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index - Entire
Cast - Cast
members - Jennifer
Aniston - Courteney
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Lisa
Kudrow - Matt
LeBlanc - Matthew
Perry - David
Schwimmer
 Madamoiselle
- Jennifer Is For Real
No
Tricks, No Tantrums, No Implants.
LOS
ANGELES IS A WEIRD PLACE - A one-company town (the company being
Fame, Inc.) where fancy faux-Asian restaurants are frequented by
frenetically glad-handling Spice Girls-with-huge-entourage. Then
there's Jennifer Aniston, whom I met for drinks at her favorite
Mexican dive, a dark cave where the red banquettes are worn, the
Spanish grillwork dusty and the chips and salsa (her weakness).
Mmm-mmm good.
Not
that Aniston's bland. But she isn't neurotic (that would be Monica)
or ditsy (that would Phoebe) or plastic (she takes special exception
to tabloid rumblings about her purported breast implants). She talks
in a low, even voice-no actressy melodrama -gesturing like the kind
of girl you might have gone to highschool with. She's normal...as
normal as you can be in Hollywood, anyway. Her black crewneck
sweater is Prada (but it looks fished out of a Salvation Army bin);
she wears gray snakeskin Freelance boots (when she can certainly
afford Manolo Blahnik) and annoyingly well-fitting jeans. She says
she used to be about 20 pounds heavier, but dropped the weight. The
hard, normal way. Diet. Exercise.
So
does that mean she believes thin equals happiness? Well, no.
Aniston admits she feels bad about unintentionally reinforcing our
national obsession with weight loss and beauty: "I know what
goes into photos and that they airbrush. Yet you still look at these
pictures and go, ' Wow! God, look at that! She's perfect!' And you
go, ' Ugh'-you're having a bad day, or whatever." Aniston
probably knows what that feels like: The daughter of a former model,
Aniston felt pressure about her looks while growing up in Sherman
Oaks, California, then New York City. "My mother would always
tell me to put makeup on," she says, adding ironically,
"she was a really big confidence-booster in the physical area.
'Put your eyes on, for God's sake!' she would say. Lips, eyes,
anything. 'Put your eyes on!' I thought I had my eyes on,
Mother!"
Jennifer
vs. Rachel - Battle of the Friends
In
case Mom's wondering, Aniston's eyes are on at the moment; her
makeup is low-key. On the whole, she's more of a regular girl than
Rachel, her TV alter ego. But what of the similarities?
RACHEL:
Pampered-from-birth princess.
JENNIFER: Pampered as career perk, but generous. (A few years ago,
she gave her older assistant-director brother a "cool Bronco -
he's a cool guy.")
RACHEL:
Former waitress at coffee shop; current Bloomie's assistant buyer.
JENNIFER: Former waitress at burger joint; current (The difference
being that Aniston "loved waiting tables! I was having a good
time. I was pretty much convinced I was going to be a professional
waitress who just auditioned on the side. Because I couldn't get
hired. Not even for a commercial. For ten years. Then came Bob's Big
Boy-I was the joke waitress in the joke restaurant that wasn't as
good as Bob's.")
RACHEL:
Ambivalent about ambition.
JENNIFER: Ambivalent about ambition. (Aniston looks embarrassed -
she says a friend wrote it-when reminded that she once filled in an
on-line questionaire like this: "I'M BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE
AT: Putting on makeup." Now she says she's ambitious, but
won't talk about her goals "because that falls into the jinxing
category."
RACHEL:
The Girlfriend. The NBC sitcom focuses more on her love life than
any other character's.
JENNIFER: A good girlfriend. Proof: She's maintained contact with
half of her exes ("You have to really want to remain
friends-have a kind breakup, be an adult, make the effort and let
time pass before the friendship can reignite") - which isn't
too hard, considering that she says she's had only two relationships
prior to the much-reported-on current one with 34-year-old actor
Tate Donovan, also known as an ex-boyfriend of Sandra Bullock.
Mad
about each other?
You
don't have to spend time in someone's home, car or, God forbid,
bedroom to guess whether she and her boyfriend are happy. When
Donovan joins Aniston for dinner after the interview, their body
language seems easy; their greetings geniunely loving; their patter
overlapping; the attention paid to each other more or less equal.
(Now's a good time to roll your eyes.)
Aniston
says she doesn't want to talk about their
over-two-years relationship (first thing she says to him:
"Okay, you're not sitting here"). Donovan, on the other
hand, has no problem talking about a shared experience: "We
were isolated, totally in the middle of nowhere, and this car pulled
up in the middle of the night. These people stopped and pointed
their headlights at us for, like, a half an hour. Then they crept up
to us. We thought they were going to murder us!" No, he's not
talking about stalkerazzi. He's describing their most recent
camping trip. Says Aniston, laughing: "It turned out they were
just really sweet German tourists, looking for a spot."
