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| GQ |
| March 2001 |
  "Edward
had inhabited that character to the point where you didn't see any seams.
He never revealed an actor at work." To Norton, vanishing into the role
of Man 1 was the moment he understood the power of what he calls "the seduction
and hammering of and audience." It was a new found lesson that would prove
vital the following spring, when he auditioned for the part of Aaron Stampler
in Primal Fear - a role that would catapult him in the space of a year
from cranking Nirvana in a rent-controlled apartment to gracing the red
carpet at the Academy Award in the arm of Kurt Cobain's widow. The Edward
Norton who rode up the elevator in New York's Gulf & Western Building
on a spring afternoon in 1995 to audition for the role of Aaron Stampler
bore little resemblance to the aspiring sophisticate who had come to New
York from New Haven several years before. This Norton greeted Deborah Aquila,
Paramount Pictures' head of feature-film casting, with a stutter and a
thick Appalachian accent gleaned from repeated viewing of Coal Miner's
Daughter, At that point, Aquila had failed to find an actor capable of
portraying a cold-blooded killer who hoodwinks his way off death row by
pretending to have multiple-personality disorder. Most actors - including
Matt Damon - could nail one personality, but not both. "When Edward
spoke to me as Aaron, " remembers Aquila, "I could not help but fall in
love with that sincerity and that earnestness. But then he changed, and
there was a moment when I didn't think I was going to get out of that room
alive. At one point, when he was screaming in my face, he yanked me back
by my hair. Then I looked up into this kid's eyes, and I didn't recognize
him, and that genuinely scared me. I didn't know him, you know? And I thought,
Oh, great, the real thing. I hope my husband can raise our daughter by
himself." Paramount Pictures subsequently dropped the ruse of being raised
in a James Dickey novel and landed the role. Within weeks, tapes of his
screen test opposite Richard Gere and Laura Linney circulated samizdat
as producers, agents and studio executives scrambled to get a glimpse if
the phenom. "By the time we were finished shooting," says Primal Fear producer
and industry veteran Howard "Hawk" Koch Jr., "he already had met with Milos
Forman, with Woody Allen and with Anthony Mingella. He became an instantaneous
hot kid." The movie came out in April 1996, and for his debut performance
Norton grabbed an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Although
Hollywood's first impression of Norton came from Aaron Stampler - someone
so cunning, so manipulative he can fool even his own defense attorney -
my first recollection of him is singing "I'm Through With Love" as he moons
over Drew Barrymore in the 1996 Woody Allen musical Everyone Says I Love
You. And the more I talked to Norton's friends, colleagues and coworkers,
the more I wondered which Norton variation was closer to who he really
is. Is he the goofy intellectual who dedicated his first directing effort
to his late mother? Or the pretentious monster who pushes his directors
to the breaking ere? "There's the part of Edward that taught himself Japanese
at 16. But there's the part of Edward that tells you he taught himself
Japanese at 16" is how a colleague describes the thin line Norton treads
between brilliance and arrogance. On-screen and off, however, Norton, who
arrived in town with as serious a persona as "Don't Touch My Stuff"
Francis from Stripes, seems to be lightening up. He is spending the winter
filming Death to Smoochy, a dark comedy in which he plays the title role,
an innocent kiddie-TV-show performer who replaces Rainbow Randolph Smiley
(Robin Williams) and is targeted for destruction by his downwardly-spiraling
predecessor. In his personal life, too, Norton's showing signs of brightness.
Sure, he still will not pose for pictures when fans approach him on the
street, but he seems to smile more in public these days, especially when
he's courtside at Lakers games with his girlfriend of the past year, Salma
Hayek. As I wait at the gate to Los Angeles's Runyon Canyon one afternoon
a few weeks before Christmas, I wonder which face of Edward will greet
me. The park is the sort of place in which an Albee character would feel
at home. Musicians, tattooed rent boys and other creatures of the night
troll the trailhead while the rest if the world is at work. Thankfully,
I'm not waiting long before Norton pulls up in a spanking-new silver BMW
X5. (Note to paparazzi: The SUV is a rental that he'll be ditching soon.)
