The man behind the wheel was drunk. So was the woman standing in the crosswalk in front of the Le Dome restaurant. When she came to Earth again, 20 feet later, she was lying on Sunset Boulevard, unconscious, with a broken leg and arm, various hairline fractures and a concussion.
A prudent 23-year-old might have taken this brush with permament obscurity as a signal to sober up. Melanie Griffith drew the opposite conclusion. ”I don`t remember what the percentage of alcohol was in my body, but the doctor told me, `If you hadn`t been so drunk, you wouldn`t be alive`,” she says. ”And I went, `Yeah! See, I should be drinking`!”
It took eight years, motherhood and a starring role in a Mike Nichols movie to make her reconsider. It wasn`t that she stumbled into any particular personal trouble during the filming of ”Working Girl”-”I mean, I`m always in personal trouble,” she told me-or that her dependence on alcohol and cocaine had reached critical mass.
It was simply that when she finished the film in the spring of `88 she felt crummy and tired, and she started talking to friends about it, and suddenly it seemed very clear to her that her next stop was the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota.
”I knew I had to change,” she says. ”I mean, everything.”
From the plane, she called Don Johnson, her lover at 14, her husband at 18, her ex- at 22. They`d remained friends, and had briefly become lovers again in 1987 when she did an episode of ”Miami Vice.”
This time, on the phone, the issues were larger than romance. ”I was so scared,” she confides, with such conviction that you can see her fumbling with her credit card at the phone in the first-class cabin. ”But Don`s been sober for five years, and he told me I could do it. He said he`d support me all the way. That was such a turning point. I talked to Don a lot while I was in rehab. And I think we fell in love again on the phone.”
In August, they had a reunion in New York. This time, the bond was immediate and, apparently, lasting; in December, as ”Working Girl” opened to ambrosial reviews, and ”Miami Vice” chugged to the end of its fifth and final season, they got engaged. (They were married June 26.)
The tabloid press, which had exhausted popular interest in Johnson`s romance with Barbra Streisand, rejoiced (at news of the Johnson-Griffith engagement). So did Johnson and Griffith as they arrived two hours late at the post-Christmas party that Johnson, movie producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer and ”Miami Vice” creator Tony Yerkovich were throwing in Aspen. No dumb blond
A month later, as Melanie Griffith settled into a chaise on the beach in Miami, her transformation seemed complete. Gone was the breathy, little-girl voice. Vanished were the extra 15 pounds she carried in ”Working Girl.”
Consigned to some black hole were the bombshell clothes she used to wear both in movies and in civilian life.
On the beach, in a loose pullover, standard-issue tights and moccasins, she looked like an attractive-but hardly lubricious-vacationing wife whose greatest addiction is aerobics.
”For a long time, I dressed funny and sexy and stuff, and that was me at the time, but it`s not anymore,” she said. ”People don`t get that yet. They think I`m a dumb blond.”
And easy, I said. And submissive.
”And I`m not,” she said, with a defiant grin. She lit a cigarette and the sun caught the rock on her left hand. ”Isn`t it beautiful!” she exclaimed, checking the ring out as if to remind herself that the diamond and all it symbolized were real. ”It`s four carats. Don gave it to me in December, the night I was on `Saturday Night Live.` We came back to the hotel, and he was really nervous, and I had no idea why. There were candles lit, and caviar, and sparkling apple juice in the champagne bucket, and he went into the bedroom and came back with this box in his hand, and when I opened it, I just sat there. I had never seen anything this big. And he said, `Will you marry me again`?”
She looked up, all innocence, and then guffawed.
”Right,” she said. ”How many times do you hear that?”
Profane and virginal. Street-smart and gossamer. Completely spontaneous and totally in control. A big goofball and a sharp operator. Melanie Griffith`s career has been built on roles that call on her to encompass these contradictions. So, it now appears, has her life.
The key is so simple her therapist should give her a cut rate-she is Tippi Hedren`s daughter. And in Hollywood that has a meaning everyone understands, for Hedren was Alfred Hitchcock`s most hapless victim, a model whose blond hair and cool sexuality made her ideal for humiliation.
