Party On!

Never mind Neve. Who needs Love? Lacey Chabert is Party of Five’s most promising postgraduate.

Stuff Magazine, August 2000

By Josh Dean

First things first. This isn’t the girl you remember. This isn’t even a girl. It’s a woman. She’s a woman. A petite, stunning brunette who’s shed the thin skin of adolescence for a fuller, curvier adult model that she isn’t shy about taking out for a spin. Dead is Party of Five’s whiny, goody-goody Claudia, the Salinger girl who looked and acted like a nun-in-training and was just about as fun. Long live Lacey Chabert, who buried that wet blanket in April after Fox euthanized the once-interesting, then-nauseating series. This woman is heading for the movies.

Lacey and I are gonna play golf because it beats “talking over salad in some too-trendy Hollywood hot spot,” and hell, why not! It’s a workday, and banging a bucket of balls with a beautiful budding superstar beats dumping toner into the copy machine.

We meet on her turf, at Chez Chabert, a modest house in Thousand Oaks, a valley town of subdivisions, strip malls and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. The ex-prez lives just a three-wood away, but Bonzo is yesterday’s news. Today I’m here for a swingin’ party of two, and Lacey’s waiting for me out front. She’s all smiles and sunglasses, clutching a single club—a driver with a fuzzy Sylvester the Cat head cover.

Despite the kitty on the club, Lacey’s got game. Maybe her ball doesn’t have Tiger’s distance or Ernie’s lift, but it’s straighter than a laser. Born into a den of duffers (her dad’s an addict, and her little bro, T.J., hopes to play pro), she has impressive form. Between swings, I overhear her giving a friend some lessons. “And then this arm stays straight, and keep this one loose,” she says, while demonstrating like the pro from Dover. “Then just turn your hips and swing through.” Perhaps it’s good that we’re not gonna hit the links: Play dollar-a-stroke with this innocent-looking young lady and I’d be walking back to New York. I tell her she’s better than the scouting report. “Thank you,” she beams. “I feel like one of the guys over here at the range. I’m actually surprising myself a little bit.” Unfortunately, that’s when she nails me with a shot that careens off the shed and into my knee. She doubles over laughing. “Oh, I think I almost just killed you.…Sorry.”

Lacey’s first post-Party role is in Tart, a movie about bad girls at boarding school, costarring Dominique Swain, Brad Renfro and Bijou Phillips. But before you jump into a cold shower, be aware that Lacey plays the good egg, the innocent who makes a girl’s Catholic school uniform a religious experience. Off the set, it was life imitating art.

“The whole cast was young, and most of them were drunk every night, running around the hotel high on something,” she says. “I really hadn’t been exposed to that on Party of Five, and I don’t hang out with people my age in Hollywood. It kinda made me feel like a complete loser, but I have no interest in that stuff.” Moving into movies has meant crazy life lessons—like being too juicy for a sweet part. “They’re doing a miniseries of Judy Garland’s life, and I auditioned,” Lacey says. “The part was awesome. They called me this morning, and they were like, ‘We were blown away, dear, but Judy Garland was ugly. You’re too attractive, and you’re not fat enough.’” Listen closely and you can hear gay America cringing.

It could be argued that this kind of rejection is a good thing, that hopping into a TV biopic is a tad too close to a path forged by the other Party girls—who’ve also been in more slice-and-dice classics than Freddy Krueger. This line of questioning makes our girl nervous. “I can’t say that any two people want the same career,” she says with a sigh. “I don’t want to be a ‘teen star’ because so many people don’t ever grow out of that.”

Lacey would rather be like Natalie Portman or Leelee Sobieski—a discerning, respected actress who focuses on demanding roles with few slices of cheese. “I’m so choosy about my next move,” she says. “I’ve had probably 10 offers since the show ended for either teenybopper television or MTV movies, but most of the scripts I’ve read are just crap, you know? You have to lower your IQ to keep up with them.”

If you don’t know Lacey from Party of Five, you may be one of the few who found her in Lost in Space, a film that was about as ill-fated as Darva Conger’s honeymoon. Despite its current residence in the black hole of bad movies, it was her first big-screen role, it made astronomical bucks and it put her star on the map. As precocious Penny Robinson, she squeezed into a latex bodysuit and stole scenes from such thespians as William Hurt and Gary Oldman. Her recollections of Hurt sound like a scene from GoodFellas. “The first time I met him, I said, ‘Hi, how are you?’ And he replied, ‘What do you mean? How am I? How am I here? How am I being?’ This went on and on for, you know, a good couple of minutes. I was like, ‘Dude, I just wanted to know how you were feeling.’”

Unlike many a young Hollywood starlet, Lacey is not about to end up in rehab. She is her parents’ dream, an anti–Dana Plato—a Girl Scout cookie not likely to crumble under a Hollywood haze of designer drugs, sleazy posses, nude layouts and terminal cosmetic surgery. Cancel that appearance on E!’s True Hollywood Story. I mention that Claudia got drunk a couple of times on the show and inquire as to whether Lacey has ever been tempted into a tipple. “No,” she says emphatically. Never? “Well, I’ve had wine. And, yuck! I don’t even like the smell of alcohol. I’m pretty straight.”

Lacey does dig the growing power of her own sexuality. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being sexy,” she explains. “I mean, here I am doing STUFF. There’s a difference in doing that and in just being trashy and exploitive with your body. Guys have always told me that it’s sexier to leave a little to the imagination.” Still, sex appeal has the side effect of attracting trouble. Read: comb-over-wearin’ costars, producers and casting agents who circle around budding actresses like an assault charge looking for Bobby Brown. “I went to a party a couple of weeks ago, and I had some 40-year-old guy hitting on me, saying gross stuff. It just makes me feel sick. I want to go, ‘Hello! I’m half your age.’ Then, ‘Excuse me, your hairpiece is falling off.’”

Actually, the lion’s share of predators in Lacey’s life exist not at drug-fueled orgies in the Hills, but in her own backyard—a landscaped wild West frontier where resident outlaws include roving bands of tarantulas, scorpions, rattlesnakes and coyotes.

Having drained our buckets, we head back to her personal ecosystem. That’s where we find the local game warden: her Cajun-born daddy. Friendly to a fault, he welcomes his guest with stories of killing another recent visitor—a canyon coyote who had dined on the family dog. “We knew it was a coyote because the heart was eaten. The damn thing chewed right through the rib cage and ate his heart,” he says, explaining the horror as Marlon Brando might have in Apocalypse Now. “It was almost surgical.” In the end, Mr. Chabert had his revenge. He later blew the intruder all over the backyard with a shotgun blast. I stay away from their pets. There are dogs everywhere—a bulldog named Claudia, a Miniature Pinscher and two Chihuahuas. “A rattlesnake almost killed my dog last year,” Lacey says of another imperiled pet. “We heard the dog barking and ran immediately to the vet. They had antivenin there and saved his life.” The snake, however, is on borrowed time.

- Issue 9

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