He's dressed in Puma shorts, hiking boots, a polo shirt and a Panavision
baseball cap.  His
eyes are a deep blue, his face is covered with stubble, and his voice is
soft to the point of being hard to hear. During the first leg of our hike
into the Hollywood Hills, he chats amiably about a five-month traveling
binge he's just finished with family members. He is the eldest of three,
and nothing feels better to him that spending time blood on blood. In the
fall, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with his brother Jim (a white-water
rafting guide) and his baby sister, Molly (who works as the Africa manager
for a travel firm). He also spent a month in China visiting his father,
who works for the Nature Conservancy in Kunming, a city about one hundred
miles north of China's borders with Laos and Vietnam. Norton credits much
of the man he has become to the freewheeling intellectual discussions around
the family dinner table, as well as to the close relationship he had with
his late maternal grandfather, James Rouse, who was a real-estate developer.
As our walk reaches a scenic overlook if the architectural miasma that
extends from the Pacific Ocean to the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles,
Norton tells me about growing up in Columbia, Maryland, a progressive community
Rouse developed. Rouse, who "invented" the shopping mall and then devoted
himself to revitalizing America's inner cities, built Columbia in the late
'60s on 14,000 acres of farmland outside Baltimore as an antidote to the
uniform sprawl he saw devouring the landscape. By the '80s, it had become
a model of a successfully integrated community. But when I ask Norton whether
he felt a sense of noblesse oblige growing up there, he brushes off the
notion that his family was the Magnificent Ambersons in a United-Colors-of-Benetton
wonderland. He claims his buddies at the local public high school had no
idea of his pedigree. He pauses. "People presume
- based on very limited information theyy've bothered to find out about
my grandfather - that I grew up in an affluent setting." Norton
then points out that when he was a kid, his father was a federal prosecutor
in the Carter Administration and later a nonprofit-environmental attorney.
His mother was a public-school teacher. "They probably,
combined, never made more than $120,000 a year [in present dollar value].
My grandfather was not a throw-money-around millionaire. He gave - in his
life and upon his death - most everything he ever made to charity."
(According to court records. Rouse left behind an estate valued at $21
million, of which $6.3 million was willed to charities after his death
in April 1996.) "Did you have a trust fund?" I ask. "No,
never," he responds. By all accounts, Norton's years in Columbia
were fairly normal. Indeed, his advanced-placement-English teacher, Andrea
Almand, tells me later that Norton distinguished himself less by his lineage
and more by his droll sense of humor - exhibited in a play he wrote and
conned his friends into performing during the annual Literary Festival.
The play was called Classroom: An Original Absurdist Play in One Scene
(With Apologies to Beckett). Sample dialogue included a character called
Student 1 announcing, "Listen, you come into this class in your animal
skins, and you leave the same. Are you truly a new man at the end of the
day? The rabbit dies, and there's nothing to be done." Yet the years in
progressive Columbia have left their mark. For when Norton and I talk about
what kind of car he wants to get, he asks my opinion of those electric-gas
hybrids, which to me are the automotive equivalent of being a vegan. And
if there is a subject about which Norton will gladly play Rouse's scion,
it is the "malling" of America - the notion that homogeneity is suffocating
eclecticism at every turn. As we take a breather atop a ridge near the
Hollywood sign, I ask how he views the fact that Starbucks and other chains
have snuffed out the independent retailers that were part of his grandfather's
initial vision for his developments at Boston's Faneuil Hall and New York's
South Street Seaport. "I look on it very negatively,"
says Norton. "And my response to that was Fight Club.
I think my grandfather would have loved Fight Club, actually, because it
spoke to the same things he was railing against for years: the franchising
of America, the creation of sameness everywhere, all our transactions taking
place within these places that are totally indistinct." To hear
him talk about the movie, it's clear that its critical (and commercial)
failure is the wound that has not healed in an otherwise charmed body of
work. A tale of Lost Boys who revolt against consumerism, the movie seemed
destined to become the third panel in a premillennial triptych of Salaryman
Angst (alongside In the Company of Men and American Beauty). But it made
less than $40 million in domestic box-office sales and suffered mixed reviews.