After signing this neophyte actress to an exclusive seven-year contract, Hitchcock ordered new clothes for her, put her on a different diet and pressured her to dump her friends. He moved on to recommend martinis during their rehearsals for ”The Birds.” On the set, as his passion escalated, he stared at her or whispered sexual hints.
And then-a field day for Freudians-he put her in a cage for an entire week of fighting off live birds. Hedren collapsed, but because she was divorced and had a child to support, she couldn`t afford to quit. Hitchcock rewarded her spunk with the lead in ”Marnie.” This time, he had her trailer set directly next to his bungalow.
Late in the filming, the 65-year-old Hitchcock finally pounced. Hedren rebuffed him. Thereafter, for the duration, he called her ”that girl.”
His final revenge was to sabotage his film in the editing room, concocting a certain failure so he could ruin her career.
In the middle of Hedren`s two-year Hitchcock horror story, her daughter had a birthday. Right on cue, the director had a present for 6-year-old Melanie. It was a doll of her mother, dressed as her character in ”The Birds”-and set in a miniature pine box.
This was more than one of the maestro`s macabre pranks; it was a blunt reminder to Hedren and her child that the man who provided the family income had the power of life and death. Melanie Griffith, no dummy, promptly learned to hate the movies.
And then, in 1972, she met Don Johnson.
He was 22, her mother`s costar in ”The Harrad Experiment,” and, more to the point, the boyfriend of Pamela Des Barres, the legendary groupie who was building her own personal rock and roll hall of fame.
Johnson, though a thespian, was worth the detour for Des Barres. ”The guy was a hunk of burning love, a sex god,” goes her review of their time together.
Fourteen-year-old Melanie Griffith, of the chipmunk cheeks and the big-girl strut, took one look at Johnson and didn`t care that someone was already tucking him in. ”I just went, `I want him`,” she told me.
Seventeen years later, she`s well aware how that looks in print, so she goes on. ”I was raised to be self-sufficient. I was one of those kids who said, `If I can get to school by myself, and cook, and clean, and take care of the house while my mother`s working, why can`t I spend the night with my boyfriend?` Other girls were like that, too-I mean, I was the last of my girlfriends to go. But they didn`t become actresses, so they`re not in the public eye.”
Unimpressed by movies
She wouldn`t have become an actress, either, but when she was 16, Johnson arranged an interview for her.
”I was modeling, and I was about to graduate from school, and I needed something to do, and we were struggling, and I knew it would help to bring in some money, and I got this interview-for a modeling job, I thought. And it was for `Night Moves.` And I went, `Wait a minute, I don`t want any part of this.` Because all I could tell from looking at my mom was the hair and the mirror and the makeup. I didn`t think acting had anything to do with your insides.” She got the part. And was entirely credible as the boy-crazy daughter of an actress who ignores her. And was completely unimpressed by movie work:
”All I was doing was reading the lines and playing myself. I just had a natural thing. I didn`t have any real desire to be a good actress.”
What interested her more was what the night can do. One historic evening, Don Johnson has said, he stayed with ex-Miss World Marjorie Wallace well after lights-out. When he returned home, Melanie called. They professed undying love, and flew to Vegas.
”We got married at the Silver Benn chapel at 11 in the morning,” she told me. ”We were in blue jeans. The cabdriver was the witness. I don`t think my parents were too pleased.”
Griffith`s souvenir of that marriage is a tattoo. What does her therapist make of the pear on her butt?
She giggled. ”My therapist is the only person in the world who doesn`t know about the tattoo.”
Larry Mark, the executive producer of ”Working Girl,” first encountered Melanie Griffith in 1975 on the set of ”Smile,” in which she played an amoral beauty contestant. ”There was a moment when the girls were to read from cards and introduce one another,” he recalls.
”Everyone else rehearsed it. Melanie didn`t. `We`re not supposed to be real smooth about it,` she said, `so don`t give me the card until we`re ready to shoot. I want to stumble naturally.` I saw right then that she had great instincts.”
