sometimes I got the feeling she’d do anything to reverse events. But I also had the sense she knew there couldn’t have been any other outcome, in part, it seems, because of her own artistic needs. It’s not clear how these conflicted with the marriage, but what’s unusual about her, given her status as a Hollywood institution, is that she’s willing to bare the confusion, the contradictions, the regret. She told me, “I didn’t have to have a huge career. I would have liked to be able to make a To Die For occasionally and things that could stimulate me. And this makes me sad, but I still would probably choose a marriage and an intact family over my career.” When I pointed out to Kidman that the beauty of living in the 21st century for women is that, one hopes, they don’t have to choose between work and family, she replied, “But I think I had to choose. I think [the marriage] would have come down to it. I suppose it wasn’t meant to be. What I see now is a nine-year-old little girl who [the divorce] affected and I see a seven-year-old boy, and see my duty as a mother. It means for the rest of my life I have to do things to protect and help them and make it up to them. That sounds so old-fashioned and strange. I don’t know why that’s in me, but it is.”

  While it’s not unusual to worry about the kids in a divorce, Kidman is clearly wearing a kind of hair shirt; after all, she was raised as a Catholic. This leads to the role of religion in her marriage—specifically Scientology, which, as everyone knows, is Tom’s thing. When I asked Kidman about her ties to the organization, she said, “Tom is a Scientologist. I’m not. I was introduced to it by him, and I explored it. But I’m not a Scientologist. I told Tom I respect his religion. I said to him, ‘It is what you believe in, and it’s helped you.’”

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  One of the most fascinating aspects of the entire story is how intrigued people are by the couple, even those who aren’t normally into tabloid-type gossip. The marriage remains a kind of blank slate upon which we can all project our own ideas; people have floated so many theories, from unfaithfulness to the fallout from pre-nuptial agreements to who knows what. The speculation was endless—and still is. This sense of mystery goes way back: the marriage had always been surrounded by whispers about the couple’s sexuality and questions about just what kind of transactions were taking place between them.

  When I decided to face these issues directly with Nicole, she laughed at the awkwardness with which I brought them up, and then asked, “Do you want to know if I had a real marriage?” Even though I thought it was my duty as a good reporter to poke around in there, I was embarrassed by having to be so nosy. So I circled the issue of the relationship and brought up the fact that Cruise seems to call the lawyers whenever the g-word is thrown at him (and I don’t mean garter). This time, she grabbed the bull by the horns and said, in a serious tone, “Look, the marriage was real. The marriage existed because it was two people in love. It’s that simple. They’ve said I’m gay, they’ve said everyone’s gay. I personally don’t believe in doing huge lawsuits about that stuff. Tom does. That’s what he wants to do, that’s what he’s going to do. You do not tell Tom what to do. That’s it. Simple. And he’s a force to be reckoned with. I have a different approach. I don’t file lawsuits because I really don’t care. Honestly, people have said everything under the sun. I just want to do my work, raise my kids, and hopefully find somebody who I can share my life with again, or, you know, have a number of different people at different times who come into my life. I don’t know what my future is. But I really don’t care what anybody else is saying.”

  On the same day that Kidman and I had this conversation in Los Angeles, I happened to visit the producer Lynda Obst. Philip Roth’s masterpiece American Pastoral is on her plate as her next film project. Kidman’s name came up as a possible lead. Obst and I then fell easily into the inevitable who-did-what-to-whom Tom-and-Nicole conversation. Has anyone in America not had this conversation? After a minute we laughed at ourselves and Obst pulled out a copy of American Pastoral and read a passage that says it all. The subject is “other people”: You never fail to get them wrong. . . . You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. . . . The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

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  Kidman’s willingness to stay on life’s ride, even when it feels like a roller coaster, is proven. She doesn’t deny that doing so was hard at first after the marriage fell apart. She even told me a story about being so upset that she was lying on the ground in the fetal position, weeping, while her parents, who had arrived to help her get through the whole circus, were trying to make her snap to. “That’s enough now—get up!” her mother said. She did. There were other issues to deal with, such as how the divorce was going to affect her career. Kidman remembers, “At the time, it felt like the work was going to be taken away from me. I had more things that I wanted to give, do, participate in creatively, and to have had that denied prematurely would have been awful.” She saw to it that none of this happened, and she had people who were true-blue behind her. One of them is Baz Luhrmann, who spent much of the first year of the breakup’s aftermath with Kidman promoting Moulin Rouge. Luhrmann had told Kidman that, under the circumstances, he’d understand if she bowed out of the promotional duties that can make a movie live or die. Instead, she stood by him and their work as though their lives depended on it. Luhrmann recalls, “I saw her realize the motto of the film, which is ‘The show must go on.’ She absolutely embodied it
s spirit.”

