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People Magazines Sexiest Man Alive!
1999
November 15th 1999
RICHARD
GERE
Talk about the evolution of man. At 50, this supreme being
has found love and embraced Buddha. But don't be fooled by
that Karmis grin: He's still wild at heart.
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"That's
the kind of thing we used to do and find it totally
normal," Martins says. But the attention that Gere
attracted from other women was hard for Martins to handle.
"I felt hurt and sad when women started throwing themselves
at him," she says.
Gere's onscreen sexuality was also combustible. His full-frontal
nude scenes in 1980's Gigolo
were among the first in main stream cinema. Yet Gere brushed off
America's shock. "In Europe," he later told Cosmopolitan,
"this is pretty
parochial stuff." His coinciding Broaday appearences as a
homosexual Holocaust victim in Martin Sherman's Bent
was equally risky,
prompting rumors that Gere was gay. At the time, the actor
refused to respond. It was only years later, when the gossip
extended to his marriage to Crawford, that he defended their
heterosexuality in an ad that he placed in
The Times of London.
Inevitably, some risks didn't pay off. After confirming his
place in hearthrob history with An
Officer and a Gentleman
(1982), Gere turned down the leads in
Die Hard and Wall
Street and wound up
apearing in a string of flops like King
David and Miles
from Home. But he came
bounding back in 1990's Pretty
Woman with his
surprisingly whimsical turn in the role of a corporate raider
bummed-out in Beverly Hills. The film eventually earned more
then $460 million worldwide, made a star of Julia Roberts and
confirmed a sea change in her leading man:
Richard Gere lightened up. In fact, he was so eager to get the
part that "he jumped up and danced on the table,"
recalls one of the film's producers, Arnon Milchan. "He actually
danced."
Shortly thereafter, Gere landed his own pretty woman: supermodel
Crawford. They married in a Las Vegas chapel in 1991. "I
didn't want to lose [her]," he said at the time. But it was
not to last. "Richard was very torn up after his marriage
broke up, just devastated," says his friend Sharon
Simonaire, who blames the split on their age difference (he was
45, she was 28) and Crawford's impatience with Gere's Buddhist
causes, which Crawford, a non-practicing Protestant, didn't
share. "Cindy had problems with his going off to India and
being away," Simonaire says. Then, in the fall of 1995,
Simonaire introduced Gere to her friend Lowell at a Manhatten
restaraunt and saw sparks ignite. After the pair spent a weekend
together, says Simonaire, "Carey called and said, 'He's so damn
funny. He pulled his sweatpants up to his chest and walked
around kind of scratching himself.' It reminded her of how her
father used to joke around the house."
Four years later, Gere has settled in with Lowell and Hannah,
her 9-year-old daughter with ex-husband actor-director Griffin
Dunne. The three share a spacious Greenwich Village townhouse
decorated with an electic mix of 1940's French furniture,
Eastern artwork that Gere has collected from his travels and his
own acclaimed black-and-white photography. Gere showers his
leading lady with gifts of rubies, pearls and shawls from his
Indian sojourns. She
spoils him too. In
September she threw a 50th-birhday party for him on a rented
rooftop overlooking the Hudson River. Buddhist monks chanted,
more then 100 guests feasted on Asian food, and Lowell presented
a specially made video containing clips from Gere's old TV
interviews and birthday wishes from his friends. At the end,
recounts party guest Bai Ling, "Carey came on and said,
'There's somebody else who wants to say "Hi." She
opened her shirt to reveal a face painted on her [pregnant]
belly. Richard was crying, he was so moved."
As soon as his tears were dry, though, the twinkle no doubt
returned to his eyes. After all, this is not a man who is made
of mush. When he reads this story, says Simonaire, "I don't
know how he'll be to live with. He may be strutting around the
house like the sexiest man alive." |
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