Detour Magazine, 1998

„No shit," she tells me, "no shit. There wasn't one community that liked me. I hated it."
There she is Anne Heche. The "no shit" is spoken nearly in a whisper, it's her response to the microscope she's been under for the past year, a microscope whose lens has come down tightly enough to almost crack the very slide it isviewing--the slide containing the specimen marked The Life Of Anne Heche.

"Heterosexuals thought I fell off the planet," she continues. "I've had things written about me like, 'We lost her.' Was I ever this big heterosexual thing? So, heterosexuals hated me. Homosexuals didn't get me at all. I got more shit written about me from homosexuals then heterosexuals. I was living in that world AND trying to shoot a movie opposite Harrison Ford AND being told I wasn't going to have a career AND being told that nobody likes me."
Heche's voice rises from the "no shit" whisper to near televangelist levels. "I was trying to get up and go every morning in a period that any other actress would think is the most brilliant time in her life. Shooting a big mainstream movie in Hawaii with Harrison Ford? Oh, my God, look what I've got. Instead, everyone feared the movie wasn't going to do well because I'm gay. Everybody-- EVERYBODY--in the industry hated me and wouldn't come near me--except basically for Harrison Ford and Ivan Reitman, who were brilliant."
[*Footnote: "There wasn't any controversy with me about Anne getting the role. I was convinced by her second reading that she was a unique find for this role among all the viable options, and the more established actors; she was the best possible person for the job."--Harrison Ford, 6 Days/7 Nights.]
How did this happen? People did hate her. One day she's the brightest new star on the highly speculative Hollywood horizon, the next, she's made out to be a opportunistic bimbo who gambled her own sizeable talent on the shirttails of a sitcom icon. She's in, she's out--in more ways then one. Tabloid fodder. Nightline topic. Fuel for the engines that write late-night talk- show monologues. A walking punch line. But who's going to have the last laugh? Heche might be laughing already.

It was almost a year ago to the week that I had last interviewed Anne Heche. Almost. It was nine days before the Oscars, and nine days before a Vanity Fair soiree that would introduce her to Ellen DeGeneres, who was about to come out, character-wise, on a much-ballyhooed episode of her namesake sitcom, Ellen, and personally on the cover of Time magazine and in an interview with Diane Sawyer. And, despite being the catalyst for Moral Majority debates and network boycotts, she appeared confident, knowing, aware of the potential backlash, and most importantly, invulnerable. Anne and Ellen met at the party and fell for each other in fairy-tale fashion, only this story had two Snow Whites and passed on a Prince Charming.

Heche was much the same back then, P.E.--pre-Ellen--awaiting another round of being touted as the next actress on the brink of stardom with Volcano, and having just been cast alongside Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro in a role written for a man in the movie Wag The Dog. We talked about her upbringing in an ultra-religious family with a closeted gay father she would nurse as he died of AIDS, and of a brother she had lost in a car accident a few months following her father's death.

She spoke of the importance truth carried in her life, and how she wouldn't be made to feel ashamed over any aspect of it. She took me, a total stranger, into her home, both of us stretched out on her bed, to watch a film she was directing and financing with her Volcano earnings, titled Stripping For Jesus. She told me about a screenplay she described as a love story between a brother and his sister, and we talked about her career and early days as an Emmy-award-winning soap queen on Another World--playing dual roles in the classic good twin/bad twin scenario--two women that looked alike, but had very different motives. She told me then that "the hardest thing for people is that they aren't going to be liked by everyone. Once you learn that, a whole new world opens up to you." And, she asked, "How much better can my life get?" A better question might have been, "How much is my life going to change?" Once again, a full year later, I've been invited into her home--the previous craftsman-style bungalow supplanted by a movie-star mansion whose outward appearance of accessibility is belied by an inner security system that would make the Sultan of Brunei kick off his sandals and relax. Still in Honeymoon mode, Anne and Ellen renovated the 1908 estate together and moved in less then a month ago, so unaccustomed to the buzzers, protective walls, and security gates that Heche's assistant has managed to lock himself out twice by midday.
"Welcome to my heaven," Anne greets me, sashaying down a grand, curving staircase crying out for Norma Desmond. It could be a movie set, I think to myself, and I wonder if I'm about to witness a performance by Anne and Ellen themselves. Why should I feel skeptical? In her own words, she's hated. Then why would the couple invite a man with a tape recorder and an agenda into their heaven? Perhaps to put on a "look how happy we are together" in three acts for me to record, then transcribe, for the uninvited public audience? Am I skeptical? A little, just like you. Look where she lives. Look what she gets to do for a living. She always speaks her mind, and on top of that, she says she's in love. The press has ridiculed her for all of these things. So why has she invited me here? The fly doesn't have the home-court advantage in the web, but why do I suspect that she has become the spider? Have I played into the hands of my own profession? Maybe an uncontrollable streak of envy has arrested me in a million-dollar prison of rich tapestries and way-too-happy- looking home photos floating about me.

