Cameron Diaz Interviews 6 - Cameron Diaz Talks Back

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Cameron Diaz Talks Back

She said she’d never sit down for another celeb profile. Unless, of course, we let her have her say, too. (Hey,we thought—why not?)

Cameron Diaz is fifteen minutes late for everything. This is public knowledge. So the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, for an extra quarter of an hour on one brisk Tuesday night, has a far less glamorous star attraction. A fiftysomething French woman is buzzing around the place telling anyone who'll listen that her son, Jordan, a featureless, quietly horrified boy, is celebrating his sixteenth birthday this very evening. And the mother is trying to parlay the event into favors of every kind: free wine, a special table in the dining room, and Christ knows what else.

But Diaz arrives, right off time—and the Chateau's denizens, ordinarily too jaded to crane a neck at anyone, stop what they're doing. Even Jordan's maman halts her shameless favor-grabbing. Because Cameron Diaz, wearing her famous nine-acre smile and the pricey counterchic outfit of any self-respecting twenty-first-century movie star, is sauntering down the corridor into the dining room.

I tell her about the French lady's bizarre ant farm of behaviors, just to hear Cameron's Big Laugh, which she seems to deny no one. "Awww, it's Jordan's sweet sixteen," she chides, grinning at my implied threat that he won't see 17. "Don't crush him!"

The reason Cameron Diaz is here at all is that (she says) she will never again sit for a standard profile-interview. Near enough, this is it. And she has a few salient points to make about celebrity journalism. So the idea (her idea) is as follows: We'll spend some time together, and I'll write it up. Then she'll elbow me off the page and respond—busting me if I've misquoted her, addressing the strangeness of having the media create an omnipresent "Cameron Diaz" persona, and in general conveying what it's like to have your life turned into a weekly, wildly overpublicized semifictional soap opera. After that, bringing a knife to a gunfight, I'll respond to her response. And so on, back and forth. It'll be a media Thunderdome, except without that creepy little bald guy who rode on top of the really strong mute guy. (Or maybe with. The story is young.)

Paradox magnifies celebrity. At 33, Cameron Diaz is nothing if not a bundle of contradictions. She repeatedly points out during our three-hour dinner that this is work for her, "required publicity for the film"—In Her Shoes, in which she stars with Toni Collette—but the entire time, she is laughing the Big Laugh and more often than not is straying far from the topic of work. She tells an amazing story about a friend's dog that could climb up the inside of a chimney and broke its legs twice in three days by falling off the roof. While every other actor in Hollywood speaks of his or her "art," she speaks of her work in unusually businesslike terms, some kind of team process always involving her management, which she blithely calls "a business concern."

She praises those she admires—John Malkovich, for example, or Daniel Day-Lewis—by saying that they "deliver," as if they're extraordinarily well-known FedEx employees. And she doesn't understand why anyone would really be curious to know anything about her, beyond that she loves making people laugh (which she does well in real life, playing the whole range from ordinary hilarity to very dark humor). By all appearances, she doesn't take herself the least bit seriously, though only a fool would describe her as ditzy. And that combination of paradoxical elements, in movie stars, is easy on the mind.

The fact that Cameron Diaz has been lied about and mischaracterized in the press is both the price one pays to reside in the celebrity stratosphere and a reprehensible crime of journalism. Because when the Backstab Reporter comes to meet his subject, he doesn't come showing the blade. He comes smiling. He's all compliments—at last, the one guy in the media who appreciates your work. Only later, when he's writing up the story, it's 3 a.m. and he's still seething about the time his father said that Terrible Thing when he was 9. So he takes it out on the celebrity. The celebrity, he realizes, deserves to be taken down a peg. Staring down the barrel of that deadline, it's all so clear. The reporter realizes that Nice is dull; Nice is for suckers. So he chooses Mean. And when the mean stuff isn't quite true, well, it's 3 a.m. A lot of things are true at 3 a.m.—or else why would Dad have said that thing he said?

But Cameron Diaz is nice. In ways that even actors can't fake for more than three hours, she is refiexively polite and, by all evidence, lacks the self-absorption that's usually a prerequisite for her job. She sits surrounded by mirrors and never once checks her look. She automatically offers to share her food and asks you as many questions as you ask her—that sort of thing. Moreover, she rarely misses a chance to make fun of herself. "I know a lot of stuff I say about the press sounds like spoiled-celebrity stuff," she says, "but I'm just one girl. I'm hunted by paparazzi, big dudes with heavy metal objects screaming ‘Get her!' The people who don't understand what that's like, every single day, need to know they're fortunate to have their...their anominity."

"Anonymity?" I offer.

"What did I say?"

"Anominity," I repeat.

She has another go: "Anomininity."

"Not even in the ballpark."

She emits the Big Laugh and tries yet again: "Amonynity!"

And it is at this very moment, after Cameron has explained why she cannot even sign autographs or pose for pictures anymore—because when she does it for one person, dozens of people queue up—that the hapless, French, 16-years-old-tonight Jordan, of all the people in this entire hotel, chooses to step up and meekly ask for a photograph.

