Calista Keeps Cool
Calista Flockhart's
golden-hazel eyes
spark mischievously
and a grin stretches
her wide, curvy lips.
The question that has piqued her playful side: If,
as she says, her big dream was to work on
Broadway, why did she ever go to Hollywood? "I
have no idea!" she says, pounding the table.
"Take it back! Take it back! What was I thinking?
What the hell was I thinking!"
Flockhart, 34, is sitting in a corner of the
pastel-appointed restaurant of the Hotel Bel-Air
in Los Angeles. She arrived minutes earlier
wearing a knit cap and huge black sunglasses,
her size 0 (yes, zero) frame lurking somewhere
inside a baggy pair of cargo pants and a thick
turtleneck sweater. As she talks, a young couple
seated nearby stare and whisper. Waiters linger.
One of them presents Flockhart with a menu; it's
after 2 P.M. and the kitchen will stop serving
lunch soon. She searches for something to eat.
Soup? No. Salad? No. She's not really hungry
after eating a late breakfast. Finally, she chooses
her lunch: double cappuccino, tall orange juice.
A year ago, Flockhart's navigating a menu would
hardly have been a noteworthy event for
restaurant patrons and staff. People were more
familiar with her role as the title character of Ally
McBeal (Fox, Mondays, 9 P.M./ET), an ambivalent
lawyer with a weakness for short skirts and odd
fantasies. But the show's second season
changed all that. The already wispy Flockhart
seemed, improbably, to have lost weight. Rumors
circulated saying she had been hospitalized for
anorexia. Comics feasted on the story-news
that she ate spinach for breakfast inspired more
laughs than a Popeye cartoon-and supermarket
tabloids cooked up one Calista tale after another:
about her weight, her love affairs, even her
housekeeping. Paparazzi snapped photos
revealingFlockhart… walking her 8-year-old terrier
mutt, Webster. To an outsider, the prying and
ridicule might have seemed unbearable. But
Flockhart says she has not only endured it, she's
flourishing.
"I'm actually feeling
really good," she
says. "I'm not saying
there weren't rocky
moments in the
recent past, but it's
very easy, when it's
happening to you, to
not be affected by
it." This rainy
afternoon, she is upbeat, smiling easily and even
joking about her own press. Asked if she is dating
Ben Stiller, as gossip columns insist, she says,
"Yeah." Then she laughs. "Oh! Not 'Yeah, I'm
dating Ben Stiller.' But yeah, according to the
press I'm dating somebody new every other day.
I get around! And I live vicariously through my
rumors." (Stiller's publicist says the two are "just
friends.") "Right now, my life is so full," Flockhart
says. "I'm not preoccupied with kids and
boyfriends and husbands. I'm not having any
panic attacks."
Panic attacks? Those are Ally McBeal's specialty.
While Ally's wobbly mien has struck a chord with
audiences, Flockhart wonders how it will play
when the character "gets a little older." The
actress is under contract for three more years;
after that, "I'll have to wait and see where I am."
Where she is now is in the midst of an "absurd,
perverse and twisted" show, as Flockhart
describes it, "about really eccentric people going
through their lives." It has become a hit, she
says, because audiences perceive "whatever may
be missing in their lives. Everybody fills in the
blanks in different ways." This season, Ally has
smooched a married ex-boyfriend, Billy Thomas
(Gil Bellows), and started a tumultuous love affair
with Dr. Greg Butters (Jesse L. Martin).
The complications
with her TV love life
are nothing
compared with the
romantic
machinations in her
new movie, "A
Midsummer Night's
Dream." Back when
she read the
Shakespeare play in ninth grade, Flockhart
thought it was "ridiculous, silly and boring." Not
that she wasn't interested in theater even then:
Her mother, Kay, a high school English teacher,
often took her daughter to shows in Philadelphia
when the family lived in Medford, New Jersey
(one of many places Flockhart and her older
brother, Gary, resided as their father, Ronald, a
Kraft Foods executive, shuttled the family around
the country; both parents are now retired). With
her aversion to loony romantic plots perhaps
softened by Ally McBeal, Flockhart reconsidered
the play upon hearing that an upcoming movie
version would film in Italy during the show's
summer hiatus. An added incentive: McBeal
creator David E. Kelley's wife, actress Michelle
Pfeiffer, had been cast.
"I realized that all the contradictions and
impossible juxtapositions are the very things that
make this play a masterpiece," Flockhart says.
She "coveted" the role of Helena, and director
Michael Hoffman ("One Fine Day") auditioned
Flockhart in her Ally McBeal dressing room. "I was
impressed with her ability with comedy and her
acting technique," says Hoffman. "Helena
perceives herself as a victim and is the
archetypal waif. So Calista seemed a very good
option." Careful with that "waif" business,
Michael. Flockhart bridles at the perception,
common in Hollywood, that she shares Ally's
delicate emotional makeup. "I've always been
called fragile, a waif," she grouses. "What do
they mean? Fragile in my soul?" Flockhart's
self-description: "I'm fierce." She's certainly
fierce about the brouhaha over her weight:"I
don't believe my weight is a problem. It's
society's obsession with my weight that's the
problem." Flockhart's Ally McBeal costar Greg
Germann is mystified by the fragility issue.
"She's very strong
willed," he says. "I
don't know anyone
who has had a
successful career in
show business that
you could describe
as 'fragile.'" Signs of
Flockhart's success
come in many forms:
a salary, according
to sources,
"significantly above"
the $40,000 per
episode she received
in Ally McBeal's first season; a West L.A. house
she's remodeling; film scripts to scan for her next
movie role; and thoughts of spending this
summer's hiatus performing onstage in New York
(where, six years after graduating from Rutgers
University with a theater degree, her big career
break came in a 1994 revival of "The Glass
Menagerie"). With all that, of course, comes more
scrutiny of her personal life. But gossip certainly
isn't going to drive her out of Hollywood. In 20
years' time "maybe I'll be producing, directing,
writing, acting," Flockhart says. "Hopefully, I'll
still be alive and well."
- Janet Weeks