Debra Winger as Wonder Girl |
Back in the eighties, Debra Winger was dubbed an It Girl as John Travolta’s bull-riding wife in Urban Cowboy, and her subsequent Oscar nominations — for her role as a strong-willed mom in Terms of Endearment and a love-struck idealist in An Officer and a Gentleman — were coupled with a public image roughly parallel to twenty-something media targets/darlings of today. Except instead of checking into rehab, the actress spoke her mind. In 1995, on the heels of another Oscar nomination (for Shadowlands) she quit show business and focused on raising her sons.“It’s that old adage, ‘whatever they ask, answer what you want,’” says Winger, whose first book, Undiscovered,doesn’t harp on Hollywood or even the globe trotting she’s been doing for Sight Savers International, which she’s involved with because of an accident involving a truck and a troll costume that left her blind for ten months at the age of seventeen. Instead,the title refers to a discovery of self.
Alternating essays with poems, and examinations of her inner journey with bitterly funny anecdotes (she embarrasses a director with a particularly choice swear word), Winger has succeeded in compiling thoughts on aging, motherhood, and the reasons we walk on a wire, with insight that never comes across as pompous: she asks as many questions as she answers. On a sweltering June day, in between grabbing aspirin and groaning at an incessantly ringing phone, she tells me why.
In Undiscovered, you refer anonymously to rude directors and ex-boyfriends. Did you feel you had to make an effort not to offend people?
No. That’s really a great question because in public I can say ten great things and one, I think, funny thing, which may be a little acerbic. I was talking to Whoopi Goldberg yesterday — I started out in standup comedy and she was coming up in some clubs in San Francisco when I was working at some comedy clubs in LA. When you’re a comedian, you never get quoted unless it’s really really rank, you know? You can have a forty five minute routine where you jab at every one, and no one quotes you unless it’s extremely funny. But if you’ve made your way being something else, like an actress…look at these stupid things I say, they’re not serious.
Such as your book ‘outing’ Jack Nicholson for loving prostitutes, which was all over the news?
Richard Johnson originated this thing which is one of those bad snowballs. First of all, I never used the word. Secondly, I talked about visiting brothels. He and I together because we were in Berlin in the early eighties — we went to brothels because that’s where you get the best food. Had Richard Johnson bothered to talk to me about the food you get in a brothel, I think it’s a much more interesting conversation.
Besides that, you don’t write about anything one would expect from a celebrity memoir, which is pretty refreshing.
Then you’re who I’m writing for. I’m just so tired of those same questions and I can’t imagine why anyone else isn’t. In the forties we had fan mags and we had the press. For some reason we have come to refer to fan mags as press. It’s celebrity…you know…it’s…
…it’s kind of a publicly acceptable way of remaining in high school?
That’s about the emotionality of it. And since I’m not stuck there I have been known to be a bit short, and they love it. It’s the classic story of the paparazzi guy who follows you around till you flip him off. To me, the book gave me a chance to put it together in writing and talk about what I want to talk about. Publishing was never the aim. I’m not that kind of person, I don’t set a goal out and achieve it, I sort of put my foot in the river and see what happens.
You write about that in the Sheltering Sky section: “That which presented itself and was not fought back or negated by my fear.”
I was in this experimental program called the Smith System of Safe Driving. They took you out to a really difficult road for your first outing — we were in Laurel Canyon instead of a parking lot. So if you’re looking at a cliff on the side of a road, that’s where you’re gonna steer. If you’re afraid of something, you’ve driven yourself right into the ditch, as my husband would say. I’m trying to find compassion in my heart for George Bush before he leaves office. Because I think it’s the best thing a human being could do. Maybe he was really afraid of putting us in a ditch.
Now you examine marriage, the loss of your mother, and notions of celebrity in a really grounded way. When you write for the perspective of your more impulsive self twenty years ago, do you feel like you’re sorting out another person’s thoughts?
I don’t want to use any psychoanalytic terms so I’ll just use selfdom, even though it’s not a word. Sometimes you get to a certain age — especially if a lot of things have kept you from having a lot of reflective time. There were times in my life where things were moving so fast that there wasn’t time to keep it together, so sometimes I would behave badly — you see it all the time with early success. People get fractured. I think of myself as the same person. I would feel the split not by show business but by the accident. That was a very defining moment and I don’t know what my life would have been without it.
Debra Winger will discuss Undiscovered with poet and Rumi translator Coleman Barks on June 26, 7 pm at theRobert-Dubbs Auditorium, Brookline High School, Brookline, MA, 617-730-2700
