This article originally appeared in the March 1994 issue of Esquire. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.
It actually was a dark and stormy night. Angry thunderheads cloaked Houston's Hobby International Airport, and flash-flood warnings were being broadcast on the radio. The forecast was for as much as ten inches of rain before the end of the day. As the limousine plowed through the downpour, the passengers recall, the water was rising almost midway on the door panels. The driver turned and asked Anne Rice if she had brought the foul weather with her. Rice—the author of Interview with the Vampire and a half-dozen best-selling novels about the demonic doings of witches, ghosts. and other unearthly creatures in a whole series of dark and stormy nights—could only smile. Lately, she has been accused of greater mischief than mucking with the heavens.
Looking like a coiffed Morticia Addams, Rice was in Texas to promote her latest best-seller, Lasher, at Houston’s Crossroads Market & Bookstore. As her limo approached, a low rumble could be heard in the distance. At first it sounded like thunder. By the time the car rounded the last bend, though, Rice could clearly make out the rhythmic meter of chanting.
Gathered outside the bookstore, nearly a thousand sodden groupies outfitted in galoshes and garbage bags, brandishing umbrellas and protest signs, were reciting the same litany at the top of their lungs: “No Tom Cruise! No Tom Cruise! No Tom Cruise!” As she stepped out of the car, a young man handed her a petition with hundreds of signatures calling for a boycott of the movie version of Interview with the Vampire, which stars Cruise as Rice’s most infamous ghoul, the vampire Lestat.
Those unfamiliar with Rice may justifiably wonder why her public appearances call forth mobs of frenzied hipsters and punks sporting black leather, Mohawks, tattoos, and nose rings. Those who do dip into the Ricean prose, which is of a style that can be described only as haute purple, may also wonder what all the fuss is about. But cults take many forms, and Rice’s followers feel they own the vampire Lestat, no matter who paid for the film rights.
The true power of vampire literature, Rice has said, lies in “the fathomless well of metaphor.” Devotees tend to read into her books almost anything they are looking for, be it addiction, immortality, a secret society, or homosexuality. The more opaque the imagery, the wider the appeal.
Interview, published in 1976, is about as opaque as it gets, and perhaps as a result is considered the greatest vampire novel to come along since Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published almost a hundred years ago. Updated for a morally ambiguous age, Rice’s Lestat is no longer the vampire as evil incarnate; he is burdened with a conscience that haunts his every waking hour. (The victims may or may not be glad to know their attacker has read his Camus.)
Director Francis Ford Coppola was so influenced by Rice’s Lestat that in his remake of Dracula, he transformed Stoker’s bloodsucker into a lonely monster, as much in search of redemption as of revenge. Thanks to Rice, the modern vampire has gone from terrifying to misunderstood, and, really, aren’t we all?
Spurred on by her readers, Rice has embarked on a one-woman crusade to embarrass Tom Cruise; Warner Brothers, the studio bankrolling the film; and David Geffen, the film’s producer. To cheering crowds, Rice has been cursing Cruise for butchering her script, sanitizing the sexual content to accommodate his clean-cut image, and perpetrating the worst crime in the name of casting since The Bonfire of the Vanities. Addressing an audience of one thousand on Halloween night, she said, “I wanted to call David Geffen and say, ‘How the hell could you do this?’”
For Tom Cruise, Interview is turning out to be a watershed role. At only thirty-one, the preternaturally cute actor with the paralyzing smile earns $15 million a picture and delivers huge opening weekends. But by now that earnest-young-man role he has played to perfection seems to be wearing a little thin.
It’s become a rather tiresome routine: The cocky youth matures to manhood over the course of a ninety-minute movie (applause and roll credits, please). The familiar wink, smile, and expression of mild befuddlement; it’s all so familiar now. At the same time, all sorts of things can go haywire when stars venture beyond their highly bankable personas into that uncharted territory known as “stretching.” For Cruise, who until now could do no wrong—even Cocktail has a certain late-Reagan-era charm—the risks are substantial.
