TAMING OF THE DREW

"Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh!" she yells, before breaking into an infectious giggle. "I think driving is, like, so-o-o-o indicative of my life, you know?" she adds, with a sideways smile that makes it hard to tell how serious she's being. "It's, like, speedy! I like an open freeway. Definitely. Traffic really pisses me off 'cause it stops me getting where I'm going."

At only nineteen years old, Drew has certainly covered a lot of distance (this is the girl who published her auto-biography, Little Girl Lost, in her mid-teens). And she's run into more than her fair share of trouble along the way. "I'm a cop magnet!" she declares, giggling again, jamming that accelerator. "They see me coming for miles. And I always get, like, Mussolini in uniform, you know? It's ridiculous. It's like, not signalling. Failing to stop at a stop sign for three seconds. The really stupid things, you know? I've got insurance up to here! I'm always crashing. Woooh! I have such bad luck with that."

If you've had first-hand experience of Drew's driving you might be tempted to conclude that luck has nothing to do with it. But trouble for Drew goes a long way beyond running red lights (which she does, believe me). Her family tree is like an object lesson in dysfunction. Great grandfather Maurice Barrymore, grandfather John and father John Drew were talented actors who squandered everything they had on booze and women. "They were all out of the minds," says Drew. "I love that they lived hard and passionately. Maybe the chaos and craziness goes with all that passion, you know? It makes perfect sense about how I am."

The first time Drew met her father she was three years old. And he threw her against a wall in an alcoholic rage. "I really love him," she says, cautiously. "I hated him while I was growing up. He was an abusive asshole. But now that I've grown up, I do love him. For a crazy person he's the most intelligent, fascinating man I've ever met, but he is crazy. Omigod, he's insane!" Giving up minor film stardom, John Drew Barrymore has spent the last 30 years drifting around the world, homeless and even shoeless. "He'll, like, leave a crazy message every couple of months, maybe. But he's off, sucking the marrow out of life like no other human being. He sucks it dry! He's like the vacuum cleaner of life. It's sort of hard. But I know that he loves me. His ways of showing it are very peculiar, you know? I've accepted it. So I don't have that pain anymore."

As bright as she seems, it is easy to see that pain has been a big part of Drew's life. There is something about her that is nineteen going on 90. She made her thespian debut at eleven months, co-starring with a puppy in a dog food commercial, and was an international star at seven, co-starring with a lump of animatronic plastic in There were spells in rehabilitation, therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous before Drew re-emerged, no longer America's little ample dumpling (as she described herself), but as a gorgeous, pouting nymphet, star of such sexually loaded films as Poison Ivy, Guncrazy and Beyond Control (The Amy Fisher Story), model for Guess? jeans, regular magazine glamour icon and hot Hollywood property. Tonight, as the Saab tears into Tucson, ripping through the traffic on Speedway Boulevard, the headlights catch a huge billboard for the all-star, feminist Western Bad Girls. There, alongside Madeleine Stowe, Andie MacDowell and Mary Stuart Masterson is Drew, the original bad girl, larger than life in every way, staring down with a knowing glint in her eye, a touch of cleavage showing and six shooter in her hand.

"Omigod!" gasps Drew. "Wooooh! It's so cheesy!" Drew says Omigod! a lot. Other fixtures of her vocabulary are like, you know, definitely and rily, which she, like, definitely has to, you know, stick into every other sentence. Like rilly! And she woohs and oo-oohs to punctuate her statements with beguiling animation. But if she has the excitability and vocal characteristics of a teenager, a true, dyed-in-the-bottle Valley girl, she also has the gravity and composure of hard-earned experience.

Drew's allure is that of the child woman. Who can deny the hint of paedophilia in watching ET's little Gertie blossom into the sexually voracious seductress of Poison Ivy? It is no surprise to learn that, when little Drew was growing up, Lolita was her heroine. She was only six when she saw the film, and any notion of child abuse went right over her head. She just thought Sue Lyons was the coolest. "She was so fucking sexy in that movie," drawls Drew. "Every little detail I totally grooved on. Lolita became, like, this idol thing, you know? I totally fell into it." And, like her idol, Drew somehow bypassed childhood, a little girl living an adult life. "I never felt like I was abused," she insists. "If something was taken away from me that I chose it to be taken away. I never regret anything. Because every little detail of your life is what made you into who you are in the end, you know?"

