Richard Gere: Heart-Breaker

Isn’t it ridiculous that I look sexy in American Gigolo?” says Richard Gere as he gulps down a glass of orange juice in his Greenwich Village duplex. “I laughed out loud when I saw the print of it. I mean, each night I put on my makeup and I look like this — a lobotomy victim. Then I see what I looked like eight months ago. You can see the absurdity of appearance.”

His countenance is a bit disarming, though no more so than Bent itself, the provocative Broadway play in which Gere is currently starring as a homosexual in Nazi Germany. Shorn of his wavy locks, Gere looks like a lobotomized teddy bear. His undulating hairline broadens his features, making his ears stick out like saucers. It’s quite a metamorphosis from Julian Kaye, the soigné escort of lonely dowagers in Paul Schrader’s new film, American Gigolo.

Gere, I learn, has metamorphosed in other ways, too. The angst he once carried like a shield has given way to a benign calm, and the change, I suspect, has a lot to do with his new status as a “bankable” star.

Back in the old days — two years ago — the industry cautiously labeled Gere “semi-bankable” after his impressive performances in a string of movies that flopped like bloated fish. His mannered, understated handiwork nicely complemented the allegorical visuals in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, but the most trenchant dialogue in that plotless beauty was between Malick and his cameraman, and much of Gere’s performance was left on the cutting-room floor. He brought an animalistic intensity to the rootless, jock-strapped hustler Tony in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, exacting orgasm after orgasm from Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton). For the film’s most breathtaking scene, Gere created a balletic excitement in a violent, sinuous snake dance while brandishing a switchblade. But director Richard Brooks’ moralmongering reduced the film to a leaden dialectic.

Gere affected the only believable performance in Robert Mulligan’s Bloodbrothers as Stony DeCoco — a young man at the crossroads in an otherwise shrill family of Bronx construction workers. And in John Schlesinger’s Yanks, Gere carried a large ensemble through a sweeping, richly textured World War II period piece that was visually beautiful, romantically touching but somehow hollow at the core.

Now, with the release of Gigolo, the word in Hollywood is that the thirty-year-old Gere is “industry hot.” And that’s more than just scuttlebutt. In Julian Kaye — $1000-a-trick male whore, master of five languages and superstud in the emotionally numb world of Southern California — Gere has a red-blooded role that could make him the male sex symbol of the Eighties.

“I never consciously thought about becoming a sex symbol when I accepted the part,” Gere says, rubbing his burr head. “But I suppose if you want to be up there — as a movie star, rock star, whatever — part of that is, yes, you want to be desired. And I suppose that is basically sexual. I wouldn’t say I did the movie specifically for that reason, but it’s part of wanting to be up there, of wanting to be watched and appreciated.”

That statement alone represents the transformation Gere has undergone. It was only a year and a half ago, during our first meeting, that he said with a defiant shrug, “Even right now, I could walk away from the whole thing.”

Holed up in a suite at New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel, Richard Gere is snarling. The “leeches, vampires and hustlers” — those faceless, nameless industry types who determine an actor’s draw — have been haunting him since he rolled out of bed.

It’s puzzling. These should be high times for an actor who not so long ago was practically unknown. He’s right off the plane from England, where he spent six months making Yanks with the highly respected director John Schlesinger (Marathon Man). And next week, he will attend the opening of two films in which he has major roles — Days of Heaven and Bloodbrothers.

“You know why I decided to do publicity,” he offers, making it clear he is doing me a great favor. “There have been situations in which I was not allowed to play a part because I was not bankable. After I did Goodbar, people thought I was that punk Tony. When you have no public profile, what else do they have to go on? I was strangling myself.”

It occurs to me, five minutes into our first conversation, that it wouldn’t bother me a bit if he strangled himself. He seems to reserve for interviews the sentiments a dog has for flea baths. The day before, a reporter from The Ladies’ Home Journal had asked him, “How does it feel to be a sex symbol? Are you gay or what?” Gere responded by dropping his pants.

The answer, apparently, was that life as a semibankable sex symbol is an entirely flaccid experience.

“It’s nobody’s business but mine who I’m fucking, who I’m not fucking,” he tells me. “The rack sheets, the press blurbs, the gossip pages — it’s all crap. And in an interview, there are just so many different levels to respond to. You can’t possibly understand my deepest emotions.”

But he seldom hints at what they are.

“It’s all a moot point. All my values are in my work. They’re all there.” He stops and looks at the moot point who has just emerged from his bedroom. She kisses him on the cheek and disappears out the door.