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Articles Source / Date: GQ February 1995 Title / Page(s): "Uma in Bloom" by Lucy Kaylin pp 145 Uma Thurman, Hollywood's least-willing lust object, has finally come to terms with her own appeal. Something about Uma never fails to summon the closet fetishist in otherwise reasonable people-men mostly, but by no means exclusively. Uma-intrigue tends to provoke strange behavior-as the scores of L.A. folk who dressed as her heroin-sniffing, Louise Brook-coiffed character from Pulp Fiction last Halloween; or in the illusionist Penn Jillette, who pays cyber-homage to her each month in a column he writes for a computer magazine. Then there were the residents of the Manhattan apartment in which Uma and her then-husband Gary Oldman, had previously lived, who found themselves on all fours in the bathroom one night, scouring the tiles for souvenirs-specifically, pubic hairs that might once belonged to Uma. Someone else even chose Uma's name for his mantra-a name redolent of preverbal lustings, of the blood rushing thrum of a body in heat. Ho hum, says Uma. "They probably get their coffee from a waitress every morning that's better-looking than I am," she says of the gaga patrol, over a cappuccino one day last fall in New York City-her wide-set, pale-blue eyes a pair of unflickering lanterns set beneath fine eyebrows that curve toward the temples like seagulls; her lips two perfect pink puffs that seem to require some physical effort to keep shut. Reaching back, she winds her hair, which is still damp from the shower, into a loose knot. "But I'm on the movie screen, so I'm there to be fantasized about. It's completely absurd, but what can you do?" She laughs her laugh-a catch of breath, finished by a tiny trill. Uma's famously placid demeanor is belied only by the few absentminded instances wherein she brings a long, large knuckled finger to her teeth and begins to gnaw it intently. Of course, in Uma's case, conventional prettiness is some what beside the point, for that has never been her primary draw. Nor is it her acting skill that arouses people so-Uma has yet to prove what she's really capable of onscreen. No, the power of Uma is in her pungent mystique, her obliqueness, her precocious self-possession and self-sufficiency-she may well like you, but she certainly doesn't need you. The wisdom of the ages on the face of a child, who also happens to have the body of a woman: Uma Thurman might be the world's most substantial waif-a Kate Moss with soul. And she stays with you, Uma. "She's haunting," says Pulp Fiction co-star John Travolta, who sees her as being "quite vulnerable-more vulnerable than she even knows. I think Uma's poignancy is in her empathy-she knows what life is about." Spend the day with Uma and chances are you'll dream about her that night. But there's something more, something darker, that renders Uma more fetishized than admired. A factor, certainly, is the smoky roles she's chosen, and the uninhibitedness with which she seems to inhabit them. The first of these, when she was only 17, was the costume-and-prop orgy The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, in which a naked Uma-arms strategically draped-rises from the deep as Venus on the half shell. Then came her indelible performance in Dangerous Liaisons as a former convent girl who, in one ridiculously slavered-over scene, sheds her nightgown mid-tryst and submits bare-breastedly to John Malkovich's predatory viscount. With the exception of Sharon Stone's interrogation scene in Basic Instinct, never has the fleeting surrender of something so private become such a public obsession: The startling turns made both actresses into stars. Uma, however, is not Sharon Stone. (Try picturing Stone saying, as Uma once did, "I'm not a dream queen or anything, so people don't want to, like, pee themselves when they see me.") Thurman didn't welcome her newfound notoriety; she didn't, as she mind-bendingly puts it, "take the heat and try and fry myself as my own egg." Instead, she fled to England for a time and turned down roles, "damsels in distress, sexy stuff," she says, "which was all completely outrageous to me, because I had no relationship to that in myself yet"-"that" being her own incipient sexuality. "To have that stuff extracted from you and then twisted and then plastered everywhere and then shoved back at you is very confusing." But when she finally did decide to get back in the game, it was hardly via chaste family movies. It was in, among others, the self-consciously carnal Henry and June. As Henry Miller's much younger wife, Uma is all sloe-eyed sensuality while fleshing out what might be the most common male voyeur fantasy-woman-on-woman sex. The movie did little to cool Uma's steamy reputation: The naughty-sounding NC-17 rating was created especially for it. So much for rising above prurience by doing serious, arty pictures. "As clever as I was-and I