The ‘Scream’ Team

Gayheart is sometimes ambivalent about her brief dalliance with necromancy. She has heard that during her time as the Noxzema girl, sales of the face cream, which had been moldering, took a good leap in the air. It is safe to say, and say it we do, that in a sense she brought the ancient emollient back from the dead. “Uh, kind of, yeah,” she says, modestly. And yet she is displeased. It’s been three years — three years during which she had a short-lived role on Beverly Hills 90210, a short-lived TV series called Earth 2 and a part in Nothing to Lose — and still the public hasn’t forgotten what she once did!

“At least once a day, people refer to me as the Noxzema chick or the zit-cream girl,” she says, pouting.

One day those people may get it. One day!

“Get me mad enough and look out!” she goes on, menacingly. For instance, back in eighth grade in Kentucky, there was this girl named Michelle — “Michelle Jones, actually,” Gayheart snorts. “She knows. She knows what happened” — who harassed her constantly. Michelle Jones would knock into Gayheart and make her drop her schoolbooks and then call her a bitch, thinking she had the hots for Jones’ boyfriend.

Gayheart stood this for a year. “Well, then, at recess one day,” Gayheart says, “she comes over and shoves me, and I fall into a mudhole. A big mudhole. I get up. I proceed to shove her into the mudhole. I punched her. I scratched her. I kicked her ass. No one ever messed with me again. The boys started calling me Rocky.” Other nicknames? “Oh, my hair was kind of big and frizzy, so I would be called Bushhead, Cottonhead, Frizzhead and Helmethead. It was terrible. I hate them all,” she says, laughing gaily, as if she wouldn’t really slaughter them Carrie-like if she had the chance.

Earlier, we had thought to spring our plastic cockroach under a plastic bagel on Gayheart. Now we tiptoe away from that idea.

She carries her cat, Kitty, with her on airplanes and once, during an emergency landing, refused to slide down the escape chute without her Kitty. Gayheart to the flight attendant: “Fuck you!” We further explore the nuances of her character by asking what she likes to do that she will only do alone. What she likes to do is organize. “It’s not something you do with someone around,” she says. “It’s the kitchen cabinets. The bathroom cabinets. Closets. Every drawer. Everything. Meticulously.” She pauses. “Actually, my fiance thinks I’m psychotic.”

Naturally, we are hard pressed not to agree.

“I’m not,” Gayheart says, simply. “I just like things to be right.”

The psychological underpinnings are perhaps these: Nothing ever goes right for long in a deep mine, and Gayheart conies from a long line of deep miners. Back in Pine Top, that’s what her father did, mine coal in the deep veins, as did his father before him. They were poor. At school, Gayheart ate the reduced-price lunches. At the age of 15, she left to become a model in Manhattan. She is now 25. She has lived in Los Angeles for a year and four months. Generally, during the day, Gayheart will be found wearing underwear, but as the hours wear on, she may have a change of heart. “Yes,” she says, musing, “I would say it would be the night hours that I don’t wear underwear. It’s uncomfortable. Why would I?” Thus does she make her way around town.

During her last minute at Marilyn Monroe’s crypt, she confesses to having an issue with biting and grinding. She says she grinds her teeth in her sleep and announces that she is the one of the Scream 2 Six who must wear a gum guard at night, dentist’s orders. Furthermore, she says she’s a person who likes to gnaw on her inner cheek. And did she happen to mention that she also bites her cuticles until they bleed?

“This one’s a little fucked,” she says, finger rising. “See?”

Nervously, we attempt to change the subject. We know she is leaving for Africa shortly. She will be away for a long time and will miss out on many things, including photo shoots for important magazines such as the one we work for. She is making a movie in Africa. But who knows what may really happen to her over there, on the dark continent? We ask her what she’d most likely come back as in her next life.

“Like, the whole vampire thing is very interesting to me,” she says, cheerily.

Now there’s a thought.

We get the heck out of there and think that what we really ought to do now is go hang out with the one known as the Slayer.