But at the urging of two Hollywood potentates, CAA chief Mike Ovitz and David Geffen, Cruise is entering the dangerous realm of character depiction. The fact that millions of Rice’s readers know the youngish Lestat to be tall, blond, European, and androgynous may be the least of his problems. In taking on the part, Cruise is playing a villain for the first time in his life—a sallow mass murderer, no less, an after-hours fiend who sinks his teeth into every man, woman, and child he meets.
Cruise claims he isn’t worried about whether the Wheaties-box image will interfere with his ability to play Lestat. “I just couldn’t resist the role,” he says in the easy, offhanded way he might talk about having a second piece of cake. Speaking over the phone from his home in Los Angeles, where he is resting for a day before flying to London, Cruise is courteous and charming. While he concedes that Lestat represents a real departure, he prefers to see it as less a risk than a challenge. “Besides, he’s not a bad guy, he just has villainous aspects to him,” he deadpans. “From his point of view, he’s right. He’s really a terribly lonely character.”
If anything, Lestat is amoral, a solitary super-vampire who voyages through time and space feasting on flesh. In Interview, he blithely turns Louis, played by Brad Pitt, into a vampire because he likes the company—and he digs Louis’s fabulous pad. Later, still bored and lonely, Lestat persuades Louis to “adopt” the five-year-old Claudia, making her a vampire as well. Claudia and Louis, who miss being human and spend a lot of time moping, are actually the engines that drive the plot. Lestat mostly stands around looking cool.
Geffen contacted Cruise in December 1992, while the star was vacationing in Australia with his then-wife, Nicole Kidman. Cruise says he “got very excited.” He had heard that they were making a movie of Interview, which he had read as a teenager and loved. As a kid, he says, he had been a huge fan of the genre, staying up late with his three sisters to watch Creature Feature and Fright Night. “I was the second youngest,” he says, “and I would always go to bed absolutely terrified.”
From the moment he knew he had the part, he has been “busting ass,” rereading Rice’s vampire books and boning up on the decadent lifestyle of the eighteenth-century French aristocrat, Lestat’s milieu before he went into the vampire game. Cruise spent time in museums in Paris and visited Versailles to get the feel of the period furniture and fashions. He went on a diet-and-exercise regimen and dropped twelve pounds to take on Lestat’s gaunt physique. His hair, which he now wears parted in the middle, is streaked blond, and his eyebrows are flecked with gold. “I don’t know how this movie will turn out,” he says. “All I know is as an actor I am having a great time playing this character.”
What he has not enjoyed doing is defending himself against Rice’s frequent and unflattering attacks. Rice has made a series of snarky comments about everything from the actor’s height (“too short”) to his voice (“too high”), complaining a bit hubristically in the Los Angeles Times that Cruise is no more her Lestat “than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.”
Cruise, who in recent years has been carefully shielded from the press by his overprotective PR woman, Pat Kingsley—infamous for requiring writers (myself not included) to sign contracts before interviewing Cruise—was caught off-guard by Rice’s wrath. “When it first hit, it really hurt my feelings, to be candid about it,” he admits, adding with genuine amazement, “her venom hurt.”
Cruise didn’t realize how much play Rice was getting until he started receiving calls from friends who wanted to know what was going on. “Nobody could see what the big deal was,” recalls Cruise. With the support of people he trusts, Cruise is trying not to let it get him down. He still regrets not being able to meet with Rice, the way he did with the writer Ron Kovic before making Born on the Fourth of July.
“You don’t usually start a movie with someone not wanting you to do it,” he says, allowing himself to sound a bit bruised for a second. “That’s unusual.”
Like Cruise, Warner Brothers is unamused by Rice’s campaign. In fact, some top executives at the studio would gladly drive a stake through her heart. “She’s out there promoting her book and getting a lot of ink from all this,” says Robert Friedman, president of publicity for Warner Brothers. “It’s no accident Interview is back on the best-seller list after seventeen years. It’s just good, old-fashioned hucksterism.”
Even Ovitz, who represents Cruise, was sufficiently disturbed to respond. Insisting that Rice’s attacks on his client and the film had not done any damage, Ovitz handed down an official-sounding line: “Interview will stand on its own intrinsic quality, which, given the talented people involved, will likely be very high.”