was cleverer then-I didn't understand," Uma says. "I had very pure ideas, and I thought to do things for the best reasons. And I didn't have a lot of hang-ups, either," about baring all at a director's behest. Fearful, however, that she was being cast on that basis, Uma began taking precautions: In 1992's Jennifer 8, she used a body double for a bathtub scene; and with '93's Mad Dog and Glory, she had lengthy, difficult discussions before even considering a seminude tumble with Robert De Niro. "I finally got to the point where I was saying to her 'Look, I feel like I'm in high school and I'm trying to talk you out of your clothes,"' says the movie's coproducer Steven A. Jones. "We had to keep saying to her 'We cast you based on your audition,' where she came in and physically shoved De Niro around. This kid, 22 years old, walks into a room, grabs De Niro by the lapels and shoves him. She was very fearless and fierce about what she'd decided she wanted to do as an actor." As well as what she didn't. In person, what makes Uma so intoxicating is that there's nothing intentionally come-hither about her. In the tradition of the forbidden woman-child, from Lolita on down, she has seemed bored by-if not, at times, wholly unaware of-her potent allure; it's nothing she has ever cultivated. Yet, without thinking, Uma will stroke your hand or touch your face while telling a routine anecdote; a kind of benign sensuality is simply second nature to her. Like this one time when we were goofing around at the Union Square farmers' market. Uma was in her element, pouncing on bundles of swollen, dirty radishes and holding them up rapturously to her face as if they were roses, while I feigned similar interest in some vegetable down the way. Suddenly I felt something scratching me lightly on the cheek. It turned out to be an especially green string bean being proffered by Uma, who proceeded, wordlessly, to feed it to me. She's full of that kind of unconscious insouciance. Still, Uma's mistrustful of being desired, on the screen and off, for she well remembers a time when she was anything but, and that is also part of her appeal. Having been both shunned and lusted after, she's suitably ironic-thus, always just a little out of reach. "I've sometimes been very testy just for the sake of being testy," she says. "I love being a bit of a struggle." Fortunately, however, she's becoming more of a mensch about it all. With twelve or thirteen movies behind her, she's been around, gained some perspective-"I've seen certain cycles played out," she says serenely. She's no longer sweating the past. Of the universal boner her big scene in Dangerous Liaisons seemed to provoke, she now says "Yeah, people went momentarily crazy. But it's a fickle bunch. This whole thing about fame and heat, it's like leaves floating on the water. They just float by, float somewhere else." Even so, Uma seems downright renewed by some of the fame and heat generated by her very game and thoroughly clothed performance in Pulp Fiction. On the heels of the disastrous Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, in which Uma took the starring role of Sissy Hankshaw, Pulp Fiction marked something of a comeback (the Hankshaw Redemption, if you like). Yet, it isn't in her to capitalize: This spring she will appear in a supporting role, of all things (opposite Vanessa Redgrave), in the quirky, small, John Irvin-directed A Month by the Lake. "That's what I love about Uma-she doesn't count lines," says Harvey Weinstein, cochairman of Miramax, which produced both A Month by the Lake and Pulp Fiction. "She goes for good things. I've seen her get $2 million offers to be the girl opposite one of these action guys and be the window dressing. She always calls me and says 'Should I do a piece of s---? I'm broke right now.' And I say 'How bad is it?'-some times we have to quantify how s----y the s--- is. And she's always tempted. She says 'Harv, two million bucks. Two million dollars!' And then she doesn't take it." Supporting or not, the role in A Month by the Lake lets her fly: Hardly Uma's typical self-important ingenue, the bitchy Miss Beaumont is a nanny-cum-cocktease who's as selfish as Thurman herself is empathic. But somewhere, there are similarities. While Irvin cites Uma's "shrewdness, her intelligence and, of course, her outstanding, eye-blasting beauty" as the traits that make her right for the part, Uma sees something else. "[The character] has contempt for all the attention she gets, which is something I can relate to," and suddenly, she rears back, slitting her eyes, only half-vamping: " 'Oh, yes, really? You like me? Really? Ha! You like me, do you? Well, l'll show you."' While some homes reflect the passions of their in habitants, Uma's loft in lower Manhattan actually resembles her physically. It's an airy, rangy, fluid (and, on this day, sunny) space with exotic but discreet touches: butterscotch velvet couches, a grand piano, a