Happily Ever After

"I always wanted lice!" Drew Barrymore exclaims over lunch. "But I never got them - I think because I wanted them for a bad reason, which was to get out of school." A waiter brings her a quart-size glass of iced tea. His name is Tom. I know this because Barrymore makes sure to call him by name whenever he appears. "Ooh, Tom, thanks so much! Yummy!" She turns back to me and says, in the hyperbole of the young, "All I want in life is a cold drink!" She drinks and makes ecstatic "oh-uh-ahh" noises.

As she talks, Barrymore twists her chin-length blond hair around her fingers; with small bunches of it, she tickles her upper lip. "So anyway, my karma will be I'll get lice when I'm older and don't need them to get out of something," she says. "I'll have to suffer." She launches headlong into tales of allergic reactions that beset her at inopportune moments (she launches headlong into everything) - the day she met the photographer who shot her Guess jeans ads and the day she did a press junket to promote her starring role in Ever After; this summer's Cinderella movie. Both times, she was covered with hideous, like, blotches, "like a puffer fish that has acne or something," she says.

"It's like, you freak out when you see your body change so dramatically I mean, little things that are spread out over time as you get older, those I can handle. Like, my taste buds have changed? I now like jalapenos, and before I thought they were so gross! Or all of a sudden I find myself liking getting my hair done. Or the Grateful Dead! I just discovered the Grateful Dead. That song 'Shakedown Street' f---, is that a groovy song! Or I love exercise now, and I used to hate it. I couldn't imagine anything worse than having to work out and sweat and do the whole show. And now I'm like, I have to do it, I crave it. Things like this are definitely an indication that you're getting older. But severe allergic attacks spontaneously really kind of overwhelm me a lot." She sucks in a headful of iced tea. She beams at me. I have known her for five minutes.

On this August day, on a tiny restaurant patio in West Hollywood, Drew Barrymore, 23, is wearing a blue button-down shirt, beat-up khakis and clunky, funny shoes. When she's not playing with her hair, she tucks it behind her ears, each of which sports five earring holes, all empty. She smells like Ivory soap; drafts of clean air wash over me as she leans forward or sits back. She looks like a college junior -not the new kid anymore, but not quite ready to graduate. She looks like a big, happy slice of pink and yellow birthday cake. She looks, for possibly the first time in her 22-year career, her age.

As we have seen, she speaks in stream-of-consciousness sentences (she calls it her "verbal waterfall syndrome") punctuated by Cosmopolitan-style italics. But don't let that fool you. Do not make the common mistake of underestimating Drew Barrymore. The woman has a light inside her, and she lets it shine.

People love Drew Barrymore. Her old friends, her directors, her boyfriend (a young actor named Luke Wilson), her co-stars – over and over, they tell me. She's a tireless philanthropist. A sponge who soaks up information. A vegetarian, an animal-rights activist, an advocate of safe sex and optimism. "She has a little man in her," her father used to say She's adorable. Meaning: You can't not adore her. She's an honest-to-God hippie. A ball of warm, golden love.

"Drew lives in hyperdrive," says Andy Tennant, who directed her in two films, the '93 telefilm The Amy Fisher Story and Ever After. "She's a pinball, bang-bang-bang! There's so much life to live right now, today by 10. It's infectious. You start to think anything is possible."

"She is one of the very few people I know who has a sincere and self-motivated desire to give energy back to other people," says Edward Norton, who played Barrymore's boyfriend in the Woody Allen musical Everyone Says I Love You.

"She really does not have a bad bone in her body - she is non-malevolent," says Courtney Love. (Barrymore is godmother to Love's daughter, Frances.) "She's like a sister to me, somebody I would really fight to protect. And she brings that out in all sorts of people."

People who have seen Barrymore only in movies dash up to her and invite her to hear their band or meet their mom or sign their palm. It happens every day. The first time Barrymore had dinner with Carla Hacken, a senior vice president at Fox 2000, at least seven people whom Barrymore did not know approached her - "Hi, I'm a DJ and you came into my club five years ago?" "Hi, I know you love butterflies; I own a store on Robertson and we sell butterfly stuff" - because she is approachable.

