Al Weisel
Parker's Poses
By Al Weisel
Out, February 1999, pp. 45-49
Why do we love Parker Posey? That's easy: she's a fascinating actress, a natural beauty, and an iron-willed woman who refuses to play by Hollywood's rules. Plus she has one pisser of a wit
"I hate myself," Parker Posey says melodramatically, making a face like a kid getting a measles shot, when she hears her voice on tape as I test my recorder. As if to reassure me, however, that she's not planning to slit her wrists with her butter knife right there in the Fenix restaurant at Los Angeles' Argyle Hotel, she twists her wide, luscious mouth into a smile that seems a bit forced, as if it had air quotes around it, and quickly adds, "But I'm getting to love myself so that I can be loved by the man that I love right now."
Ah, that explains all the histrionics. Parker's in love. This is why the 30-year-old actress occasionally reverts to the emotional state of a 12-year-old schoolgirl. This is why she can't go 10 minutes without drifting off, sighing, and moaning, "I miss Stuart," meaning her beau, Stuart Townsend, the 25-year-old actor she met more than a year ago. This is why she would rather be in London with her One True Love instead of in Los Angeles doing press for the biggest movie of her career, Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail, in which she plays Tom Hanks' girlfriend. Parker has more important things on her mind than some big ol' Hollywood movie.
That's not to say that even if she weren't pining for the man she loves she would be overjoyed to have spent the past few days talking to reporters about Mail, a cybersavvy e-mail romance. "Do you know what this TV journalist said to me?" she asks incredulously. "She said, 'Welcome to the club.' I could not believe it. It made my knees just start to ache. Like everyone's doing what they do to belong to the big Hollywood elite. It's like Scientology."
Surveying the Fenix's otherworldy terrace overlooking the City of Angels, Posey is as bemused as an alien whose spaceship just touched down in Planet Hollywood. Clad in tight jeans and a skimpy maroon sweater, she squints past the blinding sun reflecting off the pool at the odd sculptures that line the brass-and-cement patio. "Look at the concrete palm trees," she says. "They could have real ones, couldn't they?" But even real palm trees, she confesses, maker her feel like she's in a place that's not quite genuine. "It's like they don't really belong here," she says. "You only see them in Hollywood movies." Posey, too, seems a little out of place at this art deco landmark, which was the location of a memorable scene in Robert Altman's The Player, a scathing indictment of the games movie people play.
Considering all the buzz she's generated in recent years, you would think Posey would be a Hollywood player herself by now. In 1997 she scored an impressive coup with three movies at the Sundance Film Festival: Clockwatchers, SubUrbia, and The House of Yes, for which she won the festival's Special Recognition acting award for her performance as a woman obsessed with Jackie Kennedy. Time magazine crowned her the queen of the indies. "Ms. Posey...is headed for big things," Janet Maslin wrote in a New York Times review of her 1997 film Waiting for Guffman. But most of her movies have been box office disappointments, and Posey still hasn't been able to turn her indie cred into mainstream success. She just hasn't learned how to play the game.
Take Speed, for example, the film that made Sandra Bullock a mega-star instead of Parker Posey. "When I auditioned for Speed," she recalls, "I just kept laughing because I felt so dumb." While reading a scene with Keanu Reeves in which she was supposed to be driving the bus, Posey asked the producers if she could have a paper plate to hold for the steering wheel. They were not amused. "Keanu laughed," she says sheepishly. "Things like that I look back on as mistakes, like, Wow, I shouldn't have done that or I would have gotten cast. I didn't know I was being flip. I thought I was being funny."
Nor have all of her meetings with Tinseltown power brokers gone particularly well. "I met a studio exec, and he brought a friend with him, and they talked to each other the whole time," she recalls. "And then they asked me if I'd been to the sushi restaurant that was the hot place to go. 'No,' I said, 'I haven't.' " She imitates their withering look at her reply. "It was awful. And then I go out, and I look back to see the executive pushing his colleague in my direction like, 'Go get her,' like they're in high school. It really made me upset. There are so many of them that just like to sleep with actresses. It's like, 'Welcome to the club.' " Thinking she had escaped the high school cliquishness of her adolescence in the rural South, Posey was shocked to discover that the business she ran off to is even worse.
And now as if it weren't bad enough that she has lived in New York City instead of L.A. all this time, Posey has made yet another decision sure to send her agent over the edge. She moved even farther away from the Hollywood power center to London, a place where people still actually go to the theater. "I fell in love and moved to London to be with my man," she says unapologetically.
Introduced to her boyfriend by her agent when both actors had films in the London Film Festival in 1997, Posey says her first impression of Townsend (Shooting Fish, Trojan Eddie) was that "he was too cute and he's an actor, so he's got to be really dumb." Though he's still too cute, she decided he wasn't so dumb after all. "He gets it," she says of the Howth, Ireland native. "He comes from people who ate potatoes for hundreds and hundreds of years, so he knows what's important."
