PENELOPE CRUZ

HOW SHE CO-STARRED IN TWO TURNING POINTS IN MY LIFE

There have been two Penelope’s in my life. When I was the Fanfair Editor of Vanity Fair, I created a pseudonym for myself and called her Penelope Schmart - she was pithier, a bit of pill. I have a memory of the media writer for the Village Voice once asking rhetorically who she was which was the kind of traction of curiosity I had hoped for her. The other Penelope is Penelope Cruz. She is one of the few people about whom I have done two cover stories. The first one was for Vanity Fair and the second was for Allure. I adore her.

I have been thinking a lot about that second one since I saw her portrayal of an auteur in Official Competition last week, which costars Anthony Banderas and Oscar Martínez. The film was directed Argentinians Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn based on their own script which they co-wrote with Duprat’s brother Andrés. I highly recommend the film. It’s pithy. A bit of pill. Sam Shepard once told me that his favorite film director was Jacques Tati and this film about making a film about identity and power based on a book about two brothers of opposite dispositions played by actors with different ones has the layered feel of a Sam Shepard script directed by Tati. I looked up Anthony Lane’s review of it later in The New Yorker and he mentioned that it evoked Tati for him as well. And I can’t better his paragraph about Cruz. He writes: “In short, ‘Official Competition’ is nicely balanced, and the poiser-in-chief is Cruz, whose portrayal of [director] Lola goes way beyond simple wackiness. The first thing you notice, it’s true, is her hair: a deep-russet explosion, reminiscent of the great mane that was sported by a leonine Whitney Houston in the video for ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody.’ Then there are the cheroots that Lola smokes, plus the eccentric majesty of her dress sense, the standout being her loosely shimmering gold pants. Yet observe the steady steel of her gaze; listen to the speech that she delivers unflinchingly to camera; and follow her approach to Félix, as he sits in front of a mirror and tends to a tiny cut on his face—or, as he refers to it, ‘my work tool.’ (What a dick.) Lola straddles him and dabs at the wound. He nuzzles her neck, but she barely reacts, preferring to study her own reflection. Rising from his lap, and wandering off with a wicked grin, she says, ‘I may have to call my lawyer.’ You watch Cruz at moments like these, not long after her agonized performance in last year’s ‘Parallel Mothers,’ and you wonder, Is there any actress, since the prime of Sophia Loren, in whom the tragic instinct runs so unnervingly close to the spirit of fun?”

After reading that, I remembered that I had quoted Time magazine describing her as “the love child of Sophia Loren and Ringo Starr” in my Vanity Fair story about her. I was living in Paris in 2001 when I was asked by Graydon Carter to hop over to Madrid to do the September cover story on Penelope. Such was my life then. September was always the big issue of the year and to be assigned that cover was a bit of coup for a writer. And God knows I was always seeking affirmation as well as Graydon’s approval. You can read the story here. But I have hard time reading it now myself because it became the beginning of the end of my time at Vanity Fair. The first draft I turned in was not liked by Graydon, I assumed, because the final edited version sent back to me had been whittled at more - and rewritten at times - much more than my editor Wayne Lawson usually did. I had emailed in response that it wasn’t exactly what I had written but it was fine. I can’t recall now what I said exactly in that email. I do recall the air of defeat about it all and the utter lack of affirmation I felt. But it got worse.

Wayne had always been like a priest to me more than an editor - which kind of fit since he was a Lutheran who had converted to Catholicism and gave up his martini lunches for Lent. The visits I would have with him in his office and our conversations about theatre are still memories I cherish. I don’t cherish the phone call we had about this story after that email because he erupted in the kind of insulting anger I never expected from him. He basically told me I couldn’t write - I never could - and that he was tired of running interference for me with Graydon. I had returned to my apartment in South Beach in Miami from Paris - such was my life then - and by the end of the phone call I was balled up in the fetal position in the corner of it and crying my eyes out. But I picked myself up and headed to the track in the park down the street from me for my afternoon jog and tried to clear my mind in order to understand what had just happened. Later I wrote Wayne an email reaching back out trying to clear the air. I even told him I loved him. He never acknowledged the email. All that was left of our relationship was civility when we’d see each other at the theatre. He had had the same falling out with another of his writers, Dominick Dunne, and Nick called and emailed me to offer advice. By falling out with Wayne myself I grew closer to Nick whose own heartbreak over his falling out harbored more anger than mine. I will always be perplexed by it, I guess. And sad. Wayne was a brilliant editor who was also a company man. He would always choose the team over any individual players. I came to understand that about him and attempted to accept it. This paragraph 20 years later is still part of that attempt.

Penelope Cruz was the date on my arm who escorted me out the door at Vanity Fair. I feel that glamour of defeat each time I see her in a film. I barely got assignments after that and soon was passed on to Allure where I settled in as Contributing Editor for a time. I was at that apartment in Miami having just recovered from the onslaught of becoming infected with HIV when I got the call from Allure asking me to head back to Paris to interview Penelope for its cover in 2003. I felt another kind of defeated glamour when I arrived in Paris to do that story so soon after my HIV diagnosis and having been so sick. I felt so fearful yet determined to work through that fear by turning back to work. I have often said that I look on my writing celebrity profiles as driving a truck full of glamorous cargo. I dump the cargo at deadline and load the truck back up to drive to the next one. I needed to get back behind that wheel.

I arrived at the Hotel Raphael in Paris, where Penelope was staying while making a film, with the steely determination of a truck driver trying to keep his eyes open and focused on the patch of road in front him during a long haul. Penelope had been up for a night shoot but what I have always loved about her is that she has a kind of blue-collar attitude about her life as an artist as well. She too had the steely determination to keep her eyes open that day. I was the patch of road ahead of her too. Penelope loves photography - and being a photographer herself - so I watched her wake up a bit when I gave her a book of Robert Frank photos. Frank was known for his “snapshot aesthetic” which could be a way of describing the celebrity profile.

As Penelope was looking through the book, she asked what was new with me and how I’d been. I’m not sure why this moment was when I decided to make my HIV diagnosis something that was not a secret. But I came right out with it. I told her I had just been diagnosed and was finally feeling better and how grateful I was to be sitting with her in this little corner of this staid old hotel in Paris and continuing on with my life. She clutched the book to her heart and her eyes filled with tears. And then we had a conversation that I will cherish that had nothing to do with editors and offices at Conde Nast and other conversations about theatre. I don’t think I ever had a personal conversation with Wayne in all those years he was editing my stories about having personal conversations. But of all the personal conversations I had with movie stars as a kind of intimacy reconfigured as performative art, this was a truly personal one. Other than family, Penelope Cruz was the first person I told I was HIV positive. I not only feel the glamour of defeat when I see her now in a film, but I also feel the true intimacy of that moment as I watch her as an actress reconfigure intimacy itself into her own performative art. She escorted me too away from shame.