November 29, 2002
By D.K. Holm
The Lives of Nicole Kidman
Imagine this scenario:
A young woman from a privileged background decides to enter acting. She takes her art seriously, but she also knows that she's a looker, and realizes that it takes good looks to go far in the acting profession. She starts at an early age and finds a measure of fame in her home country. But soon she finds she also has a taste for show biz. The money is good and she gets to travel around the world. While making a movie she begins dating her co-star, who just happens to be one of the world's most famous actors, but who is also currently married. Soon he divorces and they marry, despite some differences over religion and children. They seem outwardly happy. But after an unusually long run for a Hollywood marriage, they break up, just as her career is taking off in a new direction. She begins dating again.
Or imagine this variation on that scenario:
A pretty, pampered girl falls into acting because she knows that she isn't really as smart as her parents want her to be. Instead she capitalizes on her appearance, and is not averse to occasional nudity if that gets the job done. She becomes a popular young actress in her home country, but is something of a brittle, careerist type with no long term publicly acknowledged relationships and a rather haughty attitude to the intrusive press. She is fine with local movie production until Hollywood beckons, and suddenly she drops everything, even a part in a major play just weeks before it is set to open, in order to appear in a flashy, empty action film opposite one of the world's biggest box-office draws. In the part, she is reduced to the insipid role of "girlfriend," but manages to snag the star, despite those rumors about him. In the end, they have an ostentatious, public marriage, adopt two kids, and alternate living among their five homes. The double life is not without its cost. She becomes a divided self, and has a succession of injuries, accidents, miscarriages, and other problems that represent her body screaming out against the hypocrisy she is living. Having held up her end of the bargain, the marriage goes sour, and it all ends in an acrimonious divorce with, as before, the actor starting a new relationship before the old one is really finished, while claiming that their marriage actually lasted just under 10 years, a deadline he needs to meet for self-interested legal reasons. Freed from her obligations, the starlet is seen in public with a succession of old co-stars and longtime actor friends.
Here's a weirder variant: Hollywood is a cabal of Satanists. Fame is only bestowed on those who join the cult. It's a deal you make, the kind that Guy made in Rosemary's Baby. Fame is not as arbitrary as the public might think. How else to explain people rising from obscurity to become superstars? Stallone goes from a bit part in BANANAS to media superstar. Matthew McConaughey rises from Texan Leatherface sequels to VANITY FAIR cover boy. The Satanists scour the world, looking for young women to recruit. They find our heroine, who innocently wanted to enter the acting profession against the wishes of her professional parents, and offer her The Deal. She rises in the entertainment industry until a bill comes due. She must marry another Satanist for professional reasons. In return, her career gets a boost. Remember how the lead actress gets cast in MULHOLLAND DRIVE? That must be how Hollywood really works. They're all Satanists.
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These musings are inspired by NICOLE KIDMAN: THE BIOGRAPHY (Aurum Press, 276 pages, $24.95, ISBN 1 85410 859 X). I now know more about Nicole Kidman than I ever thought I would. Or do I?
Nicole Kidman: The Biography is written by two women, Lucy Ellis and Bryony Sutherland, and the book takes some unusual turns. For one thing, the authors repeat and summarize some of the most horrific gossip associated with Kidman and her ex-husband Tom Cruise, then quickly dismiss the charges and speculation as the babbling of the tabloid press. In addition, it seems that the more time they spent thinking about and researching their star the less they found to like about her, without being able to fess up. They go from praising Kidman as being "surprisingly accessible," with a "warm, down to earth nature," and for being a "beautiful woman in the prime of her life, with a slender figure, delicate features, porcelain complexion, and volatile hair [!]," to asking pointed, rhetorical questions about her parental practices and career moves, with statements such as (on page 117), "Was this the same woman who was demanding the right to have an independent career just a short year ago?"
There isn't a lot of new gossip in Nicole Kidman, but there is an interesting battle of wills within the authors and between them and their subject. Perhaps they just got tired of all that volatile hair.