"Drew was so nice to every person, so unruffled," Hacken says. "And each time, she was able to go directly back to our conversation: ‘As I was saying, my take on the script...' She handled it with such grace and poise. She was so adult."

Once, when Barrymore ducked into a McDonald's in New Jersey a waitress behind the counter burst into tears of joy. Barrymore, being Barrymore, cried right along with her.

Drew Barrymore will now discuss why she loves acting. Along the way she will set off several small explosions of truth. But you have to pay attention.

"The character I'm playing now loves chocolate, and I hate chocolate - I would rather barf than eat chocolate," Barrymore says. "But how much fun is it to play someone who loves chocolate? Or in Ever After; when I'm dealing with pain with my stepmother..." She asks her stepmother, played by Anjelica Huston, if she ever loved her, just a little, and Huston icily replies, "How can one love a pebble in one's shoe?" They did 10 or 11 takes. At the end it was Huston who burst into tears. "And, yeah," Barrymore says, "I totally think of my own life and how much I am in need to have that conversation with my own mother. And in Scream, when I was 3 years old, something really weird happened where a man tried to break into my house and I was there alone, and it changed the way I slept, forever. And Julia - oh, my God -Julia [the benign waitress from The Wedding Singer, she is the woman that I long to be. The perfect girl! She is so easy! She is so not complex! I love that!"

Barrymore has been and will be many things in her life. But she will never be not complex. She thinks too much, even about simplicity, for that.

After acting in 30 films, Barrymore is no longer eager to play (1) tragic young women in mental institutions or (2) gun toting, sex-crazed babes. She's been there, bought the T-shirt and flashed David Letterman with it. She played a manic-depressive girlfriend in Mad Love. A wanton seducer in Poison Ivy. A Wild West hooker with a mean pair of six-guns in Bad Girls. Amy Fisher.

"We used to say we had a mandate against wild-girl parts," says Nancy Juvonen, Barrymore's partner in Flower Films. "Now we just say we don't love them. Unless, of course, it's the best trailer-park slut script ever."

Barrymore and Juvonen started their company three and a half years ago with a laptop computer and a notebook full of phone numbers. They would sleep late, take a four-hour lunch, then go to a movie. After a few weeks they got a fax machine. At some point they took a cross-country Winnebago vacation and Dictaphoned themselves the whole way - movie ideas, writers they liked. "I don't know if the tapes produced any real ideas," Juvonen says, "but they made us feel like we could do it, we can make this happen."

Now they have a first-look deal with Fox 2000, a staff of five (all women) who read about 20 scripts a week, a handful of projects in development - with, it's important to note, nary a "girlfriend of" role in the bunch - and a wish list of co-stars that includes Harrison Ford, Susan Sarandon and Jim Carrey. Their offices, on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, are MTV meets Romper Room, the walls painted yellow and green and midnight blue and decorated with photos and movie posters and an amusingly large 45-rpm record of "Yellow Submarine." "I think people are shocked - no, not shocked, but reassured to see actual work going on," Juvonen says. In September they finished principal photography on their first production, Never Been Kissed. Barrymore plays Josie, a cub reporter - and former geek - who returns to high school to do an undercover story and finds herself getting caught up again in the quest to be popular.

"Three years, that's record time," insists Fox executive vice president Kevin McCormick. "The deal works because Drew knows the audience she wants to reach." (Or as Courtney Love puts it, "Drew knows her face.")

"When I first met her; I used to say she was an 8-year-old boy and a 40-year-old woman in the same body;" Juvonen says. "Now I see a mature young businesswoman who is not only looking after her own best interests [but] also has a lot of serious people asking that she look after their best interests, too. And she's doing it."