While it is axiomatic in Hollywood that any publicity is good publicity, there is growing concern at Warner Brothers that Rice’s rampage could bury the $50 million movie even before it is completed. Ever since Columbia Pictures jousted with the Los Angeles Times over a negative article about Last Action Hero, studio executives have been skittish about advance word.
Although Interview isn’t scheduled to be released until the fall, it has already become the butt of industry jokes—labeled everything from Cruise’s Coffin and Geffen’s Grave to Fangs a Lot—and of newspaper headlines predicting another hilarious Hollywood bomb. More than seventeen years in the making, with a legacy of broken deals, bad scripts, and bizarre casting problems, Interview may just be jinxed. Superstitious industry people point to the sudden death of actor River Phoenix, who was set to play the role of the young reporter, as an ominous harbinger.
For all of Cruise’s efforts to play cool, there is no doubt that Rice’s comments have created a siege mentality. Since filming began last October, the papers have been filled with unconfirmed reports about tension on the set, beefed-up security, secret tunnels connecting Cruise’s dressing room to exterior locations, and other extraordinary efforts to protect the star from the press. The unit press agent has been so besieged with silly rumors that she has given up denying them.
With $50 million at stake, and Cruise’s golden career entrusted to his care, it is easy to understand why David Geffen is feeling a little cranky. Finally at work after several hellish years of haggling with Rice over her book, preparing innumerable scripts, and exhaustively searching for a director and star, Geffen now finds himself being sabotaged at every turn by the author.
“Anne is a difficult woman at best, and what her motives are remains somewhat beyond me,” he says, sounding spitting mad. “But for her to attack this movie for her own self-importance, when she has been paid $2 million [in rights] and stands to make a lot more money selling her books, is just capricious. It lacks kindness. It lacks discretion. And it lacks professionalism.”
Geffen’s impatience is exacerbated by his efforts in the past year to accommodate Rice. Early on, Rice had given Geffen a list of her favorite directors, headed by Ridley Scott and David Cronenberg, but they all turned the movie down. In the end, Geffen managed to recruit Neil Jordan. His name had made Rice’s shortlist after The Crying Game— which probably confronted the theme of androgyny more openly than any movie in recent memory—and one of his earlier films, the creepy The Company of Wolves, even comes in for a kind mention in one of Rice’s novels. “She was thrilled,” recalls Geffen bitterly. “She was a big fan of his.” With Rice’s blessing, Geffen also pursued Daniel Day-Lewis to star as Lestat. Rice says that the taciturn Lewis kept them waiting six months before declining the role, reportedly because he was tired of costume dramas. It was at this point that the situation soured. Rice desperately wanted Jeremy Irons to play Lestat. She also favored John Malkovich. She had actually modeled Lestat on Rutger Hauer when writing the novel, but even she conceded that, at forty-nine, he might be a bit long in the tooth to play her virile vampire. Jordan, for his part, felt Rice’s casting suggestions all were too old and too predictable. He wanted to avoid the same clichéd, cadaverous-looking actors familiar to audiences from Max Schreck and Bela Lugosi Dracula flicks.
Reached on his way to London, and sounding bone-weary after thirty-five nights of shooting in the swamps of New Orleans, Jordan insists that Cruise was his choice. “Sometimes when you go the opposite way from what people expect, you get the best results,” Jordan explains. “Every casting choice is a leap,” he says, “and if it works, it’s because the actor makes it fit his own skin.”
An Irishman who speaks with a lilt, Jordan has attempted only two big-budget Hollywood movies in his career, High Spirits and We’re No Angels, both box-office flops. He is refreshingly candid about one of Rice’s worst fears— that Cruise was selected partly for commercial reasons—confirming that “a very high-profile choice” was a necessity for a film as costly as Interview. He can’t quite understand why she is making such a fuss.
“I had a conversation with Anne when I took the job and she was very enthusiastic and very sweet on the phone,” he says, “so I’ve been amazed by all this public criticism.” He pauses a minute. “I’m not sure what’s happened, but it’s all gotten so out of control it’s ludicrous.”
