In her search for an image, Kudrow, 34, certainly knows who she's not. She's not Phoebe, Friends' hippie-dippy folksinging masseuse in loose, flowing skirts and dresses, with big patterns in bright colors. That look "goes against every clothing instinct" Kudrow has. "I was told early on by the show's costume designer, 'Oh, Jennifer and Courteney, they're the body girls,' which, you know, you CAN take the wrong way." Kudrow is not Michele, either -- the bottle-blonde from Romy and Michele's High School Reunion who totters around in nosebleed-height platform shoes and shiny, loud microminis. "Way too playful for me," Kudrow says. And she doesn't always share the taste of her husband, who grew up in Paris, where style is "pretty much all they care about," Kudrow says. "Instead of saying, 'Oh, I don't like those open-toe shoes' -- which I could deal with -- Michel will say [she drops into a deep, French-accented murmer] 'My bay-be, why do you hurt me zis way?'"
When it comes to fashion, Kudrow is closest to Ursula, the distracted waitress she plays on Mad About You, who favors slim black turtlenecks, pants, a simple ponytail. "I've always liked being a little buttoned-up," she says. Growing up in Tarzana, California, deep in the San Fernando Valley, she raided thrift shops to find "good-girl clothes. I wanted to dress like a fifties co-ed. I identified with loafers and pegleg pants, with Grace Kelly, Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn. There was nothing L.A. about them."
Classmates in Taft High would say, "You belong in New York," which Kudrow took as a comliment. "It meant, 'Clearly, I'm more sophisticated than you," she says laughing. She headed to Vassar, where she studies sociobiology and planned to do medical research. (Her father, Lee, is a renowned migraine specialist; her mother, Nedra, a travel agent.) But Jon Lovitz, her brother's friends, convinced her to try out for the Groundlings improv troupe, which led to acting, and ultimately, to having a stranger paw through her clothes closet.
"Oh! The funniest thing happened with this," Kudrow says, holding aloft a men's black leather jacket. She's been inconspicuously wearing it to the Friends set for almost two years. Then one day, Gwyneth Paltrow visited the show wearing a similar jacket. Minutes after she left, Kudrow wore hers to lunch, and everyone said, "That is such a cool jacket!" "It was instantaneous. It finally got categorized as acceptable," Kudrow says. "So! I didn't learn anything from that."
More favorites find their way out of her closet: a peair of black, boot-cut stretch pants, a handful of snug polyester Trina Turn button-front shirts, a funky blue-plaid cropped jacket from Barney's New York. "If it were up to me, I'd be tailored from head to toe. But in L.A., you've got to have something else going on," Kudrow says. Her "something else" is a sense of humor about her clothes. "That's my compromise for living here," she says. She points out a blue rayon dress, just tight enough to suggest a naughty girl's school uniform, with a campy crest on the pocket, a short-sleeved turtleneck in bright orange; sleek Armani sandals sprinkled with rhinestones.
A sense of irony prevades her work as well. "Playing dumb [blondes] was the easiest way to get experience," Kudrow says. "I didn't dare judge it. There was no 'What does this mean for soceity?' But along the way, I saw advantages to playing dumb in real life too. People don't expect too much. You're in the perfect position for ambush."
From the closet, it's a single step into the bathroom, where a cushy terrycloth robe hangs ready. ("I love wrapping myself in it after a bath, never using a towel," Kudrow says.) Dozens of bottles of perfumes and unguents circle the sink like tiny skyscrapers. Kudrow is not at all ambivalent in here. "Smell this! Ah! I love this!" she says, taking sniffs for herself and then thrusting bottles into my hand: Bulgari Eau Parfumee, Rachel Perry Calendula-Cucumber Oil Free Moisturizer, even L'Easu d'Issey deodorant by Issey Miyake.
Kudrow's main requirement for her new house was "a bathroom where one person could be showering and the other brushing his teeth, and not be in sight or in hearing distance. We're close, but we're not that close." Their search took 10 months; renovations ate up another 10 ("We had to wait for the granite to for before we could get some for the sink") and prompted more of Stern's Gallic commentary: "Uh, zat you peek zis bathroom tile, my god, look what have you done, we have notheeng in common..." They finally compromised on a warm, contemporary look -- warm for her, contemporary for him.
"I'm realizing I'm old enought to just say, 'This is who I am,'" Kudrow says of all her choices, from work to wallcoverings to evening dresses. "Not everybody has to like it. That's being an adult. I hope I'm getting there." Her face clears. "Now let's get out of here, before I lose the will to live."