Hollywood always has loved the scenario of the troubled star beating self-destructive tendencies and making a comeback. These days 17-year-old Drew Barrymore has embraced that role as if her life depended on it-which it very well might.
One feature film in which she co-stars-”Poison Ivy”-was released earlier this year. Another-”Guncrazy”-is awaiting distribution. And she will appear in a television series premiering later this summer. She`s happy to be alive, young and healthy.
”I`m sober and I`m making films again,” she says. ”Life is just so great for me. I know a lot of people wrote me off, said I`d never make it through, but I feel like I`ve found my life all over again.”
Today the one-time child star of ”E.T.-The Extraterrestrial” looks like a typical California teenager, slightly pudgy from too much fast food, with a wide cupid-bow mouth and dreamy eyes.
A few years ago, Barrymore-youngest member of three generations of self-destructive screen and stage actors-was the epitome of the Hollywood brat. A golden-haired moppet at 7 in one of the biggest box-office hits of all time, she tooled into the fast lane much too young.
By 9 she was hitting the career-promoting social scene with her mother. By 12 Drew admitted having an alcohol and cocaine problem and at 14 she was rescued from a drugged haze at a rehabilitation center. ”Little girl lost”
was her description for her out-of-control early years.
And there were the boys. By 16 she had been linked romantically with Sophia Loren`s two sons, several young actors and a sound engineering student with whom she lived for a year, Jordan Knight of New Kids on the Block, and Getty heir Paul Balthazar Getty.
Of those wild days, Barrymore says, ”It was like an earthquake. People wanted so much from me and expected me to be much older. By the time I was 8 I felt like I was this abnormal, crazy girl.
Her acting career has gained a boost with recent film roles and a television series.
Much of the credit for the rehabilitation goes to Alcoholics Anonymous and the domestic stability she has found with her boyfriend, 22-year-old actor Jamie Walters, with whom she lives. (Walters was in the film ”Shout” with John Travolta, and is due to appear in a Fox TV series, ”The Heights,” about a young rock `n` roll band.)
”I live in a house with my boyfriend,” Barrymore says. ”We have animals. We garden on Sundays. It`s just so beautiful. It`s a stable life. I like being domestic; it makes me feel so good.”
Barrymore has changed her appearance, cutting off most of her hair for her latest role and returning it from blond to its natural dark brown. The decision to cut off 10 inches of hair came while she was preparing to play Anita in ”Guncrazy,” a film produced by Los Angeles-based First Look Pictures and still in distribution negotiations. No premiere date has been set. In the film Barrymore co-stars with James LeGros. Barrymore`s character flees a sexually abusive guardian and joins an ex-convict she befriended during a spree of violence.
”When I came in for my first meeting for the film I had very long hair, down to my waist,” Barrymore recalls. ”It was blond and curly. After I read the script, right before the audition where I read on film, I just felt that this character, a girl who`s madly in love and willing to kill to protect her lover, just wouldn`t have this sort of hair. I took some scissors, went into the bathroom and cut it short.”
In ”Poison Ivy” Barrymore portrays a Lolita type who tears apart a sad family. She bears a souvenir of that role as well.
”It`s a tattoo of a crucifix with ivy growing through it. It symbolizes pain, death and life,” she says of the tattoo high on her right thigh.
Barrymore recoiled a bit when asked what the message from ”Poison Ivy”
was.
” `Ivy` does not have a strong message for girls, I have to admit,” she says. ”I think there should be a message at the start of the film-`Do not try this at home.` She`s just a girl who wants so badly to be the fantasy she has. She wants to be this woman of the world who has everything and she`s willing to go to any length to get it. She walked a fine line, because you have to love, envy and hate her all at the same time.
”I think there is a need in people`s lives for this sort of character, as bad as she is. She was really this fantasy.”
Anita, her character in ”Guncrazy,” is far more likable, Barrymore says.