  Between Moulin Rouge, The Others, and even the rather kooky thriller Birthday Girl, released last February (Kidman plays a Russian con artist with a throat-scraping, Moscow-ready accent), she made people take her seriously. As Anthony Minghella says, “Each film is so different and distinctive. They make you feel like there’s an enormously rich instrument there.” When Kidman received a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for Moulin Rouge as well as a Golden Globe nomination for The Others, one could feel how happy people were for her. She was finally getting recognition for who she was, not who she was with. It really didn’t seem to matter to her that she didn’t win a prestigious statue on Oscar night. Stepping out onto that red carpet with her sister as her date, she was a class act in a pink Chanel gown.

  When The Hours comes out this month it is bound to cause a sensation. It’s hard to imagine a finer cast of actors interpreting this remarkable book, which covers three eras—the beginning of the last century, the 1950s, and the 1990s. How appropriate that it is Kidman’s job to play Virginia Woolf at the time she was writing Mrs. Dalloway and looking for reasons to live as she struggled with thoughts of suicide. The meaning of the role is not lost on the actress. She says, “I truly believe characters come into your life at certain periods of your life for a reason, and Virginia came into my life to help me.” Her performance is nothing short of astounding. Much will be made of the aristocratic prosthetic nose she wears, which makes it difficult to recognize her. But even more amazing is the way she seems to transform herself in every possible way, from the lids of her eyes to her soulful mouth to her bony elbows to the crack in her voice, which is fragile and strong at the same time. Her portrayal of Woolf, accent and all, is so convincing it’s hard not to conflate the two women’s lives. When I told Kidman this she smiled and made reference to a scene in the movie in which Woolf is sitting on a bench at the Richmond, England, train station, having escaped what she saw as the suffocations of her country household. Her husband, Leonard, comes running up, afraid that she has tried to do herself in again. Virginia finally lets it all out. “The scene at the train station was the reason I wanted to do the film,” Kidman told me. “It is about a woman saying, ‘This isn’t what I want to be. I have the right to make choices for my life that are going to fulfill me.’ I loved Virginia. I just love when she says, ‘I’m living a life that I have no wish to live. I’m living in a town that I have no wish to live in.’”

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  These were the exact lines I had written down in the dark when I first saw The Hours. They seemed to get at the essence of what Kidman’s life has been about these last few years, a period in which she has become not just a bigger star, not just an actress who deserves to be taken seriously, but a truly daring artist. Anne Roth, the costume designer who worked with Kidman on The Hours and who with Conor O’Sullivan perfected the soon-to-be-famous nose, said it perfectly: “It is like she is in a new skin. She is on her own satellite. She is all alone out there and it’s something you want to watch. It’s as if she’s an amazing piece of art.”

  Who knows if this would have happened if she hadn’t gone through all her marital difficulties? When someone turns a potential calamity into something great we cheer. In Kidman’s case, she has moved people not only because she has done that, but also because of who she’s been. She’s shown her feelings. She’s asked for help. She hasn’t come up with a bunch of phony escorts to make her life look good. She doesn’t seem to mind that we can see that her life may be as messy and flawed as the rest of ours. She’s even been ruefully witty, as when she remarked to David Letterman, “Now I can wear heels” (a reference to the height gap between her and her ex).

  On my last night of talking to her for this article, I went over to her house in Pacific Palisades for a glass of wine. It’s the same house that she lived in with Cruise, which embarrasses Kidman. She says that her friends keep saying, “Sell it! Sell it!” but that she prefers things to be done gently, not in a rushed way. She’s proud, however, that she finally bit the bullet and got a place in Manhattan in the West Village. When I went by the house in L.A., it happened to be September 11, the anniversary. The kids had made a fire, and Kidman was sitting with them in the den watching the news on TV, a rerun of the day’s memorials and events. When it was time for them to go to bed she said, “See, everything went O.K. today. Nothing bad happened,” and turned off the TV. Relief for all of us. She came back downstairs after tucking Isabella and Connor in. We went into the living room and I noticed art, such as paintings by Ben Shahn and Milton Avery, on the walls, and photography books on the table. There was a clear sense of shared lives and interests—it felt like a home, not a set. I thought about another line from The Hours: “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” For a while.

