Al Weisel
Anne Heche
By Al Weisel
US Magazine, February 1998, pp 61-62, 89
In a little over a month last spring, Anne Heche made a leap from being a promising, but relatively unknown, actress to a featured player in a history-making event. If she had kept a diary, here's what it might have said: "March 25: Met the love of my life, Ellen DeGeneres, last night at Oscars. April 17: Won biggest role of my career, Six Days, Seven Nights with Harrison Ford. April 18: Celebrated new role by taking Ellen to premiere of my movie Volcano - our first public date. April 22: Fired my agent and manager when they warned me against coming out. Hired Ellen's. April 26: Ellen and I met the President at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Introduced Ellen as my wife. April 30: Oprah!"
Before Heche and DeGeneres became the '90s version of Bogey and Bacall (with a slight alteration to the Bogey part of the equation), Heche had already created some buzz on her own. She had garnered critical praise for performances in a wide variety of films, from the indie romantic comedy Walking and Talking to the more mainstream fare of The Juror, Donnie Brasco and Volcano. But aside from her recent scene-stealing cameo as a slightly menacing girl in I Know What You Did Last Summer, she hasn't had an opportunity to test whether her name will sell as many movie tickets as it does tabloids. That will be decided with her next three films, which, in addition to Wag the Dog, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, and Force Majeure, currently shooting with Vince Vaughn, include Six Days, Seven Nights with Ford.
It is the latter movie that will answer the question all of Hollywood is supposedly asking: Will audiences accept an actress in a lip lock with a man onscreen if they've seen her in a lip lock with a woman offscreen? Although there are a couple of openly gay character actors in Hollywood today, Heche will be the first leading lady with an offscreen leading lady of her own. Not that she gives any hint of the pressures of juggling a career, a relationship and a civil-rights movement. No matter how fragile the 28-year-old actress looks, with her tiny porcelain features, she masks any vulnerability behind intense but unreadable eyes. Sipping a $10 cup of coffee in a Manhattan hotel before flying off to Hong Kong to start work on Force Majeure, she's as breathless as she was on her seemingly angst-free appearance with DeGeneres on Oprah. "I've lived my life in truth always. This was the easiest thing I've ever done," she told the talk-show diva, a statement that led post-feminist gadfly Camille Paglia to write Heche has the "mental depth of a pancake." But Heche refuses to let the carping of a few cynics get to her. "Here's the truth. Ready?" she says. "I knew I would be with Ellen for the rest of my life. People have a hard time believing it but it's true."
In Wag the Dog, a black comedy written by David Mamet, Heche plays a harried White House adviser who teams up with a mysterious operative (De Niro) and a movie mogul (Hoffman) to produce a fake war in hopes of deflecting attention from a presidential sex scandal. "I was scared out of my mind," she says of working with two of Hollywood's best, yet you would never know it from watching her engagingly funny performance (which, along with her role in Donnie Brasco, won her best-supporting-actress honors from the National Board of Review). Nor is it obvious that on one critical day of shooting she was so ill with the flu that a doctor had to be called in. "She was sick as a dog," marvels director Barry Levinson, who was so impressed with her performance in Donnie Brasco, which he produced, he cast her in Wag the Dog. "She's back in the trailer throwing up and somehow she said, 'I want to work.'"
Playing the martyr, however, is not Heche's style. She shot much of Six Days, Seven Nights with a broken toe (stubbed on some lava that was apparently avenging its treatment in Volcano). Co-star Harrison Ford first encountered Heche's tough-as-Press-On-Nails demeanor when she auditioned. "She had, whether pretended or real enough, I wouldn't say quite 'disdain,'" he says, "but she seemed to be unconcerned about me." Once they started shooting, she didn't shy away from taking a stand. "She was stubborn about those things she felt were inadequate," says Ford, "and she was often right. She didn't want to play the damsel in distress."
Heche didn't act the damsel in distress offscreen either. Her coming out the day after she was cast in Six Days, Seven Nights was such a shock to director Ivan Reitman, he told USA Today at the time, "I think it will do the movie some harm, and that makes me nervous." Heche didn't just let the comment go. "When I confronted him with it, he said, 'I was nervous about all casting and they took it out of context,' " she says. But Heche is well aware of what's at stake. "There were questions," she admits. "A gay actress has never starred in a romantic comedy before, so I can imagine that creating a little stomach buzz." By the end of the shoot Reitman offered Heche an apology of sorts: "Ivan said, 'I'm one of those people who was taught not to ruffle any feathers,'" says Heche. "Of course, I have no problem ruffling feathers."
