The Girl Friend

In the middle of its second season, the sitcom may well become that rare vehicle, a TV show with the ability to launch movie stars. On the show, Aniston displays a gift for comic timing - and an ability to sound natural in a three-sided living room - that should serve her well on the big screen. "What you see on TV is only part of what Jennifer has to offer," says Abeson, her high school acting coach. "She can go much deeper."

Already, Aniston has completed 'Til There Was You, a film with Jeanne Tripplehorn and Dylan McDermott that will be released this April, and Dream for an Insomniac, which also stars Ione Skye. In late summer, Aniston will be seen in She's the One, a film by Ed Burns, who directed The Brothers McMullen. "Everyone who's seen the film so far has been blown away by her performance," says Burns. "It's nothing like her character in Friends. The girl can act!"

More recently, Aniston signed a $2 million contract to star in Picture Perfect, the story of a single woman and her desire for an engaged man, which will be shot this summer. In addition, Fox has purchased specifically for Aniston a Washingtonian magazine story, "How to Date a Congressman," which is just now undergoing that mysterious process whereby all stories, large and small, eventually become screenplays. "It's amazing what a good show will do for your career," says Aniston, smiling. "It's a whirlwind. And you have to stop and focus." That's why she wanted to come up to Aspen, she says. "To stop and ask myself, 'What's up? What's real? What's going on?'"

Aniston has traveled to Aspen with a whole contingent of friends. These are not the friends from the TV show, but they might as well be. They are pretty and nice and often want to know how you feel. There are 12 of them, actors and writers, staying in beds and sleeping bags in a rambling house on the edge of town. "For years, we've been trying to get together, and the winter comes and goes, and we never do it," says Aniston, who found the house. "And this year, with Friends and everything, I was like 'You know what? I'm going to do this for us. Somebody's got to go ahead and make the plan.' And that's what I did. And it's perfect. It's nice having the money to do it."

"This is something she was dying to do," says Bendewald, who is along for the trip. "I think she really needed a break; she worked so frickin' hard all year."

Aniston and her friends are what you and your friends might like to be. In a situation where you and your friends drink beer, they drink wine; where you drive cars, they drive all-terrain vehicles. And the very lives they lead - the auditions, the read-throughs, the screenings - seem to emit a kind of blue brilliance, like a globe with a light inside. As you listen to their casual talk, the wood in their fireplace seeming to burn more brilliantly than wood has ever burned before, it's hard not to imagine that you are on the set of a TV show, one of the many knockoffs of Friends, say, where there are no problems that cannot be solved in 30 minutes. "We have a problem," a friend of Aniston's tells me. "The wine is warm. But don't worry. We're chilling it. It will be ready in about 30 minutes."

While in Aspen, the friends meet each afternoon at Bonnie's, a midmountain restaurant. They eat lunch, joke, discuss their lives. Just now, Aniston, who briefly dated Adam Duritz of Counting Crows earlier in 1995, is concerned about a new love interest. "I don't know whether I'd call him a boyfriend," she says. "Especially when it's so new and I'm so scared and skeptical and have been on this solo thing. Isn't that weird? I'm dating, and I like him very much. But when do I start to call him a boyfriend? Do you decide to go steady? You don't anymore. Although Daniel, my old boyfriend, was funny. Three months into dating he said, 'Will you be my girlfriend?' Got down on his knees."

After lunch, Aniston and her friends retrieve their skis and step outside. They huddle up and choose a route. Then they're off - a dozen people skiing in formation. They ski down cat trails and off through the trees, which are bent with snow. Wearing a ski coat, black stretch pants, a furry hat and goggles, Aniston flies by in a tangle of poles and arms. She skis behind Jason Bateman, following his tracks through the snow. Bateman is a bright-eyed, high-spirited, 27-year-old actor who starred in The Hogan Family and is currently in Simon, a WB sitcom. He's a very nice guy. He tells Aniston to keep her shoulders back and her eyes forward.

Making her way down the hill, Aniston's extremely pleasant to look at. Her eyes, warm and alert, seem forever on the verge of recognizing an old acquaintance. She is not quite so friendly as her eyes, though; they do her a great favor. Her hair is a shade of reddish brown you see in the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. And although she's not very tall, she has the haughty, long-legged grace of a would-be Miss America.

"I'm a cautious skier," Aniston says. "And then when I feel good, I get a little crazy." And that's like her in life, too, she adds. "Very cautious to a point, and then I let it go - like dieting. If you're too strict with yourself, you sort of go off, go crazy, eat a pizza, whatever."

In many ways the trip to Aspen is Aniston's celebrity coming-out - her first vacation as a bona fide pop-culture star. She feels fame is an experience few people can understand; this explains the unique connection that has formed between Aniston and the cast of Friends.

"There's nothing like the group of us on the show," says Kudrow. "There is a bond between us, maybe like between people who have been in war. We've been through so much together that no one else can understand." She pauses. "I mean war in a good way."

