Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (19 page)

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Practical Magic,
which is based on a novel by Alice Hoffman, is the story of two sisters who must live with the curse of witchdom handed down through their family since Puritan days. Nicole plays the part of Gilly-Bean Owens, sister of Sandra Bullock’s Sal Owens. Rounding out the adults in the family are Aunt Franny Owens (played by Stockard Channing) and Aunt Jet Owens (played by Dianne Wiest).

True to her public comments, Nicole shied away from another “boy meets girlfriend” role, but she didn’t stray too far from the concept. In
Practical Magic
she plays sort of a girlfriend, in the chick-flick sense, to her more grounded sister.

Nicole’s reasons for
not
doing certain movies are usually well articulated by her, but her reasons
for
doing certain movies sometimes seem amorphous and not well thought out. In this case, the attraction seemed to be the opportunity to pair-off with Bullock, who had tapped into the All-American, “just love that girl” reservoir that thus far had eluded Nicole in her career.

By 1998, she was still unjustly viewed as an ice princess. Nothing was further from the truth—despite her life-long penchant for competing with males in physical feats, she was very much a girlie woman who cherished her moments with the “girls.” But getting rid of that icy image was proving to be most difficult. It was her hope that her pairing with Bullock would show that she could chick-flick with the best of them.

Nicole also seems to have been attracted to the prospect of working with director Griffin Dunne, who had only directed one previous feature film,
Addicted to Love.
He was probably best known as a character actor (
An American Werewolf in London
) and as a producer of off-beat independent films such as
After Hours
. 

Practical Magic
begins with Gilly-Bean running off with a man.

“I hate it here,” she says. “I’m going to go where no one has ever heard of us.”

“I feel like I’m never gonna see you again,” responds Sal.

“Of course, you’re gong to see me again. We’re going to grow old together. It’s going to be you and me living in a big house, those two old biddies with all these cats. We'll probably even die on the same day.”

“Do you swear?” asks Sal.

Three years later—in the interim, Sal has married and given birth to two daughters—Sal’s husband is killed in a freak accident, making it necessary for Gilly-Bean to return home to comfort her grieving sister. Although she is suitably saddened by her brother-in-law’s death, she cannot resist telling Sal all about her new man. “He’s from somewhere near Transylvania,” she explains. “He has this whole, ah, Dracula cowboy thing about him. He’s just so intense. He talks about our relationship in terms of centuries. Sometimes we just stay up all night worshipping each other.”

When Gilly-Bean returns to Florida to be with her new love interest, Sal attempts to go on with her life. Everyone in town knows that the sisters are witches and that sometimes causes problem for her daughters, who get teased and tormented about it, but it is the burden Sal has learned to live with and she copes the best she can.

One day Gilly-Bean calls Sal and tells her she needs help. Of course, Sal drops everything and rushes to her aid (what are sisters for, if not that?). Gilly-Bean tells her about the physical abuse she has endured, but before they can resolve that matter they are both kidnapped by the boyfriend. They drug his drink, but, alas, they use too potent a mixture and he dies, leaving them in a quandary. While it is true he kidnapped them, it is equally true they killed him. If they reported the incident to the police they would have to take their chances with a jury—not an appealing prospect for two witches.

Instead, they take him home with them, where they hope to cast a spell and bring him back to life. Successful at that, they suffer the consequences when he lunges to choke Gilly-Bean and Sal hits him over the head with a frying pan, killing him yet again. This time, they just say to heck with it, and they bury him outside the house.

Later, a cop shows up to investigate the man’s disappearance. It turns out he was a very bad man indeed, wanted for murder. The cop learns about the sisters’ curse from the townspeople and digs deeper for information about the missing man.

Meanwhile, Sal falls in love with the cop, thus complicating the deception, a situation that becomes critical when the boyfriend’s evil spirit returns and possesses Gilly-Bean’s body. Not only must Sal hang onto her new romance, she must devise a way to drive the evil spirit out of her sister’s body. She settles on a witch’s party.

The cop eventually completes his investigation and leaves town. A short time later, Sal receives a letter from him that notifies her of his official finding in the case of the missing boyfriend. After reading the letter, Sal peers into the envelope as if looking for the man.

“I don’t think he’s in there, Sal,” says Gilly-Bean.

“What would you do, Gilly?”

“What wouldn’t I do for the right guy?”

For whatever reason, Nicole and Bullock never gelled as sisters or girlfriends or even as polite strangers on a commuter train to nowhere. There was simply no chemistry between the two women, an essential ingredient for any chick flick.

By the time
Practical Magic
wrapped, Nicole felt emotionally battered. The sex scenes with Gary Goba had taken a lot out of her, as did the surgery to remove the cyst. Tom was in no better condition. The stress involved with making
Eyes Wide Shut
—not to mention the uncertainty of putting his career on hold for nearly two years—had taken its toll. Tom had developed a stomach ulcer during the final weeks of production and it had left him against the ropes, both emotionally and physically.

Nicole and Tom planned to take some time off to recuperate, but then to their disbelief, Kubrick contacted them in May and told them that he needed Tom to return to London to re-shoot several scenes. At that point, he had no choice but to comply, but clearly his enthusiasm for the seemingly endless project was beginning to wan. Visitors to the set said that Tom still seemed excited about the project, but displayed less energy than on previous occasions. Who could blame him? The dream had assumed all the markings of a never-ending nightmare.