Pretty
normal, yes? Mad about each other. Not snotty.
Successful. Problem is, Aniston is a lot more successful: He's the
voice of Hercules and was Ally McBeal's love interest for two
episodes. She's a major TV actress who reportedly makes $85,000 per
Friends episode and is the big-marquee name in this month's 'The
Object Of My Affection', a bittersweet and lovely romantic drama
about the love between a single woman (Aniston) and her best friend
and gay roomate (Clueless's Paul Rudd).
I'm
trying to get around to the subject of couples with
unequal fame and wealth, so I bring up a profile of one apparently
loose-cannon actress (who describes her husband as someone who's
"living in a house I mostly paid for"). Aniston has heard
of the article, and is quick, crisp and articulate: "Damn,
girl! Even if you think it, don't talk about it!" She adds:
"It's not taking into consideration the man's ego. It's not
respectful." But when I broach the question as it affects her
and Donovan (I'm chicken, so I ask these questions before he
arrives), Aniston seems flustered: "No, I don't look at it that
way. I mean, it's a rare case, um, it's not the norm... I
don't want to sound..." She stumbles on: "It's not an
issue. No, I mean, yeah, sure, somewhere in there - I don't know,
maybe. No, it doesn't affect us in that way."
Uh,
next subject. At least it's one we can both laugh
about: a tabloid tale that her and Sandra Bullock in a slamming,
screaming public catfight over Donovan. As a joke, Aniston sent
Bullock flowers with a note that said: "I'm sorry for all the
damages-send me the bill." (Bullock sent flowers back.)
True, the celeb dating pool for twentysomethings can seem
small-before Donovan, Aniston briefly went out with Counting Crows'
Adam Duritz, who used to be the beau of fellow Friend Courtney
Cox-but "it's not like there's swinging going on. I met
Tate a long time after he was dating Sandra." The media tries
to tell a good story, Aniston says. Ironically, "nothing
as exciting as that story happens in our lives: We go to work and we
go home."
On
the Topic of Rumors about Friends
Aniston
looks geniunely baffled when the subject of backlash comes up. She
doesn't want to give it the time of day, or acknowledge that bad PR
- stemming from last year's reports on salary negotiations, poor
box-office performance of some Friends' film projects and Mathew
Perry's former painkiller addiction-almost always plays a part in
the rise and fall of pop-culture hits.
"At
a press conference, they were trying to make it out like we're
competing against each other, that one person's gain is somebody
else's loss," she says indignantly. "'How do you feel
about Courtney's success in Scream?' Well, I'm happy for her!"
What about this quote from an Aniston profile on E! on-line,
attributed to David Schwimmer, on the subject of conflicting filming
schedules: "No one can convince me that it doesn't harm the
quality for the show that people have to fly on Friday to New York
to shoot for two days and come back late Sunday night to be back at
work Monday"? Aniston looks bewildered. "I never heard him
say that. Who was he referring to, LeBlanc?"
I
don't think she's being fake-naive. Aniston is no
innocent, but she's determined not to embrace nastiness, in herself
or others: "The main thing is not to become a bitch. Your
biggest fear is becoming that, you know?" Her New Year's
resolution for 1998 was to try not to use the word hate casually.
And she works so hard at being a good friend ("I worry that I
don't get back quicker to friends who call") that she once
thought about becoming a shrink: "I was always the one everyone
would seek out to bitch about So-and-So. I like to talk to people
and fix things. I still do that, sometimes too much."
One
attempt to be a bad girl bombed miserably: "I was
fourteen or fifteen and I was dating a guy who lived in the East
Village," says Aniston. "I shaved my hair just above my
ears and had all these earrings and rubber bracelets. I was just the
ugliest thing. But I could never be a punk rocker-I didn't even like
punk music!" says Aniston, a Van Morrison and Aerosmith fan-a
more classic-rock girl you couldn't find. "I was just a big
poseur-a big, fat poseur."
Aniston,
in short, is one of us-the way most people would
want to be if they lucked into fame and fortune: not bitchy, but not
a pushover, either (her assistant, a no-nonsense blonde, looked too
eager to get home to be working for a wussy boss). Pretty, but not
drop-dead beautiful (the easier for millions to identify with, my
dear). Call Aniston the anti-Spice Girl, who believes that Nice will
triumph over Nasty. And in her case, she'd be absolutely right.
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