Sounding almost Ahab-like, Norton tells me Fight Club will eventually be
remembered like other shock-of-the-new movies such as Bonnie and Clyde
and Taxi Driver. They were initially dismissed and subsequently embraced
as classics. In Norton's still angry mind, Fight Club was done in by the
"knee-jerk cynicism" of baby-boomer critics who reuse to release their
wizened grip on the pop-culture joystick. David Denby, he says, was endemic
of the problem when he wrote in the New Yorker, "The florid anti-consumerism
rant gets overtaken by the movie's unacknowledged sadomasochistic and homoerotic
subtext. The danger of Ikea get forgotten (and why pick on Ikea, anyway?)."
"This is exactly what we're indicting in this movie,"
responds Norton, his voice rising to a crescendo; he cannot fathom
how anyone who calls himself a man could defend the soulless Scandinavian-furniture
store. As he speaks, I can picture him breaking an imitation Philipe Starck
end table over Denby's head. Needless to say, Christmas shopping with Norton
will not be a trip to the Century City mall. After finishing our hike -
in which topic ranged from Norton's plans to adapting the novel Motherless
Brooklyn for the screening to his interest in akido - we pile into the
X5 and make our way to a tiny photo gallery in Echo Park. As we head onto
the 101 freeway, the downtown skyline is bathed in that soft, sad glow
of late-afternoon twilight. After a while the conversation turns to how
his first brush with success coincided with this mother developing brain
cancer and subsequently dying in 1997. I offer my condolences and mention
how as a teenager I lost my mother to breast cancer. Curious to know whether
he, too, feels that the mother-son conversation continues beyond the grace,
I ask him if he wrestles with questions like Would my mother be proud of
me? What would she think of the choices I've made in my life? "My
family has always been so supportive of my interests. Whenever you lose
somebody, everything you do afterward is colored by that. There's loss
for sure, absences, but prior to this experience I thought of death as
an annihilation, and it's not. You think there's going to be this absolute
absence, and there isn't," he says. I nod and mention a favorite
Emily Dickenson poem that begins "Mama never forgets her birds / Though
in another tree / She looks down just as often / And just as tenderly..."
"Yeah, the conversation continues," Norton
says.  "You
retain the connection. You look to these people in everything you're doing.
You draw inspiration from them; you still end up sharing things,"
he adds, cementing this brief moment of mutual vulnerability that plays
out against the backdrop of rush-hour traffic. In order to spend more time
with his dying mother, Norton was one of the few actors of his generation
who didn't go off to war in 1997 - he passed on the opportunity to work
with Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malick in The
Thin Red Line. The following year, he dedicated his directorial debut,
Keeping the Faith, to Robin Norton, because his interest in making it had
to with his mother's fondness for romantic comedies as it did with producing,
directing and starring in something he cowrote with his best friend. As
an illustration of the "conversation continuing," he adds that as a kid
he would often watch a movie and then break it down by genre with his English-teacher
mom, so "a lifetime of discussions with her informed doing that movie."
Talking about the genre of romantic comedy with Norton, it's easy to see
how he could never be satisfied simply being an actor for hire. His literary
sensibility crops up as we talk about how tough it is to figure out new
obstacles to keep the hero and heroine apart now that we live in a supposedly
classless society (and Woody Allen has all but exhausted neuroses as barriers
to true love). So when his pal Stuart Blumberg pitched him the premise
of a priest and a rabbi falling in love with the same girl - a movie equal
parts The Philadelphia Story and Bridget Loves Bernie - Norton liked the
idea of religion as the obstacle. Part of the allure in working with Blumberg,
he says, was collaborating with a guy he had shared his first apartment
with in New York, a guy with whom he's been a loser - eating pizza and
watching Withnail & I over and over. From their tiny brownstone apartment
on West 78th Street, Norton and Blumberg conspired to break into the big
time: writing spec episodes for TV shows, penning a Naked Gun-esque comedy
about an inept superhero called Stupid Man. And the two Yalies were poised
to write what they were sure was going to be their golden ticket into the
Dream Factory - a spec script about Mata Hari - when Norton auditioned
for the Primal Fear role. Says Blumberg when we chat on the phone about
how quickly went from geek to gorgeous: "Just to show you how naive I was
when he got the part, I remember saying, 'OK, we're still going to write
Mata Hari?' And he's like, 'Sure.' So it didn't really sink in until he
got the Woody Allen movie and we went to Michael's Pub during the shoot
and he introduced me to Woody, who was playing there with his band." As
fond as Blumberg is of his writing partner, he has heard about the actor's
reputation for being difficult. "It's a function of being unable to hold
back when he sees something that could be working at a different, higher
level," he says, trying to put the behavior in context. There is always
a point in an interview where you have to ask the deal breaker, the question
that send the star out of the room or into an unintelligible rant peppered
with pithy words life craft, misunderstood and bogus. And with Norton,
that question would be Does being the actor's actor of your generation
mean you get to be the asshole's asshole as well? So before addressing
the "Are you difficult?" question with Norton, I wait until the BMW is
safely parked. "So how would you respond to the notion that you're an overreached?"
