She's hot! She's now! She's You! She's Wow! She's a brainless adolescent pumped up to iconic status for your glossy magazine reading pleasure!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BY D.T. MAX | We are kicking it west on Sunset, windows and stereo cranked, doing 40 but it feels like more. A lot more. We're hurrying back, hurrying back to the Mondrian, where, long-limbed and lithe, this painful beauty will go upstairs and take off all her clothes and be completely naked before going to bed. The sun is like a blood orange thrown against the windshield. Her deep chestnut hair blows as I gun the engine. She, cigarette in mouth, eyes tearing from smoke and speed and smog, 14-year-old cupid's-bow mouth taut as a harquebus, deftly slips in her favorite tape.

It's like the Spice Girls wrote it just for her.

Let's get it out of the way. There's a word for her. I know that. Flavor of the Month. Flash in the Pan. This Year's Girl. Wunderkittens tumble down the streets of Hollywood with the frequency of sagebrush. Yet even in the back-stabbing revolving door that passes for L.A.'s most desirable club, the praise of A-listers who engineered her anointment is exceptional.

"She could emerge as the finest screen artist of her generation," says Stephen Spielberg, who offered her the role of Martin van Buren's underage secretary in "Amistad" over a breakfast of dry toast and shredded wheat at the $45 million Dreamworks SKG canteen.

The role fell victim to the post-production process, but she scrappily parlayed her efforts into a trip clear across town to Barry Levinson's Baltimore Pictures, where the "Wag the Dog"-hot director auditioned her to play opposite President Liam Neeson as a nymphomanical step-niece who lives in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building. The movie is "Impulse," from the new Michael Crichton thriller. It was a role every Hollywood starlet would kill for, but she sagely accepted the small but pivotal part of the sister whose anguished call from Bel-Air is the key to the credit sequence. She also has a writing credit in the works. The trades recently reported that her Phys Sci essay on the rain forest had caught the eye of James Cameron with a view to reteaming DiCaprio as a handsome young ash and Winslet as a fay sycamore wafted into the temperate zone by El Niño (Robert Duvall).

Has any of this gone to Her Nubility's head? No. "I mean, there are people every day who say, Simon says do this. Do that. Simon says, put your hair up. Put your hair down. Put a ring through your nose. Put a sock in it. Simon says, Wear Prada. Polo. Calvin. Prada, Polo, Calvin. Can I, like, say their names in your magazine?" She laughs appealingly, a child's laugh, the glamorous woman-to-be content to lurk behind playful curls. This Ford Bronco (yup) has got to contain the most centered teen in this nation.

A quick peek in her knapsack while she is in the Getty (that Getty) loo reveals the script for our meeting on embossed stationery. Her publicist of course. It doesn't really matter. Déjà Vu is the feeling great stars are meant to leave us with, that they're one step ahead of us on the chessboard of life. We pull back out onto that unbroken ribbon of dreams known as the L.A. freeway system.

The morning had begun inauspiciously at the Mondrian, where I arrived a bit late in the rented Bronc. I asked for Jamie Gertz (my little joke), but when I did security gave me the bum's rush. You're either from this town or you're not, as they say. I'm not. I'm from the literary world, where the brain work gets done, East Coast, novelist division. My editor's done me a favor. Let the photographer do the work. Write it on the plane home. Easy money. I get up, brushing off the eerily insubstantial dust of L.A. and at that moment I see her. At precisely the same moment, she sees me, and she smiles, her whole body relaxing into some sort of ironic ["iconic" surely? -- ed.] welcome.

I give her a hello kiss and ask who she's dating. "Wouldn't you like to know?" she counters. Suddenly we're best girlfriends. She has that gift for intimacy. We are off.

"Disneyland?" I suggest.

"Great. Claire was there with Vanity Fair." She blows a bubble with juvenile connotations, sits back and fiddles with the radio, a natural at its recondite electronics. Fiona Apple comes on, her voice entering her ears through some sort of private line only the young and talented can tap into.

A pick-up cuts us off, taking a bit of Bronco fender with it. "Putz," I mutter. But what I'm thinking is that I'm beginning to understand why the Romans depicted fame as a two-headed monster.