In some ways things have come too easily to Posey career-wise. In 1991 she was still in school attending the State University of New York at Purchase when she got her first acting job, a part on As the World Turns. While still in the soap, she scored her first breakout movie role as the scary cheerleader in Dazed and Confused who tells meek freshmen, "I'm going to make your life hell." Asked about another young actor who made his debut in that film, Matthew McConaughey, Posey says sarcastically, "Oh he's a Big Star now, so we should talk about him."
It was her starring role in 1995's Party Girl, however, that first brought widespread attention and branded the actress with an unshakable label. Party Girl is a silly movie about a silly girl who's the life of the party but who really wants to be a librarian, and Posey made the film worth watching through the sheer force of her personality. Considering she could often be spotted in real like at one trendy Manhattan hot spot or another, the "party girl" moniker proved an irresistible hook to anyone writing about her for years afterward. If you want to make Posey's eyes roll like a pair of dice, just saying these two words should do the trick.
Although her image as a promiscuous partier may have been exaggerated, she has been pretty promiscuous in choosing movie roles. Though she's made more than 30 films in just six years, some of her roles have been little more than walk-ons, and only a few of her movies have really allowed her to show off her talent. And though she's a lot of fun in Mail, the role of a self-absorbed New York editor who "makes coffee nervous" is hardly a stretch. ("She had to be enough of a bitch so you aren't sad when Tom Hanks dumps her.") But while she seems a little frustrated that her films haven't always gotten as much attention as this one will ("It cracks me up that out of all the movies I've done that need press, we have to talk about You've Got Mail"), Posey claims to be happy that none of her movies have been runaway successes. It's hard to tell whether she's just rationalizing like her character in Clockwatchers, a frustrated office temp who every time she gets passed over for a promotion says she doesn't really want a permanent job anyway. "The fame thing is kind of scary," Posey says. "If I had a movie that did really, really well, they would try to pigeonhole me. But I've gotten to play all these characters without an image placed on me." To compound the sacrilege, she claims she doesn't even care about getting rich. "I've made enough money, you know," Posey says, and you almost believe her. "Especially with You've Got Mail. I was able to go to London three times during filming. I really missed Stuart. It was hard being away from him." Sigh.
***
"Walking in L.A.," Posey sings, screaming out the lyrics of a song by the '80's synth-pop band Missing Persons as we drive down Santa Monica Boulevard, "nobody walks in L.A." She can't sit still, bouncing up and down, turning up the car radio, and fiddling with the dial to find a station. She points at some tanned, tank-topped West Hollywood types. "Hey," she mockingly yells out the window, cracking up. "Did you just come from the gym?"
We are on a quest for Jamba Juice, a smoothie and juice store she discovered while working on Clockwatchers. We park on the street, and Posey urges me to examine the vehicle parked behind us, pointing out the telltale signs that indicate we are indeed in West Hollywood, Los Angeles' gay mecca and home of the International Male catalog. "see, you have the whole package here," she says like a tour guide at the Museum of Unnatural History. "The Range Rover, the big dog in the front seat, the parking sticker from Gold's Gym."
Before you fire off letter to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, however, you should know that few actors have been as supportive of gay filmmaking as Posey, who has appeared in a number of gay-friendly flicks, including Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, The Doom Generation, and The Daytrippers. She even kisses Brooke Shields in the long-awaited Misadventures of Margaret (which, Posey predicts, will likely head straight to video).
Having already decided she was tired of being interviewed long before I came on the scene, Posey decides to interview me. "So what do you think of West Hollywood?" she asks. I confess that I find it a tad alienating, what with my lapsed gym membership and all. "Do you think it's superficial, shallow?" A bit, I say. What do you think? "I think there's a lot of insecurity," she sagely notes, "the idea of having to put ourselves in little groups to fit in or have this sense of family or sense of belonging to a certain club."
A muscle queen in a tank top and shorts walking a very big dog strolls by. "Frightening, huh?" Posey drawls in horror. This is great, I say, proposing a mock headline for this story: parker posey -- makin' fun of the gays. "Them gaaaaaaaaays," she says, in a thick Southern accent. "Them gaaaaay folk. I know a lot of gaaaaaaays." Some of your best friends? I ask. "All of my best friends," she replies. "Some of my gay friends are really queeny and I love that. They'd rather slit their wrists than be on the street like that guy who walked by. I just find a lot of strength in gay people because they've had to deal with something."
She attributes her comfort with gay men to her brother. "I have a twin brother and I was around a boy my whole like so I relate well to men who are gay." Not that her brother is. "it's a relationship with a man without sex," Posey explains, "so I'm comfortable with that."