For a nerd-girl role in Never Been Kissed, the folks at Fox 2000 planned to cast yet another flat chested, buck-toothed, glasses-wearing, gangly brunette. Barrymore wouldn't let them. "It's not that, it's something else," she told McCormick, with typically imprecise precision. (Somehow Barrymore made McCormick understand what she meant: It's not merely her appearance that makes an intelligent teen-age girl feel set apart, that makes her unable to comprehend how other girls dress and talk and move and think, even though it looks so simple.) "Drew kept talking about a caterpillar who turns into a butterfly, which is a story she connects to," McCormick says. Thanks to Barrymore, the girl who got the part is a bright, thoughtful-looking blonde.

Barrymore, as we know, has a past. Her illustrious but troubled actor ancestors, including the Barrymores John (her grandfather), Ethel (great-aunt) and Lionel (great-uncle), struggled with drink and fame. For a time, Drew followed in their footsteps, getting drunk, smoking dope, doing cocaine and, finally going into rehab. It wasn't the severity of her drug use that caught everyone's attention - "There are boys working today on the A list, who are 8 million trillion times worse than Drew ever was," Love says - or the length of it, five years. It was the fact that those five years occurred between the ages of 9 and 14. It was the sight of the little blond angel from E.T. staggering around slit-eyed at 3 a.m.

Where the heck were her parents? Her father, John, an alcoholic and a drifter, left when Barrymore was a child. Her mother, Jaid, a sometime actress, took Barrymore to clubs and parties by night (Gary Busey who was on the same circuit, nicknamed Barrymore "The Badger" - she was shorter than everyone else, moved faster and darted around close to the ground) and to auditions by day. Barrymore landed her first job, a commercial, at 11 months.

Barrymore doesn't like to lay blame. Her parents had problems of their own, she says: "I learned early on that family as far as my mother and father, were not an option."

So she found her own parental figures - her godmother, Anna Strasberg, who teaches acting at the prestigious Strasberg Institute in New York, for example, and Steven Spielberg, with whom Barrymore made E.T. when she was 6 - people, she says, "who had dreams and saw them through, but didn't hurt people along the way. And that was the greatest lesson. You can make your destiny be this amazing entity but you don't have to f--- people over."

When Barrymore posed naked for the January 1995 issue of Playboy, Spielberg sent her a copy in which his effects people had super-imposed clothes onto her photos. He re-dressed her. Barrymore coos at the memory: "I love that, because it's funny and it's fatherly and it says something, but it doesn't make me feel bad."

She adopted her co-stars, too: Goldie Hawn ("the most non-bulls--- person I've ever met in my life," Barrymore says), who played her mother in Everyone Says I Love You; Whoopi Goldberg, her best friend in Boys on the Side ("If you are having a problem with a certain subject, there will be a book on your doorstep the next day"); Jeff Bridges, who played her stepfather in See You in the Morning ("That was a very bizarre time in my life: I was a little confused - a lot confused," Barrymore says. "And Jeff's kindness kept me grounded. I was 13 and like, 'What is this world all about?' and there he would be at work every day and I'd be like, 'It's all about that.’")

These days, Barrymore does not see Jaid (by choice). John occasionally resides in an apartment above Barrymore's garage – her way of helping him without harming herself. But he comes and goes without her knowledge. "At times it's painful, and at times I'm so at one with it," Barrymore says. "And that's taken me a lot of years, it's taken me a lot of therapy."

"What she's weathered informs who she is," says Laura Ziskin, president of Fox 2000. "The phrase 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger' really applies."

How does Barrymore do it? Why isn’t her trippy, happy love of life and most everything in it a tad cloying? (At one point, she actually says to me, 'It's like when you get a cold, it makes you appreciate being healthy so much," and I nod enthusiastically.)

"I can't figure it out either;" says Dean Parisot, who directed Barrymore in Home Fries, a small ($16 million), quirky romantic comedy due out this month. "I think it's that Drew genuinely likes people. She looks at you and finds something she likes, rather than something she doesn't. She had to reinvent herself, you know, and I think this is the person she wants to be."

"She is self-f---ing-made; that's what I love," Love says. "I'm harder than Drew; I'm more something - angry; maybe. It's not like I've lain down in the middle of the desert with her and gone, 'Oh, isn't this neat.' But she really has taught me to simplify my life a little more, to take pleasure out of stupid stuff that's just fun - having barbecues, having picnics, going to the movies, having sleepovers."