  MERYL STREEP

  SOMETHING ABOUT MERYL

  By Leslie Bennetts | January 2010

  In one of the more curious plot twists of recent industry history, Hollywood has a new box-office queen.

  She’s certainly not new to the industry, nor is she young. While she is fabulous by any measure, she is a babe primarily by the standards of the A.A.R.P. set. For the last 30 years, she has been venerated as the best actress of her generation, and her performances have won critical raves as well as rafts of awards—but even her most ardent fans, until recently, wouldn’t have linked her name with blockbuster receipts.

  And yet at an age when women have traditionally been relegated to playing old crones, Meryl Streep has become a powerhouse at the box office. Last summer’s Julie & Julia, in which Streep played the chef Julia Child [see a profile of Child on page 168], has earned $121 million to date. November brought the release of Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s animated film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s story, which co-stars George Clooney and Streep as Mr. and Mrs. Fox. And a Christmas Day opening is scheduled for It’s Complicated, which stars Streep as the ex-wife of a cad played by Alec Baldwin, who has cheated on her, divorced her, and married a very young, very gorgeous second wife with whom he has quickly become very bored—whereupon he plunges into a torrid illicit affair with his ex, who is also being romanced by a milquetoast architect played by Steve Martin.

  “It’s incredible—I’m 60, and I’m playing the romantic lead in romantic comedies!” Streep marvels. “Bette Davis is rolling over in her grave. She was 42 when she did All About Eve, and she was 54 when she did What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”

  Audiences have already pegged It’s Complicated, directed by Nancy Meyers, as a hit and Streep’s performance as a must-see, thanks to an irresistible trailer that elicits peals of laughter when Streep’s character tells her equally middle-aged friends about her unexpected adulterous transgressions and adds, with a priceless mixture of embarrassment and pride, “Turns out I’m a bit of a slut!”

  Although her name used to be associated with such angst-ridden dramas as Sophie’s Choice, these days Streep, the recipient of two Academy Awards—as well as 15 Oscar nominations and 23 Golden Globe nominations, more than any other actor in the history of either award—can often be found in commercial crowd-pleasers that induce hilarity instead of uncontrollable sobbing. [The current tally: 21 Oscar nominations and three Academy Awards; 31 Golden Globe nominations and eight wins.]

  Mamma Mia!, the 2008 screen musical, has grossed $601 million worldwide, despite some cringe-worthy reviews (for the movie, not its much-lauded heroine) and a leading man (Pierce Brosnan) who was suitably dashing but couldn’t sing as well as he acts. The Devil Wears Prada, released the same year to widespread acclaim, has made $324 million worldwide.

  The movie business—which long assumed that success lay in making films aimed at young men—has reacted to such eye-popping numbers with bemused consternation. Many studio executives have been privately convinced that it wasn’t worth even a modest budget to make films about women, particularly older ones,
and they seem stunned that a series of movies about middle-aged women racked up such enviable grosses. “The problem isn’t just the fact that studios forget that movies about or aimed at women have an audience—they honestly don’t know how to market them,” says Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed Julie & Julia. “What they know how to market are movies aimed at teenage boys. I don’t think my movie would have been made without Meryl.”

  Streep’s success has forced Hollywood to consider a startling hypothesis: If you make movies that actually interest women, they will buy tickets to see them. “She broke the glass ceiling of an older woman being a big star—it has never, never happened before,” says Mike Nichols, who directed Streep in Silkwood, Heartburn, Postcards from the Edge, and HBO’s Angels in America. “Her crusade, at this point, is to show Hollywood how much money can be made from female-driven movies,” Entertainment Weekly commented recently.

  Although the stage version of Mamma Mia!—which was written, produced, and directed by women—has grossed more than $2 billion and been seen by more than 30 million people worldwide since opening in 1999, the movie was greeted with what might charitably be described as faint enthusiasm. “In press screenings, there are murmurs that to be singing karaoke Abba songs in a relentlessly cheerful Hollywood musical is a terrible career misstep,” The Guardian noted disdainfully. “After all, Streep is renowned for much more substantial roles.”