Sitting in the sun-drenched garden room, the only cheerful room in her otherwise gloomy, violet-colored First Street mansion in New Orleans, Rice seems overwhelmed with regret. For that matter, the whole house, with its ghostly mirrors and statues, staring porcelain dolls, and eerie memorabilia—skulls, crystal balls, and such—seems oppressively sad. As she explains her anguish over the course that events have taken, clasping and unclasping her small, pale hands, her assistant, who sports a small gold pin in the shape of a bat, serves us cold Tabs. We drink in silence for a moment. The only sound in the house is the clinking of the ice in our glasses and the whir of the ceiling fan.
Rice didn’t mean for things to go this far. She had put her trust in Geffen and Jordan, but the more she thought about what they were doing to her book—turning it into a commercial blockbuster—the more betrayed she felt.
“I suddenly realized I was just furious,” she recalls, clutching her glass. “I didn’t speak out in any organized or planned way.” She did it for her public. “These people have stood in line for me three and four hours. They are my readers, and they hate this,” she says. “I was carried along by my readers. I didn’t start the whole thing at all.”
The story behind Rice’s dealings with Hollywood and the difficulty in bringing Interview to the screen is almost as long and tortured as one of her novels. Rice’s intense emotional ties to the book can be traced back to the tragic circumstances of its conception: Interview was written in 1975 in the drunken, grief-stricken years after her five-year-old daughter died of leukemia. Much of the story is autobiographical: The character of Louis, the vampire who acts as narrator, is based on herself, and Claudia, the five-year-old vampire, is the reincarnation of her lost child.
Big studios’ and stars’ determination to turn good books into terrible movies borders on compulsive. But Interview is not everybody’s idea of a good book. Scene after scene is larded with highly charged sexual imagery—heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. It is a steamy bouillabaisse of uncontrolled animal urges. The plot, however, is hard to find. Many people (this reporter included) can’t tell if it is meant to be serious fiction or great trash.
Interview was rejected by every publishing house Rice sent it to. Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster dropped her agent a note saying, “I can’t see this at all. Lunch?” Rice kept it as a memento. Ironically, Knopf, one of the more highbrow houses, thought the book had potential and published it with great fanfare. The reviews were mixed: The Washington Post declared it “beautiful and always unforgettable,” and The New Republic dismissed it as “pernicious” and “suckling eroticism.”
Hollywood loved it. The book was optioned by Richard Sylbert, a gifted production designer who was then head of production for Paramount. But Sylbert lasted there only eighteen months. Not long enough, he says, “to get shit made.”
Even so, Sylbert recalls that during his brief tenure “there was absolutely no enthusiasm for that movie.” Paramount offered it to John Travolta, but he passed on it. The chief problem, according to Sylbert, was that Rice’s story is “polymorphous perverse,” which is to say, downright kinky. Some of the scenes of Lestat and Louis cuddling with Claudia, the five-year-old love child, border on pedophilia. If it wasn’t for the fangs, these guys would have been brought up on a morals charge.
The book was slated to become a sleazy movie of the week when the rights reverted to Rice. By this time, she had hooked up with producer Julia Phillips, who was convinced that Interview belonged on Broadway—as a musical. The project fell through. By 1988 it seemed unlikely that Interview would ever make it as a movie. There were more than a dozen different scripts of Interview, all of them regarded as unmakable. But when Rice’s sequel to Interview, The Vampire Lestat (in which Lestat returns as a rock star), became a bestseller, Lorimar bought the rights to both books.
To keep the ball rolling, Rice proposed a bizarre solution: a new script changing the male vampire Louis into a woman. Since she had based the character on herself in the first place, Rice did not see this as a radical departure from the text. It would also dilute the story’s homoerotic elements and introduce a comforting maternal theme in regard to Claudia. Convinced that her “transvestite” character was a good compromise, Rice developed a treatment for Lorimar along those lines with Cher in mind. She also thought Meryl Streep or Anjelica Huston could play the part.