One night, Love threw open Barrymore's closet, surveyed its jumbled shiny; floaty; floral and butterflied contents, and said, "This has got to stop. I can get you fabulous gowns, anything you want." Barrymore said, "I don't want any gowns, as long as I wear flowers in my hair." Love said, "But, Drew, then you don't get the best dress." "Yes," Barrymore replied, "but you get the best soul."

Barrymore doesn’t like: Flies. "They come and vomit on your food," she says. "And by the way; they've probably been sitting on a steaming pile of poo." She thinks being angry "is a real waste of time." She hates when people "s--- talk, when someone you've just met tells you so-and-so's a bitch. You're like, 'Wait a minute, you don't even know me, why would you tell me that?' That's not smart." And she really cannot stand when toilet paper comes off a roll one square at a time. "You can't do anything with it!" she wails.

Barrymore loves: Macaroni and cheese. Sleeping late. Watching movies in bed (while eating macaroni and cheese). The Otis Redding song "That's How Strong My Love Is." Children ("I long to have a family;" she says). Therapy. Making up words (karmatic, horrification, questionative). Taking long drives and sticking her head out the window like a dog. Telling people that they have food caught between their teeth or gunk in their eye: "You have to tell a person - don't leave them hanging that way! It's just human stuff; there's nothing gross or wrong with it. You've got to watch each other's back."

But the thing Barrymore loves best is love. She says things like, "I would like to be the most wonderful girlfriend that ever lived." She says, "I think it's nice when people find love, because I feel like everyone deserves it." She calls her boyfriend of two years, actor Luke Wilson, "the greatest person I've ever met. Hands down, everything I do, I think about how it affects him."

Luckily, everyone else loves Wilson, too. He and Barrymore began dating just before he was cast as her love interest in Home Fries. In that film and in his others (Bottle Rocket; Telling Lies in America), Wilson, 27, has a droll, deadpan delivery; an engaging "deer-caught-in-the-headlights quality; like Jimmy Stewart," Parisot says.

Wilson is a nice guy, people say; Calm, upstanding, reliable. He's good for Barrymore. "So, you finally got rid of those rock & roll guys," David Letterman needled her. (Barrymore's ex’s include Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, Beverly Hills, 90210 actor Jamie Walters and Welsh bar owner Jeremy Thomas, whom Barrymore married in 1994 and split from six weeks later.) Wilson wasn't intimidated by Barrymore's past, he says: "I just kinda asked her out. It just seemed natural. She makes you feel that at ease. She makes so much of an effort in her dealings with people. She's so smart and funny and ready to laugh, she has a way of making you forget all the stuff you may have heard or read [about her]."

This Christmas will be the third that Barrymore spends in Texas with Wilson's family - his mom, dad, grandma, two brothers - the kind of family that not only has picnics but sets up elaborate obstacle-course relay races at them. Not, in other words, the Barrymores.

"The first Christmas, she was a little nervous," Wilson says. "I remember thinking, how could this of all things make you nervous? Then I realized, maybe she wasn't used to this. Maybe it made her think about her own family. And she loved it, but it also made her a little bit sad."

When Barrymore was 15, she became legally emancipated from her parents. "The judge said he couldn't turn back the clock, he could only turn it forward," Barrymore says. "I remember thinking, thank God! I don't want to go back there! I just knew: I am all of my responsibility. And I liked that feeling."

"Drew has always been, not older than her years, but the right age in Drew years - it's like dog years," says Justine Baddeley; Barrymore's best friend for 10 years. Baddeley is 12 years older than Barrymore, but they've gone through every phase of growing up together. "She was the same person she is now when she was 13, with the same great values; lately she's just let go of the less useful ones."