My tape recorder sits on the dash, conjuring its transcriptive web. I ask about her family.

"Dad runs Paramount but it isn't like we have Tom Cruise over for dinner every night. Maybe Tisha B'Av and L. Ron Hubbard's birthday, that sort of thing. And Mom is, like, a voice coach. She gave Kiri [Te Kanawa] her high C, but she never really got the credit she deserved. So often women in this culture don't."

She concedes her family's stature put her in a glamorous orbit at a young age. Director Mike Nichols met her when she was still pre-K at New York's prestigious Dalton School and went on to baby-sit her with his wife Diane Sawyer on several occasions. He hasn't forgotten. "She did wash-up more easily than any little girl I know," he says. "She got brushing." More recently novelist Jay McInerney took her dancing at Bomb Bomb Bomba, the Latino club of the moment in the Bronx, north of Manhattan. "I admit my first thought was why isn't she home watching Arthur," he says, "but then I realized this chica can salsa."

Her first break came via family friend and former Sony co-chairman Peter Guber as an Angelena in the IMAX special "Welcome to L.A." "I had to kind of wave my arms whenever the A.D. pointed in our direction," she remembers with a seasoned laugh. "I just thought if I waved hard enough I'd be a star. I didn't realize I was looking into the wrong end of the camera."

She pauses. An Important Point is on the way. "If anything, coming from powerful and influential parents makes it harder. People bend over backwards to tell you no. They're afraid your parents will think they're being nice to you or something."

Absorbed in that, I miss the turn-off. I wave goodbye to several easy grafs about Mickey and Goofy.

"The Getty, OK?"

"Fine. Uma was there with Vogue."

They grow up fast.

I pull out a map and look for Malibu. You're either from here or you're not. I'm not, as I think I've said. I'm a brainworker, novelist, East Coast division. Ah, there it is. I'm pulling out, and some jackass comes out of nowhere and clips me. A two-headed monster that eats its young, that's what I think.

"What do you think of death?"

I've come to believe there's more to learn from a half hour with Winona, Jodie or Julia than from all the Penguin Classics laid end to end. She mimics putting her two fingers down her throat. "Death is so '80s." It takes me a moment to remember that for much of the '80s, she wasn't even born.

"Death. What is death? Is Lana Turner dead? Natalie Wood? Jane Fonda?"

I lose control. We swerve sharply to the right, caroming off two narrow concrete barriers, coming to a stop dangling above Coldwater Canyon. Briefly she seems cross, if no less adorable. She asks for my license. She wants to see my picture, an irony that I don't think escapes either of us. She is all bright pinks and rich sprinkled scarlets, a light indent on her forehead. Extremity becomes her, what with her windblown nutbrown hair, Bois de Boulogne-green eyes and magenta lipstick. I think of that Karl Marx line about Sandra Bernhardt [?--ed.], that if she hadn't been born it would have been necessary to invent her.

"Shutters?"

Silence.

"Spago?"

I get no response.

"Uma did Spago with Premiere," I tease.

Nothing.

You're a star, an idolatrix of the moving image, the Next Big Thing. That's what I'm saying to her, but what I'm thinking is: Phone call. Kill fee. White Christmas.

But that's before she spots a face in the mangled turn mirror. It's her own, of course. I watch her watching herself. She brightens. She's Judy and Mickey in one. She's Gloria ready for her close-up. She's Thelma driving off in search of sunsets and empowerment [Louise? -- ed.]. Slowly she hikes herself up -- the camera likes them short and if there's one thing she knows it's how to give the camera what it likes. She's known it since before birth, I realize with a start. She peers over the dash. Her gaze flows outward. From here she can see all of Los Angeles spread out like a wish-list at her feet.

"Drive," she says.

I put it in reverse.

She shivers, rolling up her shattered window with a confidence that will never be lost. Her hair obediently settles down, an audience expecting a memorable performance. Something tells me her follicles -- and her public -- won't be disappointed when Oscar time rolls around.
SALON | March 13, 1998

D. T. Max is a frequent contributor to Salon.