Born the youngest of five children (three sisters, one of whom died in infancy, and a brother) in a small Ohio town, she spent most of her childhood in New Jersey, where the family relocated when she was five. She rebelled against her strict Baptist upbringing early, pestering her Sunday school teachers with questions. "Why is God a man? was a big one," she says. After high school, she defied her family's wishes that she go to a Christian college and instead took a role on the soap opera Another World. Playing identical twins - one good, one bad - she won an Emmy in 1991.
In 1994, Heche's oldest sister, Susan Bergman, wrote a critically lauded memoir, Anonymity: The Secret Life of an American Family, about the tragedy that changed their lives. When Heche was 13, her family discovered that her devoutly religious father, the church choir director, was not only gay but dying of a relatively unknown disease at the time - AIDS. "He never admitted anything, even on his deathbed," says Heche. "He was a deluded liar from way back." Her father died in 1983, less than a year after the first article about AIDS was published in The New York Times. Three months later, her family was dealt another blow when her brother died in a car accident.
"If it weren't for my father, I don't think I would be so open. So that's a huge blessing," she says. "I think it's somehow beautiful that because he died, [and] because he was so unwilling to tell the truth, I got at a very young age, 'Just tell the truth, be who you are, there's nothing more important.'"
Heche has an uncanny ability to find an uplifting moral in everything that happens to her. When she was 15, her gutsy ambition to be a pilot was derailed when her instructor came on to her while she was flying for the first time. "I just took that as a message that I wasn't supposed to be a pilot," she says. "I much prefer my job. So it all worked out." The director of the first film in which she was a lead, The Wild Side, "was a nightmare," she recalls. "He would go from fits of depression to being violent." (He, in fact, killed himself after shooting the film.) Yet Heche is "grateful for that film because, since then, I spend more time talking with directors before I agree to work with them."
Heche has persevered, although not always with the support of her family. "My family was raised to believe there is a certain way to live. They've seen me my whole life taking steps I wasn't supposed to take," she says. Of her committed relationship with DeGeneres, Heche's mother told her: "I don't accept your love affair with Ellen the same way you don't accept my love affair with Jesus Christ."
Even before her father's death, Heche suspected he was playing a role. "If we look back, [we realize] he was a big queen who wanted to be onstage," she says. "If it wasn't for my father, I never would have started acting." He not only inspired her to be an actress - he was the direct cause.
"Part of living a double life like my father did is you never can quite settle down and make any money," she says. "When I was 11 we really started hurting. We were always really poor but it turned out the kids had to start getting jobs." Heche auditioned for a dinner-theater production of The Music Man and won her first acting role. Ironically, this musical, about a con man who helps the people of a small town see their true selves by pulling the wool over their eyes, was a revelatory experience. "Finally, I had role models who were telling the truth and being who they were and singing and dancing and laughing," she says of the other actors, some of whom were openly gay. "It became my new family. I was seeing people be who they wanted to be and they loved it. I had watched a man not be who he wanted to be my whole life, and here I was seeing people having a good time."
Heche realized the possibilities were endless. "Being an actor, the fun is changing form, being able to portray the person you've never been," she says. "But people consider that more of a character-actress thing to do."
"She has a chameleon-like quality," says Levinson. With her facility for both comedy and drama, he says. "You have to think back to the older actresses more so than newer actresses. Rosalind Russell. Barbara Stanwyck."
"The movie-star idea has switched from what's important," says Heche. "Watch us change form. That's what I want to take acting back to. When someone says they're nervous [about whether audiences will accept a gay actress], I want to say, are you kidding? Don't I change form for you?"
Already she is consumed with her next project, her next opportunity to be someone besides Anne Heche. Just thinking about it, she becomes so exuberant you wonder if she'll suddenly morph into someone else. "I'm now playing a lawyer [in Force Majeure] who has a passionate love affair with someone who's going to give his life up for a cause." Then an ironic smile crosses her face. She sits back and withdraws into herself as if something has just occurred to her. "I happen to be kind of playing that in my real life as well," she says, "but, you know, what fun."■
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.