A year ago, Barrymore bought her first home, a solar-heated, recycled-cedar treehouse of a house in Coldwater Canyon. For the first time in a long time, she is not hopping like a cricket from hotel room to short-term rental to friend's sofa. The ceilings are high. The windows are always open. Recycled water circulates outside for the local fauna and the profusion of citrus trees and frondy flora. There's a tiki-bar deck with a thatched roof, a sunken yoga studio, a screening room with comfy sectional sofas. "It sounds opulent, but it's not the least bit fancy;" Juvonen says. "It's very home-sweet-home. It's the kind of place where cobwebs look beautiful."

Wilson's favorite room is the kitchen. There's a junky old boombox - and daisies, always lots of daisies. "Drew's a good cook," he says. "If you're hungry; she'll make you something - which, to me, is a good cook."

She doesn't long for a wilder life, Barrymore says. A number of her teenage friends are now dead, or hooked on heroin, or struggling. "And they find this glamour in self-sabotage - it confuses me to no end," Barrymore says. "I don't see the glory in it, I just see the sadness."

When she was younger (in Barrymore years), she spent a lot of time "looking for the fun. I always felt like, 'Where is it?' And now, anything I do is fun. I could be standing in a taco line, and I'm like" - here she mimics grinding her hips and singsonging - "'I'm getting a taco! I'm getting a taco!'" Next she mimics meeting someone's eye, being caught out: "'Sorry I guess I'm excited.' You know? And I used to make fun of adults that I thought were dorks. If I saw a guy singing, 'I'm getting a taco,' I'd be like, 'What a dork!' And now I'm that guy! And loving it. So watch out, because whatever you make fun of is gonna come and bite you in the ass!" Welcome to adulthood, Ms. Barrymore.

At first glance, the films Barrymore has chosen in the past few years seem to be all over the map - Boys on the Side (smart-chick weeper), The Wedding Singer (goofy comedy), Ever After (historical romance), Home Fries (eccentric romance) and Never Been Kissed (high-school high jinks). But at the center of each is the same beating heart: Barrymore, playing a good woman who insists upon seeing the good in others. Playing, that is, herself. Her characters have been richly disappointed by life - they have had boyfriends who beat them up, boyfriends who are jerks, stepmothers who are cruel, stepfathers who are drunks; they have been poor and overworked; they have suffered the scorn of their peers. But they have endured. They have stayed positive. They keep looking for the good.

I tell Barrymore that, to me, her recent movies are about forgiveness. "Absolutely," she says, accenting both halves of the word. "I feel that way I don't know who or what I would be forgiving, and maybe it's myself. I'm always trying to not be so hard on myself. But I don't feel any awkwardness or bitterness toward my life, and I really like playing characters who feel that way. Who aren't burdened by what's existed in their past. And know how to make their pain into their strength.

"I understand there are inevitable things that we have to go through: heartbreak, family problems," she continues. "I don't feel like some quixotic idiot who says, 'We don't have to feel pain.' No!" She snaps her fingers. "Let's feel it [snap], let's get down in it ~ let's make it work for ourselves. But I want us all to be able to get past it. Do you want to lug a 40-pound suitcase of steaming, stinking s--- around all day long, or do you want to kick the bag and get rid of it?" She throws a handful of sushi ginger into her mouth. Energetically; she chews. "I don't want to be stinky-poo-poo girl. I want to be happy flower child. I believe you can be the person that you dream of being."

Recently, Barrymore dreamed she was the fifth Spice Girl: "And I was so nervous the whole time, because I was like, 'I don't know any of the songs, I don't know the dances.' I had the most panicked, driven night, because I was the fifth Spice Girl and I couldn't handle the pressure."

Barrymore is an insomniac. She thrashes around. "But I love dreams," she says. "Oh, my God, they're like, what are we trying to say?" What do Barrymore's say? That she's still a girl. That she sometimes feels in over her head. That she is not a tragic figure.

But she has recurring dreams, too - good ones. She often dreams of dolphins. In her very favorite dream, she jumps off tall buildings and lands softly "Oh, I love those!" she says. "I jumped off the Empire State Building in a dream." And landed softly? "Uh-huh!" Barrymore smiles. She is beatific. "I love that."

Words: Johanna Schneller
Transcribed by Robert Gale
© US Magazine 1998