Drew Barrymore: Wild Thing
A laundry problem is quickly averted. Talk turns to Mad Love, and Barrymore, without missing a beat, travels back in time to make a point.
“My character goes into an institution, and her brain starts to deteriorate,” she says. “How many other fucking actresses can relate to that?” She stops, waves her arm in the air like a kid trying to get the teacher’s attention and shouts at the top of her lungs, “I can!”
And so the question bubbles menacingly to the surface: Does she worry about drinking again after having lost a year of her life to institutionalized rehabilitation?
“Every time I take a sip of alcohol, I think, ‘What will people think?’ ” Barrymore says. “That’s strange. Try that on for fucking size, living your life in a fishbowl for everyone to judge you. How ’bout that?”
Instead of an answer, another question is asked. This time, it is whether – regardless of public opinion – she fears that drinking might shatter the fragile balance that she has achieved in her life and career. She is, after all, part of a family tree that has been tragically uprooted by its history of alcoholism. To this, she smiles sweetly.
“I’m fine,” Barrymore says. “This is what kills me. Ask any person in this industry if I ever missed one fucking day of work or if I was ever unprofessional or threw a temper tantrum or walked onto the set drunk. It’s never happened. Doesn’t that stand for something?”
She pauses and affects the more dramatic tone of a veteran actress.
“The only reason anyone found out anything about me is because some guy broke into my hospital and reported it,” she says. “I never asked him to exploit my story. Nobody ever would have known, because I never missed a day of work over it. This guy has some pretty gnarly karma coming. So to clear the record I had to tell people myself. I had to go, ‘OK, I’m getting my fucking life together.’ And now I’m fine. I’m happy.”
Barrymore dabs her hand at the tears that are beginning to chase each other down her cheeks and chooses her most childlike tone. “Can’t just be happy?”
It is not your typical uniform in which to commune with nature. We are seated in a park alongside New York’s East River, and Drew Barrymore is extolling the virtues of the great outdoors. She is wearing a leopard-print coat and an intentionally loose, low-cut blouse circa Charlie’s Angels, the Cheryl Ladd years. Her purple sunglasses are held together with a diaper pin, and her hair is in spiky disarray. It is a souvenir snapshot from the Sex Pistols’ reunion picnic. If, of course, they ever decide to hold one.
Barrymore settles onto a park bench and begins playing with a friend’s dog. Suddenly she leans back and stares intently into the air.
“I tell you, nothing makes you appreciate being outside more than being locked up for a year,” she says. “Nobody appreciates the sky more than me. Nobody. I have this fear that goes way beyond claustrophobia. I want to fucking be free. I mean that in every possible way.”
More than any one thing, Barrymore seems defined by her inner battle between yearning for liberation and needing security and reassurance. She repeatedly and emphatically stresses that her friends are her family. Since the age of 15 she has lived a life of utter independence. At the same time, she has almost never been without a boyfriend, and a large number of those relationships have been live-in. When she and Erlandson began dating last June, they set about cohabiting almost immediately.
It wasn’t your typical beginning to a love story (unless your idea of romance involves vomiting, in which case your opportunities are probably rather limited). It was in Los Angeles, outside a rock club, and Barrymore had stepped outside to relieve herself of anything she had eaten in the last 24 hours. Suddenly a hand was placed on her shoulder. Noticing the tiny creature purging herself in the relatively seedy neighborhood, Erlandson had stopped to stand guard. Skyrockets, however, were not yet in flight.
Two weeks later, after being given the wrong hotelroom number by a photographer, Barrymore knocked on Erlandson’s door accidentally. There was intrigue, but still, Barrymore claims nothing was set in stone. And then while filming Mad Love in Seattle, Barrymore ran into Erlandson yet again. This time, he suggested they retreat to his apartment to play records. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. The rest is history.
“I love him so much,” says Barrymore at this moment and countless others to come. “And I have a family now from Eric, too. He has such a huge, amazing family. Seven kids. I never thought I’d have a sense of family until I had my own kids. I want two: a boy and a girl. My daughter will be named Ruby Daffodil.”
Of course, there is extended family as well. While Barrymore brings to the relationship her trailerful of issues, Erlandson enters the union with Courtney Love – his bandleader and a walking psychology experiment in her own right. It’s enough to make you want to buy some popcorn, sit back and watch the carnage. During the rehearsal for Hole’s MTV Unplugged taping, in fact, Love chastised Erlandson by saying, “You’re the one with the girlfriend on the cover of Playboy.”