In Aspen, as Aniston skis into lift lines, she is followed by whispers and smiles. Although new to celebrity, she already displays the self-satisfied grouchiness of a paparazzi-punching veteran. "There's people with fucking cameras at the bottom of the hill or when you walk out of a restaurant," she says. "Unbelievable. The other day I was Christmas shopping, and at the end of a long, hard day, I stopped at a coffee-bean place to get a frapp?.

"So I get my drink," she says, "and I'm ready to run into my car, and I stop, and I said, 'OK, look, just fucking talk to them.' So I slowly walked around the car, and they, of course, shied away, and I said, 'What are you doing?'

"He said, 'It's my job.'

"I said, 'What do you mean it's your job?' " Aniston continues. " 'I understand it's your job, but you have no idea how invasive this is in my life. It actually makes me not want to do what I do. I mean, we go to work, we love what we do, and we do it for you, and we do it for people to enjoy. But if these are the repercussions - on my day off to see you with a camera in my face? I know it's your job, but you really need to think about how it's affecting people, 'cause it's just so disheartening.' "

Late in the day, Aniston and her friends ski over a rise, the streets of Aspen arranging themselves below: brick facades, snow drifts and smoke rising from chimneys. Everywhere you look in town - lift lines and slopes, hot tubs and saunas, barrooms and restaurants - you see the haircut Aniston has made famous. And as the star makes her way down the mountain, as she steps out of her skis and walks through the skiers crowding the plaza at the base of the hill, you want to dance up to the look-alikes and ask how it makes them feel seeing the real Jennifer, if her presence somehow threatens their own Jenniferness.

As Aniston continues through the crowd, hobbling along in ski boots, she's followed by an eddy of excitement, a wave of interest. Friends nudge friends; children halt parents; couples stop arguing. For a long moment, all these people in fuchsia jackets and fleece hats seem to stand at attention - America's First Hairdo is going by.

After the last skiers have made their way down the hill, Aniston and her friends retire to their house for drinks. Some of the friends are married and have brought their kids. One little boy has a pet ferret, which he waves around. "Get that fucking rat away from me," someone says.

"It's not a rat," says the kid. "It's in the skunk family."

Emerging from her bedroom, Aniston has changed into something more comfortable. She wears a tight white shirt, her nipples sticking out like peaks on a relief map. Just above her chest is a winking Mickey Mouse - a sort of cartoon tease. She wears tight gray sweats that ride low on her hips, offering a glimpse of a high black waistband, below which her hips are bare. What is it? A thong bikini? A G-string?

Aniston pours herself a glass of wine, leads me back to the bedroom, sits on the edge of her bed and starts talking. She tells me about people and how they don't really know how to deal with celebrities. "They're untouchable," she says, sipping her wine. "They're onscreen, in print, on billboards, and it's just a fantasy - not real. It's created - I mean, even this interview, it's all media hype. For a while, I was in the tabloids all the time, dating this person or that. If my romantic life was as exciting as they were saying, I would have been happy."

Aniston pauses to reach for a cigarette. From the living room you can hear the sound of clinking glasses. She strikes a match, the flame lighting her face. "You know what I got my brother for Christmas?" she asks, exhaling. "A Bronco. He just cried. He was just like 'No way, no way, no way!' And he held me and wouldn't let go, and I felt his body trembling. For the first time, I saw this boy, this man, just lose it."

At one point, something strikes me about our conversation. It seems as if it has already happened, as if it were following a fixed course. Maybe Aniston has already learned that celebrity trick of making all questions the same question, all interviewers the same interviewer, of slipping into that place where answers are handed over like disarmed bombs, pieces of nostalgia designed to do the least possible damage.

"I have this sensation that this conversation has happened before," I tell Aniston. "I'm asking the questions, and you're giving the answers, but it could be any writer and any actress."

"That's what's so fascinating," Aniston says, stubbing out her cigarette. "It's hallucinogenic almost - you're going to hypnotize people with images, with celebrity status, with the fascination people have with celebrities."

She stands up, downs the last of her wine and walks to the window. The mountains are fading into the darkness, like a light on a dimmer. Aniston is looking at the mountains but is maybe afraid of seeing something farther off - maybe a glimpse of her own form coming down the hill, at last proving that her suspicion is right, that somewhere out there, among the bean shops and beaneries, is the person she once feared herself to be - the girl with nothing to say.

A month has passed. Aniston has returned to her old life: California sunsets, traffic, pre-show jitters. Ski parkas have given way to half-shirts; the midriff is again the order of the day. The streets around the Warner Bros. soundstage where Friends is filmed dribble off into alleys. A turn brings you from the center of Paris to small-town America. Inside, a hall has been made to resemble a New York street, complete with a curb and a taxi; approaching the stage, you have the not unpleasant sensation of entering a theme restaurant that you called ahead to reserve a table in the cab.

On the set in the fake Manhattan living room made famous on Friends, Aniston, David Schwimmer and Courteney Cox are walking through a scene that involves a little dialogue and a lot of rolling around. Reading from scripts, the actors move tentatively through the room, as if learning the steps of a new dance. After a while, a director steps forward and shouts, "Second team!" The actors are then replaced by stand-ins, middle-aged people who walk silently through the scene so that the director can decide where to place the cameras.