The book begins with a quote from Kidman that constitutes a statement nearly impossible to credit to a functioning international film star. "I'm someone who likes to put her cards on the table. I like to be able to talk to people about who I am, what I am, what I experience. I like to be very open and free about all parts of my life." Kidman may indeed feel as she does in this un-sourced quote, but it seems unlikely that many in Hollywood put such feelings into practice. I mean, she's a movie star, an actress. She has no interior life to reveal.
And, anyway, few people truly like to be so revelatory. I'm a mere nobody, for crissake, and I loathe being "open about all parts of my life."
The authors, whom I shall call Lucony for short, take this initial quote at face value and endorse it, perhaps forgetting that they are about to cite her later in the book four or five times as pleading to the press and the public to back off: "I understand that people are interested but its my life; my personal life [page 229]."
Coincident with the release of this book, Kidman is the subject of a December cover story in Vanity Fair (with Kidman looking at first glance a lot like Meg Ryan) broadcasting that the star "bares her soul." Of course, she does no such thing. In an article by the editor of INTERVIEW, who says she is a friend of Kidman's, the actress is presented as a paragon of down-to-earth fun. Lucony follow much the same pattern, but with a little impatience creeping in over the long haul. They catch her fibbing about her attitude towards drugs (page 78), and note her public evasiveness of the fact that she was dumping one guy to date Cruise (page 91). They liken her going on and on about her love of Cruise as "nauseating readers" (page 104).
Nicole Kidman was born in Hawaii on June 20th, 1967, to Dr. A. Kidman, an Australian biochemist and psychologist, who also happened to be a Catholic, and his wife Janelle, the daughter of Methodists, and a nursing instructor. Kidman later went on to become a prominent teacher and public lecturer and author of self-help books with titles such as TACTICS FOR CHANGE. The family transferred to Washington, D.C. for a while before moving back to the upscale community of Longueville, Australia, when Kidman was five. She has a younger sister named Antonia who today is the host of an Entertainment Tonight-style show on Australian television.
An indifferent student at school, Kidman took a mime class at the age of eight, and began to act and take lessons at the Phillip Street Theatre. She appeared in Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening in which she played a repressed Victorian crying out in the throes of passion, "Beat me! Harder! Harder! Harder!," a play in which, she says, she enjoyed her very first kiss.
Eventually, she drew the attention of moviemakers and almost appeared in a film by Jane Campion, but the head of Kidman's school would not give her leave; Kidman eventually dropped out of high school altogether to pursue a film career. Her first movie was BUSH CHRISTMAS, shot during summer break when she was 14. It's a TV movie that is supposedly still a favorite Holiday broadcast in Australia. Her next film was BMX BANDITS (not the American one), in which her "volatile" hair had as much a part as she did. And then Kidman was off, starting out in a string of successful TV mini series such as VIETNAM, and going on to make nearly a film a year for the rest of her life, while her parents fretted over her lack of academic credentials.
On page 211 Lucony assert that Kidman "has stayed true to herself. This is why she's so popular." Is Kidman really all that popular? Lucony present Kidman as the recipient of much good will from her home country. All of Oz seems to be behind her. A "bad year endeared her to the world" (how do they know this?). Lucony are insistent that Australia lives and dies by her activities and interests. But anecdotally, I don't perceive Kidman as exciting the public to the degree of, say, Elizabeth Hurley, or Madonna at the height of her fame.
Like everyone else in American, I first became familiar with Kidman via DEAD CALM, the excellent thriller based on Charles Williams's novel (Orson Welles also made a version of the book, but that movie has never been released). She was good as a dedicated wife struggling to rescue her husband and ward off a crazy killer, trapped on a boat with her, and quite sexy in her "volatile" flowing curls, her white shirt and a skin-diver's watch as she battled Billy Zane for control of the vessel. She was also good in the underrated, Aaron Sorkin-scribed MALICE (Lucony hate it), in which she plays a femme fatale in a clever and twisty tale.
The Satanists in the movie industry, however, insist that she is a great actress in the Meryl Streep mode, and keep offering her to us in rarified parts in high art films. Unfortunately, there has always been something a little off about her in these roles. I don't think that the problem is that she's an ice queen, which Lucony suggest is the perception of her. I think it is her voice. It's high and cupie-doll like, like Ann-Margret's voice. It disrupts the efforts of movies to present her as a sultry sex symbol like in MOULIN ROUGE, all tights and top hats. Kidman is much better as a tomboy, poking harpoon guns in guy's chests.