statue of pzo-a Buddhist deity whose mission is venturing into hell to retrieve lost souls. ("I like that," says Uma. "He has compassion for the damned.") There are blond wood floors and enormous, open windows free of shades or trim of any kind. Just great, blank geometric shapes, like Uma's own eyes, staring out impassively. The window frames have been stripped raw of paint or finish, suggestive of Uma's makeup-free purity (in fashion-magazine layouts, she almost looks as if she's trying to peer through the carapace of cosmetics). Just beyond the living area is a bedroom; in it, a long-limbed four-poster-the perfect resting place for an angular woman nearly six feet tall. In the loft, however, as in Uma herself, there are pockets of chaos and corners of contradiction. On the kitchen counter, for instance, is the hastily dumped detritus of a fast lane life: a makeup brush, a hundred-dollar bill, a pair of black panties, an AmEx card, a wrappered tampon, Eric Clapton's number in London, an empty business envelope on which someone has imprinted a burnt-sienna lip smack. The bathroom, too, just beyond the four-poster bed, is the refuge of another Uma entirely-the one in the movies. Next to the sink is a vast acreage of beautifying apparatus- creams, lipsticks, applicator wands of all sizes, liners, an eye lash curler; across the way is a walk-in closet barely restraining a riot of slinky sheaths and tops. In other words, this isn't the boudoir of someone who's uninterested in her appearance, despite all the assiduous covering up Uma is lately wont to do-wearing schoolgirl eyeglasses to night clubs and schlumpy cardigans on talk shows (she's a big fan of cardigans, which of course draw the eye away from the breasts to the space in between). Today she's wearing an ill fitting velvet top, a baggy black skirt with no hem and red sneakers; in an hour she'll change into boyish jeans and a blue sweater. The message is clear: Now, Uma shows her body on her own terms. If Uma's place and schizo style of self-presentation reflect a telling dichotomy, so does her palate. The grown-up Uma orders truffles, has slurped down her share of raw oysters and once made a dinner for Mad Dog and Glory director John McNaughton and producer Jones that featured caviar. Yet, in the snappy restaurants she frequents, which tend to boast seared monkfish or some such thing for $22.50, Uma, as often as not, will ask the waiter if they've got peanut butter and jelly stashed somewhere. She likes hot-fudge sundaes, and back at her loft, she carves herself a raft of some chemically enhanced, frozen store-bought white cake with vanilla frosting. "I love frozen cakes," she says greedily, digging in. Kid food, in other words, for someone who didn't get to be a kid for very long. Maybe she's just trying to catch up on all the white-trash goodies she was denied by her extraordinarily sophisticated parents. Her Swedish ex-model mother was a psychotherapist and ex-wife of Timothy Leary, while her father, a highly esteemed scholar who teaches at Columbia University, is the country's foremost authority on Buddhism. In all ways, her family fell wide of the mainstream. Uma and her three brothers, who look like quadruplets and were all named for Hindu deities, spent a few childhood years in India, where Uma rode a camel and two of her brothers were literally kept on leashes. But mostly they grew up in Woodstock, New York, and Amherst, Massachusetts. "It's a small town, Amherst," Uma says, pulling the sleeve of her sweater down over her hand like a sock puppet before grabbing the pot of tea water on the stove. "A lot of good Christians around. Kids would say 'Do you believe in God?' And I'd say no-not in a negative sense, just simply because it wasn't a God-oriented household. 'Well, you're gonna burn in hell, then' ...I remember my brother and I had that one on the bus, once." Uma also talks about having been called ugly in high school-having been ugly-"too tall, too odd; I didn't have the right clothes, didn't look right." And while every great beauty has summoned the same phony sounding memory at one time or another, in Uma's case you almost believe it. In scrawnier times, she must have looked a little like those sad saucer-eye kids in the paintings. "I wasn't one of those eccentric oddballs that was contented to be different and separate," she says. "I desperately longed for approval and all that. And I always had hope. Even the kids that had rejected me, the minute they were nice I was ready to put it all behind me, though I wish I could take my mother's advice: 'Well, forget about it! They're a bunch of squares anyway! What do you want to be one of a bunch of squares for?!'" Uma laughs. "And I couldn't relate to that. I always wanted it to work out." "One day, when I was a totally normal, grown-up teenager," she says, "I thought about all my school experiences and burst into tears." Again, the little laugh. "And that was