”She is this woman who is so vulnerable in the beginning, and because of what she goes through becomes so strong in the end.
”Playing someone like Ivy was much more difficult,” she says. ”She did so many horrible things and because I really like to get into the characters I play, when I took her home with me at night it really made me miss Drew sometimes.”
It`s clear that Barrymore identifies some of her own past with these two off-kilter roles. Building emotional muscle and making allowances for her own imperfections are among experiences from which she now can draw.
”I`ve certainly become a stronger person,” she says. ”I think I`ll always be childlike and vulnerable in a way, but one of the great things about going through a traumatic time is you learn to accept yourself.
”I feel I`ve not only matured, but in a funny way I`ve learned to be a child more. I think I tried too hard to be mature before and I`ve now learned that I can be stupid and it`s OK.
”I did write my book (”Little Girl Lost” (Pocketbooks, $4.99)), and I try to help people in recovery because there is nothing more powerful than helping others. My message to girls is to come out of yourself, be strong and accept love in your life. I think a lot of young women can relate to that.”
Barrymore is disturbed by recent events in America, particularly the race riots in Los Angeles.
”It just seems there are so many people in America who are just waiting for an excuse to explode,” she says. ”There seem to be a lot of people who think they would love to live the life of the couple in `Guncrazy,` just striking out.
”In those Los Angeles riots people just went wild and looked for a reason to just rage. It wasn`t thought out because they mainly hurt themselves, looted their own neighborhoods.”
When she talks like this, it`s evident that Barrymore has had to apply the same message in her own life. The family seems almost cursed by emotional frailty. Drew is the daughter of failed, reclusive actor John Drew Barrymore and granddaughter of John Barrymore, celebrated star of the 1920s and `30s who ruined his life with alcohol. Drew`s mother, former actress Ildiko Jaid, brought the preteen star up largely without the father. At an early age Drew joined her mother in celebrated Hollywood nightspots. Doormen would recognize her and invite her in. (Drew`s mother eventually went through therapy too, and has said she did not understand the dysfunction in their relationship until they both received professional help.)
”I grew up thinking I didn`t really relate to anybody,” Drew Barrymore says. ”Now I appreciate my incredibly difficult upbringing. Nothing was exciting to me and I was always out for excitement. It got me into a lot of trouble.”
A number of men had important father-substitute roles in her life, including Steven Spielberg. Rock veteran David Crosby also tried to help her with her emotional and drug problems.
”I was this passionate little girl who wore sweaters to hide herself and then had to become an adult because of all the things I went through,” she says.
And yet there`s a maleness in her personality as well, she says: ”I don`t know if that`s why I`m often in men`s clothes. I really have a male mentality. Sometimes my mother says I was really meant to be a boy.”
Her relationship with Walters, she says, was based on love at first sight, and the shared understanding of the pressures of being an actor.
”It happened quickly, but I`ve never been so sure of anything the way I am of this,” she says. She and Walters moved in together a month after meeting in the Hollywood restaurant managed by her mother last February.
Barrymore says that because both of them are actors means she won`t have problems at home when she has to play love scenes with other actors, a source of friction with sound engineering student Leland Hayward, namesake grandson of the late Hollywood agent-producer, whom she was due to marry last year.
”It`s just something you have to deal with as an actress, but then I`m not one of those who takes her clothes off easily,” she says. ”I only believe in showing some nudity if it`s tasteful.” (A double was used for skin-revealing scenes in ”Poison Ivy.”)
Barrymore`s television series, being shot for CBS, is to be titled ”2000 Malibu Road.”
”I play an aspiring actress in this group of four women. I know this might sound like a contradiction in light of what I do for a living, but this is a very different character from myself. I don`t like to play characters who are too much like the real me, because then it`s not a challenge.
”On the other hand, who knows more about an actress facing rejection than I do? And who knows more about the happiness and thrill you get when you receive a break, a part you want so badly?”