She is smaller in person that she appears in the movies (or on billboards) and slimmer and a lot less vampish. She favours T-shirts and jeans over designer outfits, and off the set her make-up is rarely more excessive that a dash of lip-liner. Not that she need more. Her skin is clear and smooth and she has one of those not quite balanced faces that is somehow ever sexier that perfection. Her mouth stretches enticingly to the right when she smiles. And she smiles often. And giggles more. She appears totally lacking in airs and graces, while radiating careless sex appeal. But say it to her face and she'll laugh bashfully and try to hide her head. Which is not something you want her to do while she's weaving through traffic at high speed. "You know, like, I'm very flattered, truly, to be thought of as sexy," she giggles sweetly. "It's an amazing compliment, but I know that that's a role I can play. I mean, p-uh-lease, I'm so not the vogueing type of chick. I don't look in the mirror and say, 'Woo-oooh baby, you got it goin' on!' I put on my jeans and I'm like, mmmh, OK, if the top button fits, I'm fine." The boys in the jeeps that pulls alongside Drew's Saab evidently think a little more of her. They stare and point, dicing down the road, hollering, "We love you!" Drew rolls her eyes, but can't help smiling.

Drew is in Tucson filming Boys on the Side for director Herbert Ross, with co-stars Whoopi Goldberg and Mary Louise Parker. It is a comedy drama with serious themes, but as usual Drew was called on to expose a little flesh in a love scene. Drew's done a lot of love scenes, getting down and dirty on celluloid with older men and younger ones. In Poison Ivy she even French-kissed actress Sara Gilbert and was taken naked over the household furniture by 58-year-old Tom Skerrit. But this time it was different. Something was wrong. The director and crew looked on in surprise as Drew got up in the middle of the action and scurried to the bathroom. After a while, Drew's make-up lady was sent in to find out what was wrong. "I don't know," Drew told her. "I just feel so uncomfortable in my skin. It feels strange to me. I don't like it."

"Are you being yourself right now?" asked the make-up lady. And that was it. "The minute I was myself I freaked," Drew recalls. "But when I was my character again it seemed completely natural. So I walked right back out and it was no problem." Being comfortable in her skin is important to Drew, but she confesses there are rare moments when she actually is. Which is maybe what her desire to act is all about. "You know how I see myself, to be honest? As an empty canvas. And I think maybe that's why I feel most fulfilled when I'm doing what I do, because I'm almost physically brought to life, you know? When I'm modelling or acting I feel like I've been painted. I really like that."

She wanders about the large, spotlessly white hotel room that's been home for the last couple of months. The bathroom is cluttered with skin cleansing products, a black bra and panties hand on the shower rail and there's full-length mirror that she does her best to avoid. "I know I'm not ugly but I don't think I'm a pretty girl," she admits." I'm very critical of myself, definitely. There's one thing about my body that I truly, truly hate. I hate my arms! I have really fat arms!" She giggles as she holds up her arms for inspection, two perfectly normal limbs, unlikely to discourage admirers for even a moment. "They're like sacks!" sniggers Drew. "I always really wanted those long, lanky, thin, model-like arms, but I don't have them. There's nothing I can do about it."

There was something else Drew did not like about her body. And she did do something about it. At the age of sixteen, she had breast reduction surgery. "Talking about my boobs now," giggles Drew. "Oh dear! Like they're another person, you know! Actually they were! You should have seen the size of them!" Drew was a 34 double D. In her early teens the wardrobe department would bind her breasts down in order that she could play characters her own age. "One more Dolly Parton comment and I was about to lose my mind!" she exclaims. "I completely lost my identity. People would never look me in my eyes. They'd go, 'Boy, you're really growing up,' looking straight at my breasts." So she opted for surgery. "It was the most wonderful choice I've ever made," Drew insists. "All of a sudden this thing that was terribly depressing and scary and embarrassing was not a problem any more, you know?" The hotel room sports a big, luxurious double bed, with drapes opening over the headboard to reveal a large potted corylus, its gnarled branches stretching out above Drew's pillows. "That alien thing!" says Drew. "I hate it." She tried to move it, but it was too heavy, and she doesn't like to complain to the hotel staff, so instead she just lies in bed at night and stares at it. Chronic insomnia, it transpires, is another thing Drew doesn't like about herself.