Frankly, it is unlikely that this book would have been written if Kidman had not married Tom Cruise. Now, I've always been a fan of Tom Cruise. The full extent of my advocacy of Cruise can be found in a review of BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. I'm not much of a fan of Scientology, but I don't care about Cruise's involvement in it. And I'm as subject to a ghoulish interest in public people's private lives as anyone else, so rumors about him are always interesting, but they don't detract from my appreciation of him as an underrated actor. Still, there was always something weird about the whirlwind courtship and ostentatious cuddling (I know someone who was in a position to observe the couple briefly on a movie set, who said that their affection seemed authentic). Much as I like Kidman in those early roles I just mentioned, her association with Cruise has thrust her into a "superstar" status that doesn't suit her, and isn't even real, despite the assumptions of news magazines.
Fun Facts Remember the scene in THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT when the two girls read an idealizing magazine article about their hero and the film cross-cuts to the truth, showing him to be a vain roué who sleeps 'til noon? As with that magazine article, it's hard to trust journalism as gushing as what's found in this book, and so in the absence of hard gossip one has to make due with some of the tame tidbits the book proffers. Kidman is left-handed, allergic to bumble bees, and scared of butterflies (!) (page 7). She has a secret recipe for lemon sponge cake. She is hypersensitive to noises and sleeps with earplugs. Barbie dolls were banned in her childhood house. She bossed her little sister around. Her dad was a union supporter and her mother was a feminist so she was "teased at school." She stuttered. At the age of 14 she had a crush on an unnamed 16-year-old fellow actor at the Phillip Street Theatre. She once said, "I want to make films that could possibly shed new light on world situations." She almost became a journalist instead of an actress, and keeps a diary to this day. She smoked and drank and took an average amount of drugs in high school. She hates hotel rooms, and says she has a temper. She prefers Michael Perry shoes, has an assortment of antique dresses, and collects jewelry. She eats tofu and very little red meat. She co-owns a chain of nail salons. She had to sue two websites that used her name in connection with the offering of sexual services.
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Relationships Kidman's first romance, when she was 17, appears to have been with an unnamed Dutch actor who was 17 years her senior and with whom she traveled in Europe. Next she dated Tom Burlinson, an only slightly older actor she met making a movie called WINDRIDER, and who later went on to be the Man from Snowy River. Next she dated Marcus Graham, whom she met after seeing him in a play. She dumped him for Cruise. Her first kiss from Tom Cruise occurred as they were parachuting. They were married on Christmas Eve 1990 and divorced in 2001. If a recent issue of US magazine is to be believed, she has an off-again, on-again romance with Russell Crowe, who once wrote a song about her, and briefly dated Tobey "Spider-Man" Maguire.
Tom Cruise-Related Gossip The authors relay how Kidman "tactlessly" dragged Cruise to meet ex-boyfriend Graham, who hid in his apartment and pretended he wasn't home. They recount how Kidman was rather upset over the lovemaking scene in THE FIRM and called actress Karina Lombard "rude." During their marriage Kidman supported Cruise's frequent Gere-esque lawsuit threats, but in VANITY FAIR indicated that such actions were more Cruise's thing than hers. A 1991 McCALL'S article claimed that their marriage was one of convenience and that Cruise was infertile and the agency CAA arranged the marriage to mask Cruise's alleged homosexuality (rendering Kidman someone on the order of a Phyllis Gates). BUNTE ran an article in 1996 claiming that Cruise was infertile. A guy named Eric Ford taped a resentment-filled cellular phone argument between the pair in 1998. The SUNDAY EXPRESS MAGAZINE charged that the two kids the Cruises adopted were little more than impulse-buy fashion statements. An Italian website printed an interview with porn star Chad Slater, who said he had a relationship with Cruise. All these publications printed retractions or suffered damages.