I ask, figuring this will put a quick end to my Sony microcassette recorder.
"Someone who has a hard time respecting the boundaries between actor and
director, actor and screenwriter, actor and producer?" It's dark enough
now for Norton's face to be illuminated by the eerie night-vision orange
of the dashboard, and he doesn't bother to bullshit, nor does he get ticked
off. Instead, he answers the charge directly and succinctly. "I'm
incapable of engaging as an actor on something without engaging as a dramatist.
And when you work with great people, they not only accept it, they welcome
it. But when you work with insecure people, it's a problem." The
implication is perhaps to Tony Kay, the director of American History X,
a film for which Norton received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor but
a film whose director still refers to Norton as a "narcissistic asshole
person." Norton was not the TV-commercial director's first choice for the
role of Derek Vinyard, a reformed skinhead who watches rage destroy his
family. But Kaye, a first-time director, quickly came around and welcomed
Norton's contributions to David McKenna's script. "He was a brilliant guy
to work with," says Kaye, "and he would have won the Oscar for American
History X if he hadn't fucked me over in the editing process." The two
worked well together during the shoot and for most of post production.
Their collaboration went off the rails, however, after Kaye took more than
a year to edit the movie (most rookie directors get four months) and the
studio sent Norton into the editing room to work alongside (and coax a
final cut out of) Kaye. By the summer of 1998, when Norton went off to
make Fight Club, New Line Cinema decided to take the movie away from Kaye,
and the director retaliated with the Dadaist stunt of placing full-page
ads in the Hollywood trade papers, addressed to New Line executives, quoting
Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln and John Lennon (Everybody's hustlin'
for a buck and a dime / I'll scratch your back and you knife mine). Norton
was caught in the crossfire, with Kaye making him out to be a patrician
brat by erroneously whining to Vanity Fair, "His grandfather invented the
ice cream cone!" On Fight Club, the legend of Edward the Difficult grew
when stories made the rounds about his clashing with director David Fincher,
regarding details as small as whether his character would wear Stan Smith
or Chuck Taylor sneakers. "He's a daunting proposition because you're taking
on a collaborator," says Fincher of Norton.  The
director and the actor ended the production as friends, though. "No one
could have played that part except for Edward. I think it's probably easy
to read him the wrong way because he's still so new and because he's somebody
to be reckoned with." As he steps out of the X5 and into the Fototeka gallery,
Norton exhibits nearly the same attention to detail in choosing a photograph
as he does in choosing a role (or a character's footwear). On the ride
over, he mentioned that he has violated his criteria (great script plus
great director) only one time since he's been able to exercise free will
over his career. And that one time is his next movie, The Score. Working
with two titans of their respective generations - Robert De Niro and Marlon
Brando - was an offer he could not refuse. "Two Corleones," I blurt out.
"You've got the matched set: Young Vito and Old Vito." "I'd
do this one for the poster," he says, sounding more like film buff
than film star until the database in my head scrolls to the more than $6
million he was paid for movie. Curious to know whether the shoot lived
up to the ex-waiter's daydreams, I ask about the first day the three bad
boys had a scene together. Norton admits to allowing himself a brief moment
to stare in awe as the camera rolled. Then, as Norton said his line, Brando
dribbled designer water down the front of his shirt. And when Norton turned
to De Niro for a reaction, he caught De Niro catnapping on his feet. In
lieu of a lengthy conversations about Stella Adler, Brando further endeared
himself to Norton through practical jokes. A favorite prank involved a
high-tech whoopee cushion that would make six different fart sounds depending
on how the Wild One manipulated the remote control. "Marlon
would always figure out where Bob was going to be sitting in a scene, and
he would hide it somewhere near him," remembers Norton. "And
he would wait until Bob got warmed up in the third or fourth take and then
start firing it off while we were trying to be cool-thief serious."