A rude awakening
When she was 18, though, she suspected there might be more to acting than an unashamed openness in front of a camera. One visit to an Actors Studio class sent her running back to California-”(Acting teacher) Stella Adler creamed me; she was so tough on me I can`t even remember what she said”-and the comforting arms of her friends, many of them male.
”There is nowhere that Melanie hasn`t been,” a Hollywood veteran told me. Her oldest friend, Heidi von Beltz, agrees: ”Melanie`s definitely got a list, and it`s the `Who`s Who of Hollywood,` but they were all relationships, all loves of the heart.”
”Yeah, I was having a good old time, working and being a kid,” Griffith admitted, as eager to be truthful in her sobriety as she was eager to shock in her wilder years. ”And then, when I was 23, I realized I wasn`t getting to read for the really good parts. And I thought, `Dammit, I want to be good. I want to be able to do a play, and not know I`m safe because they`ll say
”Cut!” if I mess it up. I want the danger; I want the excitement of driving a car really fast.` ”
With Steven Bauer, the actor who would become her second husband, she moved to New York and began to take acting classes. ”We were flat broke, living on knishes and hard work. But it paid off. I even got to study with Stella Adler. And this time she liked me.”
In Hollywood, her reputation-and her well-publicized encounter with the drunken driver on Sunset Boulevard-held her back. The next film role she was offered was Holly Body in ”Body Double,” Brian De Palma`s all-but-X-rated 1984 homage to Hitchcock`s ”Rear Window.”
”There are some things I like to get straight right up front so there are no misunderstandings later on,” Holly tells the hero, by way of introducing herself. ”I do not do animal acts. I do not do S&M or any variation of that particular bent.” And she lists several other activities rarely performed without considerable sums of money changing hands.
Griffith delivered these lines as if she were giving a grocery order.
”The most honest fear an actor has is that he`ll make a fool of himself,”
she explained. ”So you try and forget about being embarrassed. You try to remember that it`s not you doing it, it`s your character. And you remember who you`re working with. Some people say that role was an exploitation, but the thing is, working with Brian De Palma was the first time I was acknowledged as having an opinion.”
New parts, new roles
One of her opinions is that film is a gloss on life, that ”the parts you get come at a time when you`re going through exactly what`s happening to your character.” ”Body Double,” for her, says, ”Yeah, I may be a porno queen, but I have a brain-pay attention to me.”
Griffith and Steven Bauer had a son, Alexander, in 1985, and then divorced. So ”Something Wild”-Jonathan Demme`s 1986 cult classic about a woman definitely over the edge-is, for her, a parable about experimentation.
”It`s like me saying, `I`m going to try all these things and watch the effect I have on people.` The effect is devastating, and I have to deal with the consequences.”
”Stormy Monday,” released almost subliminally last year, is about
”getting out of the grips of men and making your own decisions instead of doing what you`re told.”
And what about ”Working Girl,” in which she`s an ambitious secretary who characterizes herself as possessing ”a head for business and a bod for sin”?
”When I get found out and fired, and I`m packing my things, the other secretaries ask, `What are you gonna do?` and I say, `Not take it all so seriously.` That`s what I loved about the part-she has to grow within herself. Once she`s okay with what she`s done and what she`s caused, then everything changed for her.”
I pointed out that ”Working Girl” is a fairy tale.
”And I feel my life`s become a fairy tale, with true love at the end and the two of us as the most fortunate people around. It`s like it was destined. Don was my first love, and he`s still my love-my best friend, my man, my partner. I`ve never had that ease, that specialness, with anyone else. And we both feel that way, and it just keeps getting better and better.”
For example?
”Aspen! We were with Alexander, and Don`s son, Jesse, who`s 6. On Christmas Eve, the boys wrote their letters to Santa. And Santa came in a big way, and there was such joy on their faces when they jumped in bed with us in the morning! So nice. So normal. And that`s what comes first with us now.”
Don Johnson a stay-at-home? Melanie Griffith a hausfrau?
”There`s no nanny,” she said, with deep pride. ”I don`t need one if I`m not working. If I were still drinking, I would. But I get up at 7, and I take Alexander to school. At night, Don and I work out or run or have dinner with friends. It`s real Ozzie and Harriet.”