it. It was over." These days, she and her brothers are bonded veterans who fought in the same outfit. They were her dates when Pulp Fiction opened the New York Film Festival; her brother Dechen crashed at her place for a while after being tied up and robbed in his Brooklyn apartment not long a go. They all lean on one another-sometimes Uma and Dechen hold hands, walking down the street. "I'd say my brothers are my best friends, in all honesty, in a crazy way," says Uma. "Till death do us part. Who can take the trouble to explain all the s--- that they know to anybody?" By age 17, Uma had put childhood behind her. She was modeling, living in New York's Hell Kitchen and hanging out with people twice her age. Eventually she'd land movie roles, as well as the volatile actor Gary Oldman, whom she'd marry in 1990. They lasted less than two years. "I think my... 'marriage,'with all due respect, was...," Uma casts about trying to keep this neutral and private. Then: "It's an infantile gesture to wed your first boyfriend, which he basically was. I mean, I'd had other dates and other affairs before, but I'd never had a relationship with anyone. And it was immature, rebellious...it was a mistake." she pauses, starting hard. "Of course it was a mistake, because it's over and marriage is forever. I found out a lot. And I loved him so much. But I shouldn't had married him, of course-he was not to be married to." And now? Any truth to the endless tabloid linkage of Uma with...Eric Clapton? Richard Gere? Robert De Niro? Quentin Tarantino? "I'm single, actually, to be quite honest. But I kind of like the idea at least somewhere there exists a wild and racy lifestyle," meaning, in gossip columnists' imaginations-never mind the fact that A-list Uma is by no means a homebody. "Somebody has to hold the torch, and at least I don't have to do the damaging night work to back it up." "Jizo looks good here, Uma," Professor Thurman says, glancing over his eyeglasses at the statue. Minutes earlier the phone had rung; Uma answered with a squeal of "Mumsy!"-it turned out her parents were in the neighborhood. Her good-natured, intensely engaging father wears a bolo tie, while her mother, who speaks with a Swedish accent, looks like Greta Garbo a little later in life. She tells Uma she's just finished fasting for some medical reason, whereupon Uma produces a large onion and a larger knife in order to make her some miso soup. A Siamese cat with a funky gait and weak haunches sidles in; she's been around for twenty-one of Uma's twenty-four years. Thurman family banter is antic and affectionate; Uma begs her father, who's having trouble reading a sushi take-out menu, to get a decent pair of glasses. At one point, Professor Thurman starts talking about what a perfect baby Uma was-not at all wrinkled, and with a a nice head of blonde hair. In fact, he says, a friend of his who happened to witness her first bath corroborated just how perfect she was. Uma, meanwhile, rolls her eyes-clearly she's had enough of people assessing her nakedness. Uma's always gotten on well with adults, and she's never wanted for opinions. "She doesn't get impressed by people being older than her or anything," says Maria de Medeiros, who played Anais Nin in Henry and June. "Uma gives great importance to her feelings and what she thinks is right, and she'll struggle for it." However, she seems to be struggling less and less. She can hold her own with anyone, even intimidating characters like Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino. One day last year, during the Venice Film Festival, where Uma was on the jury and the Miramax movie Heavenly Creatures was competing, Weinstein invited her and Tarantino to lunch on the Lido. "Not that I would influence her," Weinstein says in a terrifying guffaw. "But I might dropped a line in like 'Quentin, did you see Heavenly Creatures, by any chance?' And he said, badly, 'What a great movie!' And Uma said, 'Come on, guys, look, I'm on the jury. This is a complete setup and I'm not standing for it. I'm and upstanding person and I don't give a s--- if you're both friends of mine, forget it!'" But there's plenty of girl left in Uma Thurman, judging by the fact she just learned to drive a car, and by the coltish trot she takes through a music store just as night is falling in Greenwich Village on Halloween. She's searching for some new music by women, any women-"It's important that we support them!" she says, flipping through the Nona Hendryx bin. (Uma even selects music like a young person: indiscriminately.) And just when you think she's acting her age, she'll stun you with some world-weary wisdom about life-her life, and the pressures of having taken on so much publicly, so young. Unwrapping her new Cranberries CD back at the loft, Uma concludes, "I've found out that the wisest way is to discover your own vulnerability and your own insecurity, and just stop thinking you're such a smarty-pants."