FLASHBACK: Out On Her Own 1998

Out On Her Own

By Cathy Booth
TIME Magazine
June 15, 1998

Imagine being on the brink of stardom, but after your first big Hollywood premiere, you and your date are escorted out the back door. Imagine landing a role opposite Harrison Ford--the No. 1 box-office draw in the world--but your manager says the new "love of your life" may cost you the juicy part. Imagine--miracle of miracles!--that you get the lead anyway, but the studio hits the roof when rumors spread that you're pregnant with this new love. Now imagine that a $70 million investment rides on your performance--and on your love life.

Is it any wonder that Anne Heche is slightly fidgety, her hands nervously shuttling one Camel cigarette after another to her lips? The 29-year-old actress had been on Hollywood's fast track, landing roles opposite stars like Johnny Depp and Al Pacino (Donnie Brasco), Tommy Lee Jones (Volcano) and Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman (Wag the Dog). Then last year--just as she was tapped to share onscreen kisses with Ford in Disney's romantic comedy Six Days, Seven Nights--she met and fell in love with Ellen DeGeneres, TV's first openly gay leading actress. Overnight, the couple, showing up at premieres arm in arm, snuggling in front of the President at the White House correspondents' dinner, became a gossip columnist's dream and a public relations nightmare. And just as suddenly, Disney's frothy little summer vehicle for Ford became the bearer of a heavy burden: Would moviegoers accept Hollywood's first avowedly lesbian leading lady?

"I'd be a fool not to recognize the fear and hesitation around this movie," says Heche (pronounced Haych) as she lights yet another cigarette. "Obviously, it's super-superexciting to play opposite Harrison Ford, but frankly, it wasn't as exciting as finding the love of my life." Dressed in old brown corduroys and a skimpy T shirt, Heche looks the very picture of elfin delicacy, hardly the "biker chick" symbol for gay rights that she figures her detractors expect. Having started in show biz at age 12, she marvels that anyone would question her acting ability now--and for a fairly simple role in which she plays an uptight New York editor who falls for Ford's pilot and general layabout. "I am an actress. I play a role. That's my job," she protests. "If I'm good, you shouldn't think about what you've read in the papers."

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For the past year Heche and DeGeneres have lived together in Los Angeles' old-moneyed Hancock Park, in a remodeled Spanish manse featuring a harem-inspired video room and a mammoth shower with their initials--A and E--intertwined in tile. While the town's tongues wagged last year, they decorated. "We looked at fabrics instead of tabloids," jokes Heche. "It's been an odd year. It has played itself out in every way--negative, positive, people supportive, people bitter--but we never wavered in our love."

Another cigarette comes out. "My last bad habit," she says, then laughs. "Though some people think I live a bad habit." Interviews with Heche these days are like therapy sessions as she works out the demands of a Hollywood career, her new relationship with DeGeneres and the discrimination she says Hollywood shows a female couple. When she locked eyes with DeGeneres last year at a post-Oscar party and fell in love, she was, she says, caught unawares after a lifetime of heterosexual relationships (her last, high-profile boyfriend: comedian Steve Martin). "It's kind of an astonishing story. Ellen and I were together from the moment we met," says Heche. "I'd had lesbian women friends hit on me before, and it didn't hold any sexual appeal. So it was surprising for me."

Director Ivan Reitman heard the rumors about Heche and her new girlfriend just after he had cast her in Six Days. But after a round of worried phone calls with the studio, the decision was made to stay with Heche out of principle--and because of her considerable talent. "I was nervous about all the attention, but not about Anne," Reitman says. "The most important thing for me was to find someone who could play opposite Harrison Ford and hold the screen equally. Right away [at the screen test], I saw she had this way of getting under his skin. He was better with her." Ford apparently thought so too. "Harrison Ford--God bless him--was great," says Heche. "Everybody thought I was going to lose my career, but he said he didn't want another actress." Ford even offered her and DeGeneres refuge at his estate, she says.

Still, with $70 million at stake, Disney is taking no chances: print ads for the film show a sexy Heche with her shirt hanging open just enough to reveal a skimpy bikini and some cleavage. Reitman believes the controversy will be over within days after the film's release. "There's this great fearless quality about her," he muses. "You have a sense of someone who's been knocked around a lot and who has risen above it."

Life has knocked Anne Heche around a lot. Heche's father Donald, a Baptist choir director and closet homosexual, died of AIDS when she was just 13. "My father was gay, but it was shrouded in ugliness because he lied about it," she says. "He was sick my whole life, but we were in complete denial. As good Christians, we never asked."

As her father's health declined, so did the family's fortunes. At one point she, her mother, two sisters and a brother were homeless. At age 12 she went to work at a dinner theater in New Jersey, appearing in shows like "The Music Man." Eventually, Heche's homemaker mother moved them to Chicago, where Anne was discovered in a 10th-grade play. Two years later she was in New York City auditioning for the daytime soap ANOTHER WORLD. Her portrayal of twins--one good, one evil--brought her an Emmy in 1991 and a raft of Hollywood agents. Her star turn as Johnny Depp's long-suffering wife in the Mob drama Donnie Brasco got her noticed big time last year.

On the basis of that performance, director Joe Ruben tapped her for the lead in Return to Paradise, as a lawyer who must persuade two young men to go back to Malaysia to help a friend sentenced to die for drug smuggling. The movie, due out in August, pairs Heche with young hunk Vince Vaughn (Swingers, The Lost World), and Ruben, for one, says he has no doubts whatsoever about Heche's ability to sizzle opposite a male co-star. So hot was the sizzle, in fact, that rumors soon spread that the romance with Vaughn was real. "Right on time to put a heterosexual spin on me, just before the movie," she says, laughing.

What worries Heche now is not the rumors of romance with male co-stars but what she perceives as a lack of job offers. "I think the assumption with any other actress than me is that once paired with Harrison Ford, let's get her as quickly as possible," she says. She did, however, just land the plum Janet Leigh part in Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho; her co-star--yep, yet again--will be Vince Vaughn.

Until the cameras roll this summer, Heche is whiling away her downtime by developing a one-hour TV drama with director Jonathan Craven and publishing some of her poetry and a children's book, "Adelaide, God's Little Fairy." There is no baby in the future. "We're way too selfish with our time," says Heche. "Besides, I'm not the mother type yet--though I wouldn't rule it out, maybe in five years."

All in all, she says, lighting up another cigarette, an interesting year. Six Days, Seven Nights may be a slim vehicle on which to rest her career, but, she says optimistically, "there's this whole energy around it now that will make it memorable. It's an old-fashioned love story, [but] it could shift stereotypes." Sometimes, she adds, "you have to look at your worst nightmares to turn them into dreams."