Then Warner Brothers purchased Lorimar, and Geffen, who had a production deal with the studio, acquired the rights. Geffen persuaded Rice to take another stab at the Interview script herself. Rice dispensed with all the elements she had introduced over the years to placate different producers and focused on a story line that would make Lestat “sympathetic” and “clearly establish that vampires are bisexual.”
Over the years, screenwriters had transformed the vampire’s bloodlust into a metaphor for AIDS, casting the story in a strange light. “One reason the fifteen or so scripts of Interview hadn’t worked was that people tended to make Lestat a stereotype of a horrible gay person,” explains Rice. “They were terrible scripts. I used to call them the hairdressers from hell.” To correct the problem, she made what she terms a series of “minor changes,” giving Louis a dead wife and child (those family values pop up everywhere) and in one scene switching the small boys Lestat feasts on to a couple. Rice now concedes that it was she herself—and not Cruise or Jordan—who “mainstreamed” some of the material to make it more palatable to Warner Brothers. “I did the things Neil Jordan is accused of,” she says.
Geffen showed Rice’s revised script to directors, and even she admits “it became apparent that we were going to have difficulty finding someone to do it the way we thought it should be done.” In the end, Jordan threw out all the previous efforts and started over, putting back “the little girl, and the blood, and the sex,” he says, chuckling.
Perhaps the greatest irony about Rice’s attacks is that of all the screenplays written over the years, including three of her own, Jordan’s is probably truest to the book. “Anne is hostile because her scripts couldn’t be made,” concludes Geffen, adding that she had seventeen years to get the movie made her way and has no grounds for complaining now. “She’s not about anything but self-importance.”
Geffen is not in a forgiving frame of mind. He feels that by bad-mouthing the film, Rice was playing with people’s reputations. “She is hurting people,” he says angrily. “It’s just nasty and gratuitous and uncalled for.” Geffen maintains that Cruise has not demanded any changes. “He has not had any input into this script whatsoever,” says Geffen. “There is not one iota of truth in it. Any homophobia being alleged against Tom is an outrage and a bald-faced lie.”
Jordan is particularly puzzled by Rice’s claims that he is cutting out the sexual content. “To accuse me of taking all the homoerotic elements out of the movie, after I made The Crying Game? Me, of all people—why would I do that?”
Jordan points out that despite all of the overheated passages in her book about two hearts beating as one, her vampires do not have sex. They are, if anything, sexually ambivalent. Lestat likes to snack on girls, then move on to boys for the main course. As Rice has the vampire Louis explain in Interview, “For vampires, physical love culminates and is satisfied in one thing, the kill.”
“There’s a lot of biting going on,” jokes Cruise, who doesn’t want to give anything away. “It is a very erotic picture,” he hints, explaining that every time Lestat goes for the jugular, it is done in a unique, achingly seductive manner. The guy has finesse. “The hard part is learning to bite someone in a different way each time,” he says, getting into character. “Each kill has to tell the story of that relationship.” For Cruise, “there is a huge amount on the line—money, reputation, everything,” says Jordan. “For me, it is not as much a risk professionally.” If the movie fails, the director says, he can always go back to making small movies. “But you have to be brave to do this,” he murmurs.
Geffen thinks Rice will end up sorry. After all, Ian Fleming apologized after complaining that Sean Connery would make a terrible James Bond. But if Interview turns out to be a great movie, it won’t matter. “No one will remember Anne Rice’s attacks,” says Geffen, “and she’ll make a lot of money selling more and more books.”
Rice may also have to get accustomed to seeing Cruise’s face. After all, there is the not-insignificant matter of sequels. Interview is the first of four best-selling books that make up her gory anthology, The Vampire Chronicles. Geffen, who bought the rights to the complete set, was clearly planning for his future. If Interview is a hit, Rice can look forward to seeing Cruise play Lestat again and again and again.
Editor’s Note: The movie was indeed a hit when it was released in November, 1994. And Ann Rice loved Cruise’s performance, later commenting, “I like to believe Tom's Lestat will be remembered the way Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered. Others may play the role some day but no one will ever forget Tom's version of it.” A true Hollywood ending.