To see whether Norton was up to his old tricks on The Score. I ask whether
he was merely an actor for hire. He explains that he transformed the script
so that burglary became a metaphor for acting - with Brando's thief representing
raw talent, De Niro's character combining talent with very disciplined
career choices and Norton's character being "a young guy trying to make
his bones." Reached in the editing room, The Score's director Frank Oz,
acknowledged that while it was a contentious shoot, there was, to quote
David Selznick, only one "madman at the helm," meaning Frank Oz. He welcomed
what he describes as Norton's tremendous involvement in his character's
development and some contributions to the overall shape of the piece, but
he noted that there were many writers who worked on the script at different
stages of the game, among them Lem Dobbs (The Limey), Ebbe Roe Smith (Falling
Down) and Kario Salem (HBO's The Rat Pack). Adds the director, "Edward
didn't want to play the Tom Cruise character in The Color of Money. He
didn't want to be the smart-aleck punk who thought he knew everything.
He wanted his character to be at the same level as Bob's character professionally."
(Amateur psychiatrists, feel free to discuss this at home.) Norton may
no longer be a smart-aleck punk. As he sifts through various black-and-white
photographs that A.H. Buchman snapped in Mexico during the early '40s,
I think back to a conversation earlier in the day, when he conceded that
part of growing up for him has been coming to grips with his meddlesome
nature. He suggests that an example of this maturation process is his decision
to pass on the lead in MGM's upcoming adaptation of the World War II novel
Hart's War. After reading the script, he feared he would not be able to
act in the movie without donning his screenwriter cap and getting in people's
faces, so he walked away from the opportunity to work again with Primal
Fear director Gregory Hoblit. Instead, he chose to strap on a foam-rubber
rhino suit in Danny DeVito's next directorial outing, Death to Smoochy.
"It's a script that I wouldn't change a word of.
I can show up, be an actor and then go home at night and not obsess,"
he says. At 31, Norton is showing other signs of maturity. He talks about
Sean Penn and Warren Beatty as examples of two actor-directors who are
compass points by which he would like to chart his own career. And as the
conversation drifts from these two legendary Hollywood rogues to his romantic
life, he clams up on the grounds that it's rude to offer up the affections
of a woman for tabloid fodder. He also worries that the more the general
public knows about him, the harder it will be for him to vanish into the
roles he plays. Still, during our time together, he's been dropping more
hints about his feelings for Hayek than Hansel and Gretel had crumbs. Even
though his black book once included Courtney Love, Drew Barrymore, and
Tara Reid, he seems genuinely enamored of the woman he's dated for well
over a year. And he grows slightly animated whenever he talks about a recent
trip to Mexico,  where
he traveled around the country with Hayek. For someone who fancies himself
a New Yorker, he seems happy about spending more time in Los Angeles, presumably
to be closer to her. This winter he will do a cameo as Nelson Rockefeller
in a Frida Kahlo biopic Hayek is starring in. For that reason, perhaps,
the photograph he settles on to purchase is telling. The black-and-white
image captures Diego Rivera in the very moment that inspiration flashes
from his eyes to his brush. And I can't help but wonder if this is bound
for Norton's inamorata. If he were my buddy, this is the moment I would
churlishly blurt out, "What's the subtext here? Are you saying, 'I want
to be the Diego to your Frida?'" But I keep my greasy journalist mouth
buttoned up, electing to respect his request for privacy. Besides, the
article may end up alongside the other clippings his old high school teacher
Andrea Almand posts about Ed ("he was just Ed then") on here bulletin board
to motivate her students. And as far as her more prurient charges are concerned,
the secret to the Edward Norton mystique should already be clear. Study
hard, be good to your friends, raise hell for your artistic choices and
you too may end up courtside at the Lakers in the company of a beautiful
and talented woman.
By John Brodie
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