"I lay in bed at night and you know after five hours I'm just ready to tear my hair out," she complains. "I close my eyes and it just never stops! I can go from thinking about, like, the over-excited weight trainer on a TV show to, like, evolution to, like, what I did yesterday or, mm gee, I'd really like some macaroni cheese! It's like my brain won't turn off. I climb the walls going please, please, please let me go to sleep! I think that my insomnia's one of the hardest things in my life." And then there's her anaemia ("I have total lack of energy sometimes"), claustrophobia ("it gives me really bad anxiety attacks"), compulsive obsessions ("I'm a very hygienic person; I think I do obsess on it a bit too much"), anal retention ("everything has its place: it's probably the wrong place but it has its place"), clumsiness ("omigod, if there's a hair on the ground I'll trip over it," she says, after spilling her iced-tea and somehow tossing a cigarette over her shoulder to burn a hole in an expensive leather couch), PMS ("I turn into a high-maintenance bitch one every three weeks!") and occasional depressions ("I used to get into wallowing depressions that would last for months. So, like, fucking Camille-esque, you know? Now they're very sporadic"). Drew Barrymore does not give herself an easy ride.

"I am the most critical person of myself," she admits. "Whoof. The list of things I don't like about myself is l-o-o-o-ng, you know. I can list hundreds of things! At times I don't give myself enough credit, I know that, but it works to my benefit in the way that it makes me strive really hard and work really hard on myself as a person. I don't just sit and hate myself. I overcome." Here are some things Drew Barrymore does like: "Coming home. Standing in my house when everything's neat and clean. I love the rain. I love daisies. I like painting. I love to smile, you know? I'm a giggler." And she giggles some more, just to underline the fact. It is a delightful, spontaneous giggle, there's no doubt about it. But even giggling has its down side: "If I don't have one really good giggle in a day, it wasn't a good day. Seriously! I get very depressed about that. That'll keep me up at night! I did not laugh enough growing up."

Drew lights up another cigarette. She can't quite decide if this should go in her list of things she likes or dislikes about herself. "I get through anywhere from two to three packs every day," she declares, with undeniable relish. "It's disgusting. It's awful. But I love it! Ooh I love it. If there could be an alcoholic word for smoking then that would be me. I'm a smokaholic. Definitely. Marlboros. That's my brand. It's such a great consistent taste. I love everything about smoking. I love that it cures my oral fixations, I love that it's something to do, it's something in my hands, I like the smell of it, the taste of it, I love smoking! I love the first one in the morning, I love the last one before I go to bed and every one in between. If I could, I would smoke and eat at the same time. Whether it's obsessions or fixations, this is definitely one of mine. But if it's a fault, this one I take pride in."

Everybody is entitled to a few vices, and after spending her midteens in recovery, this seems to be the last of Drew's, although the reformed alcoholic does admit to a very occasional tipple. "It's strange, you know," says Drew. "Maybe I was an alcoholic a couple of years ago but I'm really not anymore. It's not like I have to wake up every morning and go, 'OK you're gonna get through this day and you're not gonna drink'. It's sort of, like, not even on my mind."
All that really appears to be left from her wild child days are her cigarettes, white-knuckle driving and her tattoos. She has six of those. She's got butterflies, daisies and angels on her back, a cross on her ankle and a blue moon on her toe. "I really like tattoos," says Drew. "It's expressions of how you feel and they're there forever." What they celebrate, however, is not always so permanent. An angel on the base of her spine carries a scroll with the name James, Drew's ex-live-in boyfriend actor James Walters, who broke up with her last year. "You can't even read it," says Drew, defensively." It's so small and the colours have sort of blend into each other. It almost scares me. It's sort of disappeared. Isn't that strange? Isn't that indicative?"

No regrets though. That's Drew's bottom line. She could be wallowing in the stuff by now. Another three of Drew's little angels carry a cross bearing the name of her mother, Jaid, but Drew hasn't had any contact with her in almost two years. "My mother. My mom," sighs Drew, her voice suddenly sounding weak. "We're like oil and water, we just don't mix." After her break up with James, Drew headed out to Texas to shoot Bad Girls, feeling the need to escape her mother's influence and get control of her life. "I had been living the hardness of the lessons and not getting any knowledge from the, you know? I was alone from five months and, thank God, it started to pour. It was like a rain shower, the knowledge was just, like, flowing almost too fast to understand it. I had to escape and see everything very clearly to come into that. And now it's just been a really long time and it's gotten to the point where it's uncomfortable to come back? Like, who makes the first move? You know? It's kind of scary."