Growing up in the South (in Laurel, Mississippi, the hometown of A Streetcar Named Desire's Blanche DuBois), where, she says, "women are expected to act a certain way, even now," Posey has always known what it's like to not quite fit in to society. When she and her twin, Chris, who is now a lawyer in Atlanta, were born prematurely, no one thought they would make it. "They thought I was going to be retarded," she says. "my parents were scared that I was going to be different from the other kids." Her Christian name, which came from '60s model Suzy Parker, was just a space filler on the birth certificate, since her parents (Lynda Gay, a housewife, and Chris, who owns a car dealership) didn't think she would survive. But because her parents thought her unusual name would invite taunts from other kids, they started calling her Missy. "My grandmother didn't like [the name] Parker," she explains. "This Girl Scout with blond hair and pigtails named Missy sold her some cookies for my dad, who was in Vietnam, and it kind of stuck." Eventually, of course, everyone realized that no matter what she was called, Posey was going to be different from other kids anyway. Perhaps that's why one of her favorite songs when growing up was Kermit the Frog's Sesame Street ballad [It's Not Easy] "Bein' Green."
Along with her brother, Posey's grandmothers were big influences on her while she was growing up, especially in the way they coped with breaking out of the roles that were expected of them as good Southern belles. "You take a lot from your grandparents, "she says, "much more than your parents, My dad's mom, Granny, was a bohemian without really knowing what that was and that there were other people like her. My other grandmother, Nonnie, was, like, in her own movie -- a movie from the '40s. She created a personality that would allow herself to be what she felt inside, Very dramatic. Like Susan Hayward."
***
"It's all your fault!" Posey screams as me in a performance that would make Nonnie proud. We've rushed back to her hotel, the Chateau Marmont, because her boyfriend is supposed to call. But it turns out he's already rung, and now because of the time difference it's too late for her to call back. She throws herself facedown on the bed and kicks her feet like Scarlett O'Hara foiled again in her plans to hook Ashley Wilkes. Pouting, she curls her waif-er thing body into a fetal position and clutches her teddy bear, Wuzzy. "I'm just missing my love," she finally says, which is her way of apologizing for accusing me of ruining her day.
There's only one thing that can make her feel better now: the music of Burt Bacharach. "I love the stories he makes in his songs," she says as "Walk on By" plays on the stereo. "Brokenhearted people who have gone through a lost and survived. I don't think it's camp at all. If something's corny it's just because it's true. There's so much passion lacking now. Everything's so fucking cool. I'm so sick of that."
I ask if she minds if I smoke and am shocked to discover that the "party girl" (cue the rolling eyes), who never seems without a cigarette in every movie and interview she's ever done, has quit. "Smoking is something you do alone," she says, sounding slightly superior as she assuages her oral fixation by chewing on a leather string that holds the heart-shaped locket Townsend bought her for a dollar. That doesn't mean she wouldn't love to breathe in secondhand fumes, however, and Posey practically begs me to smoke so that she can experience the joys of nicotine vicariously. Later on, trying to dodge her flailing arms and Rockette kicks as she sings along to "What's New Pussycat?" I accidentally tip over the ashtray onto the faux-antique divan I'm sitting on, spilling ashes all over its velvet cushion.
"Aaaaaaaaaah!" she screams like Fay Wray when she sees what I've done. Suddenly she becomes the maniacally dirt-hating Joan Crawford from Mommie Dearest, one of her favorite movies. I pray that it's the dirt she hates and not me. Springing into action, Posey shoos me away from the site of the toxic spill, rips a page out of a fashion magazine, and delicately scoops up the ashes. When she realizes that she won't be able to completely eliminate all traces of spillage from the cushion, she awakes from her mad-housewife trance and shrugs. "Oh, well," she says, "it's not my cushion."
She stops in mid-thought, suddenly realizing that "Alfie" is playing, and leaps up and begins lip-synching, getting more and more animated as the song goes on. She transforms herself not merely into Dionne Warwick but a drag queen doing Dionne Warwick. With fists clenched and eyes closed, she pours her heart into every line until she reaches the song's emotional climax. "Without true love we...just...ex-ist!" she silently belts out, her arms raised triumphantly over her head.
"OK, now she calms down," Posey explains, momentarily acknowledging my presence before plunging back into her Bacharach reverie. This time she actually starts singing instead of mouthing the words, almost whispering the last lines of the song as if it's a plaintive cry from her own heart: "Let your heart lead the way and you'll find love one day."
Ensconced in her room at the Chateau Marmont, the ultimate Hollywood hideaway, where mega-deals have been made, rooms trashed, stars have OD'd, starlets have been seduced, Posey is content to inhabit her own little world, oblivious to everything around her. Perhaps she'll always be an outsider to everything around her, but there are worse ways to live your life than letting your heart lead the way.■
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.