Cold Feet Kidman comes across as a determined actress fighting both Hollywood indifference and her own qualms. On the one hand, directors rarely seem to want to hire her. Kidman had to canvas Gus Van Sant, Ron Howard, and Jane Campion, among others, yet she got the job (Satanism?). On the other hand, just as frequently, Kidman gets the willies and wants to drop out at the last minute as she almost did before MOULIN ROUGE, THE OTHERS, and the play THE BLUE ROOM.
Injuries As a teenager, Kidman temporarily dropped her career to help her mother get through a bout of breast cancer. In her own life, she was secretly rushed to the hospital in 1991 for abdominal pain, and again in 1998. After shooting PORTRAIT OF A LADY, she spent two weeks in bed with "emotional distress." She almost died while lost on an Italian volcano, had to make an emergency landing in a helicopter, and dislocated a shoulder skiing—all in 1996. She cracked a rib and hurt her knee on MOULIN ROUGE. On the set of COLD MOUNTAIN she developed swollen ankles. The knee injury forced her to pull out of PANIC ROOM. (However, I know someone who saw actual footage from the Kidman version of Fincher's film, and, to put it non-libelously, this person came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a knee injury that caused Kidman to leave the production.) In one of the more mysterious events in her life, Kidman suffered a miscarriage in March of 2001 not long after the split with Cruise.
Stalker What would a contemporary celebrity be without a stalker? Kidman's was a man named Matthew E. Hooker. They supposedly met in a bookstore; the subject of his screenplay came up; he started to write letters; he started showing up at her house; she took him to court and got a stalking injunction. His side of the story is told at his own website, where he says " I believe that Kidman & Co. stalked me, chose me as her expendable victim to gain her and her films publicity and public sympathy, and used me horribly to her own profit." It's Satan, I tell you! The authors are surprisingly sympathetic to the man. He is now running for president.
Peekaboo: Kidman sang in an all-girl amateur rock band called Divine Madness. As a teen she hung out in several Australian bars and befriended transvestites, while dressed, according to VANITY FAIR, "in a tutu, fishnets, and lace-up black boots, [her hair dyed] like a rainbow." Lucony describe Kidman as having a "strident Aussie accent and strangely masculine good looks." She had a hit in the all-female play STEEL MAGNOLIAS. When Cruise moved out, a bunch of girls moved in to comfort the star, among them best friends Rebecca Rigg and Naomi Watts. Recently, she made a rock video of the old Sinatra song "Something Stupid" with Robbie Williams, in which she mouthed the words "I love you"—to the woman sitting at the next table over. She also wielded a riding crop in a bedroom scene (this rather hot video is available on the BIRTHDAY GIRL DVD).
A whole other section could be dedicated to Kidman's hair. Being girls, Lucony are obsessed with Kidman's "volatile" hair. They are careful to mention that she hid her hair under a short blond wig in THE OTHERS, and chronicle in detail director John Duigan's problems with her hair in an early film. But we're above all that.
Unfortunately the authoresses' mounting rage against Kidman causes their attention to detail to drop off. There are several clichés: in one film, Kidman gives an "edgy performance (page 96), and at another point she needs "Dutch courage" (page 233). There may be a bit too much minutia: "Having met Diana five years earlier at a movie premiere, Tom and Nicole attended the funeral" (page 177). They assert that Tom Cruise's father wrote WINNING THROUGH INTIMIDATION (page 85), but that book was written by Robert J. Ringer in 1974. On page 95 they say that Robert Benton pursued Kidman for a role in BILLY BATHGATE, and then tell us a few paragraphs later that Benton had severe doubts that she could lose her Australian accent. They don't even seem to have her height right. Lucony have her at six feet, while Us magazine and IMDBPro have her at five-foot-ten (maybe that volatile hair makes her look taller). They spell her father's name as Antony (everyone else has Anthony).
NICOLE KIDMAN comes across as a massive cut and paste job. Such books have value, and can be helpful to subsequent biographers, but this book doesn't even have a bibliography, and few of the Kidman quotes have citations. Did they interview Kidman? It's possible, if unlikely, but in the end hard to tell. Instead, the authors come across as if they are auditioning to become Kidman's press agent. They might be better off as her hairdresser.
NEXT TIME: Billy Wilder lives!
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