Added to that stress were the constant media reports that suggested that Tom was homosexual. When a British newspaper, the
Express,
published a story that alleged that his marriage was a sham, entered into as a business arrangement or on order of the Church of Scientology, or as a cover-up for his and Nicole’s homosexuality, he filed a libel lawsuit against the newspaper’s publishers. On October 1998, Tom stood on the steps of the High Court in London and announced that he had accepted a settlement from the newspaper. It was a major victory that also called for the newspaper to issue an apology (which it did in the courtroom ).

“I really don’t take a lot of pleasure in being here today,” Tom told reporters that had gathered outside the court. “This is the final recourse against those who have printed vicious lies about me and my family. I have to protect my family.”

That same month,
Practical Magic
was released. The critics were not kind. Jay Carr, writing for the
Boston Globe
, said that Nicole was “amusing and convincing,” but had allowed herself to fall into a “one-note rut.” He continued with, “On-screen, it’s a patchwork of disconnected segments in search of a tone, unable to blend the earthy and occult.” Under the headline HEX EDUCATION,
Entertainment Weekly
described the movie as “so slapdash, plodding, and muddled it seems to have had a hex put on it.” Falling in step was
USA Today
, with its description of the film as “witchy-washy.”

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On the very day that Tom stood on the courthouse steps defending his family’s honor, Nicole embarked on a new acting adventure that left her totally naked on a London stage, much to the delight of British theatergoers. It was one thing to see Nicole naked on a movie screen, but to see her naked in the flesh, talking, walking and making eye contact, was an experience not to be missed.

The play, Sir David Hare’s
The Blue Room,
is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s shocking 1912 play,
La Ronde
. Its centerpiece is a sexual relay race in which a series of encounters are observed, with one individual from the previous encounter moving on to participate in the next encounter. Nicole played five different women who barred their souls in separate affairs. She played opposite Scottish actor Iain Glen, with whom—shades of Gary Goba—she simulated love-making on five different occasions during the hour-and-half play. To do that, Nicole appeared totally nude on stage.

London theatergoers were shocked by her performance. Why, they wondered, would an actress of Nicole’s reputation perform nude on stage for two hundred and fifty pounds a week? Some said it was because the play’s author had written the book on which
Eyes wide Shut
had been based and she felt some strange connection to him and his work. Others said it was because she had become a regular visitor to the theater while they lived in London and had found an offer to return to the stage for the first time in over a decade too attractive to turn down.

By her own admission, Nicole’s management agency was horrified by her acceptance of the role. “My agent went ‘You’re doing what? For how long?’” Nicole told the
London Telegraph.
“No doubt they were rapidly working out their percentage of 250 pounds a week. They used to try to tell me what to do but now they’ve given up. I’m a lost cause. I usually call and tell them what I’m doing.”

Nicole’s after-the-fact bravado aside, she almost backed out of the play before opening night. She had a panic attack and telephoned her father, Antony, and told him she was terrified of failing in the play. She said there was no way she could learn five different accents and play five different characters. She feared she had bitten off more than she could chew.

Antony allowed the psychologist in him—and not the father—to talk her through the crisis. After about forty-five minutes of long-distance therapy, she was able to calm down and see the situation more realistically. She hung up the telephone and took a deep breath. Of course, she could play five different characters—a coked-up fashion model, a stage diva, a teenage hooker, a politician’s wife, and a French au pair. And, off course, she could be convincing using five different accents; she had played so many different movie roles that she no longer even knew what her own Australian accent sounded like.

When the play opened, London critics fell all over each other in praising her performance. Charles Spencer, writing in the
Daily Telegraph
, described Nicole as “pure theatrical Viagra. One critic called her “achingly beautiful” and another wrote, “she is not just a star, she delivers the goods.”

Nicole was totally disarmed by the extravagant reviews. She had not received good reviews like that since she left Australia. The response was so good in London that she agreed to do the play in New York at Broadway’s Cort Theater for a twelve-week run, with the opening set for December 13, 1998.

The advance publicity in New York was just as enthusiastic as it had been in London, helped along perhaps by Spencer’s “pure theatrical Viagra” comment. Wrote Clyde Haberman for the
New York Times:
“In case you have just emerged from an experiment in cryonics,
The Blue Room
may be the hottest theater ticket since Sophocles wrote about some guy bedding his mother and poking his eyes out.”

One of the odd things about the media frenzy surrounding the film was the way it transferred to Tom, who was inundated by reporters wanting to know how he felt about his wife appearing nude, about how he felt about her being away from home for so long. To everyone’s surprise, he was totally supportive of her Broadway adventure, saying to one reporter, “I never saw her as Mrs. Tom Cruise.” He was going on location to film
Mission Impossible II
, but he vowed to fly to her side once a week to be supportive.

By the time the play opened, it had garnered an advance sale of over $4 million, with all but a handful of tickets spoken for.
Newsweek
ran a very flattering cover story on Nicole, written by Jack Kroll, that bore the headline
Nicole Takes Off
(Kroll had reviewed the play when it opened in London, warning that “no one country, no one medium, is going to control her energy and daring”).