Sweet Sensation

He was born Depp. He has always been Depp. As a boy, he was ridiculed for it. In the schoolyard, he was called Dipp. Or Deppity Dawg. Later he was called Johnny Deeper, this based upon a popular adolescent joke he barely remembers: "Something about some guy having sex with some girl who kept saying, 'Johnny, deeper!'" He conjures up this dark memory with visible embarrassment. Being Depp, you see, has never been easy.

Depp came into my life during his Hollywood years, a time when the Depp name had begun to really stand for something. The day we met, he extended his hand to shake mine, except that his hand was not a hand so much as it was weaponry. In place of fingers, there were blades. This was the sort of unpredictability I would later come to expect from Depp. At the moment, however, we were on a Twentieth Century Fox sound stage where he was making Edward Scissorhands, his second major film, in which he portrayed the man-made boy with scissors for fingers. He laughed quietly at his own comic gesture and then introduced me to his attorneys, who hovered nearby. (Depp is a master of the ironic nuance.) Soon he was asking me what I knew of Al Capone and doing his impersonation of Warren Beatty blinking. Such is the irrepressible spirit of Depp.

Now I will reveal all that I know of Johnny Depp. I will tell of our adventures together: the time we found Jesus, or a guy who said he was Jesus, on Santa Monica Boulevard and Depp gave him cigarettes. The time we ate eggs with his movie-star fiancée, Winona Ryder, whom he loves profoundly. The time we trespassed on Harry Houdini's abandoned property in the Hollywood Hills and got yelled at. I will describe his tattoos, his problem facial hair, his recurring nightmares that feature the Skipper from Gilligan's Island. Clearly, earlier biographers have never gotten much of the real Depp, focusing instead on the surface Depp. This, then, is an all-new Depp — a man who lives hard, loves hard, but most of all, thinks hard.

The days I knew Depp best came and went quickly. There were three of them in all. They were November days, as I recall. The first one began in a coffee shop, as so many things do in the life of John Christopher Depp II. Winona had left him that day. Left him at the coffee shop. Then she drove off to do some errands. So he was very much alone. He was smoking too much and drinking too much coffee, but who could blame him? He said he was enslaved by caffeine and nicotine and didn't sound proud of it. "I like to be pumped up and hacking phlegm at the same time," he said wryly.

"Coupla tequila worms flying out here and there," Depp said, but he was joking about that. He hadn't touched the hard stuff for a solid month, maybe longer. Depp was as dry as he'd ever been in all of his twenty-seven years.

Nobody recognized Depp in public places, not when I was with him. He is a man of the people and therefore doesn't stand out much. Yes, he continues to be a teen idol and a heartthrob ("a throbbing thing," he calls himself), but frankly he looks like someone else. Director John Waters, who cast Depp as a delinquent grease ball in the film Cry-Baby, used to imagine him as "the best looking gas-station attendant who ever lived." Or as Waters later told me appreciatively, "Johnny could play a wonderfully sexy mass murderer. I mean, it is a part made for him." Which is to say, there is shadiness to Depp. He looks attractively unwashed. ("Nobody looks better in rags," said Waters of the basic Depp sartorial statement.) As such, he does not possess the burden of great presence. He speaks and moves with quiet dignity. You hardly know he is there. It is easy to sit in silence with him, although ultimately — and I think he would agree here — not very interesting.

If Depp is anything, He is interesting. He takes the big risks. Tom Cruise, the rumor goes, wanted to play the role of tragic, disfigured Edward Scissorhands — but only if his face was cosmetically restored by picture's end. Not Depp. He wore Edward's scars like medals. And he wore the unwieldy, imposing hand shears with brio, recognizing the lyric poetry in Edward's fateful curse. (Edward, who cannot touch anything without slashing it, is a metaphor for the outsider in all of us, including Depp, who knows what it's like to be mocked for being a little different. He is, after all, a teen idol.) "He certainly was closest to the image of the character," said Tim Burton, who directed Depp in Edward and Jack Nicholson in Batman and Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice and Pee-wee Herman in Pee-wee's Big Adventure, as well as many other actors in those same movies. "Like Edward, Johnny really is perceived as something he is not. Before we met, I'd certainly read about him as the Difficult Heartthrob. But you look at him and you get a feeling. There is a lot of pain and humor and darkness and light. I think for him [the role] is probably very personal. It's just a very strong internal feeling of loneliness. It's not something he talks about or even can talk about, because it's sad, ya know. What are ya gonna do?"