Cameron's face, still fiushed with laughter, nearly melts at the irony. "Oh, Jordan," she says, baffiing him with the fact that she knows his backstory, "the crazy thing is that I don't take pictures."

Jordan promises, of course, he will show no one—absolutely no one, not ever.

"Except for everyone you know, right?" Cameron replies kindly. But she knows karma has brought this on her head. She poses as I snap a shot of the two, then purrs the requisite "Happy birthday!"

Appeased, Jordan rapidly quits the room with his digital swag. "It's an interesting struggle," Cameron says, "your needs versus people's desires. People just don't know what it's like to lose their...what was it?"

"Anonymity?"

She catches her breath before explaining. "I'm from Long Beach, dude," she says. "I can't barely speak English!"

It is utterly inexcusable, but I cannot resist: "You can barely speak English?"

"See?" She actually topples over onto the blue banquette, hysterical, and after a long gale of laughter huffs out, "Oof. I just burned off my entire meal."

Tabloid attention doesn't merely double when two celebrities date. It exponentiates. Cameron's romance with Justin Timberlake has made her life lovelier and far more arduous. "I don't even think of the tabloid stuff as ‘press,' " she says, twirling her hair as ever. "Those are romance novels. They're stories that have to go week to week, so they need movement for the fictional characters. I'm in at least five magazines a week, and there are at least five stories going on. I'm getting married or breaking up; Justin and I are moving in together; or I want to get married. None of it's true. Not any of it! People are so obsessed with it all. The idea that people are together just to get married and have children—not every relationship ends up that way."

It's all oil for the machine. The five or ten psychotic paparazzi who camp in Cameron's front yard (and because of whom she may never, ever go into her front yard) take pictures to accompany this story of "Cameron and Justin"—because text is no good without art. And art is worthless without text.

Printed once, a myth is reprinted everywhere, on the authority of the original printing. You can read that Cameron will only wash her face with Evian water. "Ridiculous!" she says, as loudly as etiquette allows. There is also the story that she is freakishly superstitious, a tale that tabloids love to print about nearly any Big Name, since it makes the celebrity seem nutty (or better, hooked into the infinite). But besides knocking on wood, Cameron lacks any such obsession. "I once fiew on Friday the thirteenth with a black cat on my lap during a thunderstorm," she says. "And the fiight attendant was retiring! It was her last fiight!"

Something seems odd here. "They were givin' out black cats for the fiight?" I ask.

"No, it was my cat."

"What's its name?"

She pauses, then cagily decides to deny something to the press. "Nuh-uh. That I won't tell you."

I decide to claim the same rights open to other reporters who "cover" Cameron Diaz, and tell her that the name of the cat is Fluffers. Fluffers is the name of the cat.

"No," she says vaguely. "It's Jack Handey."

"You're suckering me in," I tell her. "You're making that up."

"I might be," she says, laughing at half speed. "But you should use that!"

The names of her cats are one thing (actually, two things). But savoring the joy of withholding, Cameron even refuses to tell me her middle name. She's making me pay for the tabloid "news," the fiction that drives her up a tree—for example, the tale of the lady in Monte Carlo who says she punched Cameron in the face. Cameron has never been to Monte Carlo. Worse, Cameron is suing the National Enquirer, which asserted that she had an affair with a married man. "You just can't sue everybody," she says wearily, before getting back to a happier word. "Anonymity!"

You should know these disparate facts about Cameron Diaz: Her paternal grandparents were Cuban and, though she doesn't speak Spanish, she occasionally dreams in that language. She suffered alcohol poisoning in Australia at the age of 18—and when asked what the liquor was, cheerfully replies, "Everything the Aussies pour down your throat, dude!" She loves poker and recently was the runner-up in a Texas Hold 'Em tournament in Tunica, Mississippi. Further, she does a spot-on impression of John Malkovich as the Russian gambler in Rounders: "Chyeck. Chyeck! This son of bitch, all night he is chyecking me! He beat me straight up!"

Know this if nothing else: The girl knows how to tell a story. Here's one from two nights before our dinner. See, that night, working on the computer upstairs in her house, Cameron heard some sort of fuss outside the window. Running out, she found to her horror that Fluffers, the cat that has an entirely different name than Fluffers, had caught something. "I realized, shit, it's a bird!" she says, freshly aghast. "I ran after it and got it and took it in. I did it all: got a little box, made a nest, and figured it would sleep the night.

Then I went on the Internet to find out how to care for a baby bird. It turned out it's illegal to handle any bird—illegal! The mothers, despite what you hear, will take care of the bird if they find it again. And the next morning, I was going to meet Jane Goodall. So I got up early to find the nest it had fallen from, thinking how fitting all this was. Here I am, going to see Jane Goodall, and I'm out looking for a nest and being very observant, thinking, ‘Where can my cat have found this?' and looking for tracks and trails. Nothing.