Drew finds a lot of things kind of scary. Ask her what her favourite thing is in the whole wide world and she'll answer, without hesitation: "Freedom, definitely. I try to put freedom into every little thing, you know?" And her least favourite thing is "limit. Mm-hmm. Hate limits. I think the less you put on yourself and people around you the easier it is." And yet in Drew's short life, her youthful freedom and lack of limits almost took her right over the edge. "I had a very long leach and I definitely choked on it," she concedes. "Maybe that's why we strive for that other pleasant word called security. Ooh, always a good thing!" She giggles. "Yeah, it's crazy. For someone who's like afraid to be trapped and confined, sometimes I bust out and do things that are so permanent. Like tattoos and marriage!"

At the time of this conversation Drew had just got married. Of course, she didn't go about it like regular mortals. Although she had known Welsh former merchant seaman Jeremy Thomas a couple of years, they had only been dating for two months when Drew proposed, in an alleyway, at two in the morning. The couple dialled 1-800-I-MARRY-YOU and got hold of a female "psychic priest", who married them a few hours later in The Room, one of two Hollywood bars Jeremy runs. As the sun was coming up, the reformed alcoholic sipped champagne and kissed her husband. They spent five days together before Drew headed off to Tucson.
Drew was still in the full flush of marital bliss, glowingly describing her husband as "a little gem", showing off her wedding ring, insisting she wasn't going to make the mistake of not working at her relationship. "I have someone else I have to think about in the world. I have another half, you know? Which I love! I love this person! And it means being completely selfless, which is a very grounding thing. Too many people think the grass is greener. I always wanna be aware of what I have and never forget that and never not be grateful for it. And that's not just with my marriage, that's with everything. I'm a very grateful person!" She even wanted to correct the impression that they had rushed into it. "Actually we had been discussing it together for a couple of weeks!" she asserted. "It kept going back and forth and after a while it was, 'Why bicker about it? Let's just do it and see what happens.'" And then the inevitable did happen. Six weeks later, it was reported that they were getting divorced. Or maybe not. They could be back together by the time you read this. She could be married again. To him, or to someone else. The problem with living life at such high speed is that it makes it hard for the world to keep up. And sooner or later you are going to crash and burn.
I guess Drew is used to that. "Sometimes I think I'm in a race because of how fast I've always moved, but I just love to experience every little think, you know? I could never be one of those people that heard how hot the stove is. I've gotta burn the shit out of myself to figure it out."

 "Wooh! An arcade!" yelps Drew, clambering out of her Saab in Tucson. She makes a bee-line for the Pac-man. "I haven't played one of these in years! I lo-o-o-ove Pac-Man!" The other teenagers in the mall sneak sideways glances as the beautiful blonde grabs hold of the joystick and gets locked into the oldest game in the room. When she completes the first level, two little bleeping monsters cross the screen and touch faces, while love hearts erupt. "I used to have a table-top one of these at home when I was, like, eleven or twelve, and every time that came on my boyfriend and I used to kiss," she recalls, sweetly. It's hard to imagine, looking at her, so fresh-faced and youthful, that when the kissing was done she probably hit the booze and coke.

Not anymore. With her endless self-criticism and fixation on self-improvement, Drew Barrymore is like a one person self-help group. "It was the only thing I could do to survive in life," says Drew. "Otherwise I probably wouldn't be here right now, you know? For the most part, ever since I was born, I've had to learn things on my own or go through it myself, so I've had to be able to fix things on my own, to make it work for me in my life, you know? I don't wanna hurt anybody and I don't wanna hurt myself, so when I work on myself it prevents me from doing either of those things. I wanna be a good person, you know?"

Drew's done therapy, but finds it self-indulgent. She doesn't like to pamper herself. She dropped out of AA. She doesn't like to belong to any group. She hates limits. But she's working out her own boundaries. She seems to have her own twelve-step plan from recovery. She is the world's only member of Barrymores Anonymous. And she might just be the first Barrymore to survive and flourish.
"I'm not the only child in the world that feels let down by their parents, you know?" she says, matter of factly. "That's the way it is. I know I'm related to these people, there's certainly no question about that. Now maybe I've broken that cycle that they had. I feel further and further away from that every single day, you know? I feel very in control of my life. I know that at any given moment I'm not gonna fuck up."

Drew says this assertively, as if defying the world. Or maybe defying the part of herself that is scared she is going to fuck up, big time, and follow her family into the abyss, with one foot hard on the accelerator. "I think panic sets in quite often in life," says Drew, out of the blue, as she slides back into the driving seat, ready to start another terrifying run back across the desert to her hotel. "It comes in spurts," she confesses. "I don't think it ever really goes away."