"Here's the thing," Heche says, laughing, when I ask her point blank about my invitation. "I really don't like leaving here unless I get paid." At least she's retained her sense of humor. "Honestly," she elaborates, "I love for people to come into our world. With all the stuff we've been through the past year, we could have gotten bogged down with a lot of self-pity, doubt, and negativity. Through all of it, Ellen and I decided we needed to get out life grounded, so we decided to create heaven. If nobody gets it, we'll get it. If nobody else understands what we're doing, we'll understand what we're doing. We'll create heaven and then let everyone come in and see." Other then that, what's happened in the past year? "My hair's gotten back to the same length it was a year ago," she says, still laughing. "Other then that? The world."

ANNE & ELLEN, ACT I
(Ellen enters the room)
Anne: Hi, angel.
Ellen: Hi, baby.
Anne: Dale wants to know why after everything we've been through and the press lying why I would let him into our home.
Ellen: This is a period of trust for us. There, we're trusting you. We'll have to have you beat up if we find out you turn out to be the enemy. Big guys with guns. Other then that, we're completely normal.
Anne: But they won't have ammunition.
Ellen: No, they won't actually shoot you, but they will beat you up with the guns. We don't believe in guns for shooting.

They seem genuine enough, but there is never a curtain after the first act. It's also the first act of Anne's new life as leading lady, opposite Harrison Ford in the romantic comedy 6 Days/7 Nights. Ford is a gruff pilot who hates tourists. Heche, of course, is a brassy New York tourist on an island vacation with her new fiancee, David Schwimmer. Heche abruptly needs to cut her vacation short and charters Ford to fly her off, sans Schwimmer. The plane goes down in a storm, and the two find themselves stranded on a deserted island.

Heche landed the role, but ended up firing her manager and agent along the way. "They wanted me to hide my relationship with Ellen under the guise of what's best for my career. I was up for 6 Days/7 Nights when all of this was going down," she explains, recounting the period when she began seeing Ellen. "Just that very statement 'what was best for my career,' I disagree with. It's like, 'You're in love, but it's better for your career if you say you aren't.' Has the world really come to believe the absurdity that your career is really more important then love?" Not the whole world, but apparently her former agent and manger did. They led her to believe that if she showed up at the Volcano premiere with Ellen that Disney would tell her to kiss the part good- bye.

She went with Ellen and got the part anyway.
But will the audience buy the sexual tension between a lesbian and Harrison Ford? "It was like everyone at the time was saying, 'Can she pull it off,' rather then, 'Look, she did it,'" says Heche. "There should be a lot of concerns about any two people who get together in a movie being able to pull it off because of their chemistry. I understand that. No one ever had a concern about Harrison pulling it off because he was married." True, but Ford isn't married to a man who just came out on the cover of Time. "I'll give you that, but what was funny to me was if I could pull it off with a man was the least of it. Practically ever part I've ever done has been playing opposite a man. When I get on a set, I do my job--that's something that has fallen on the wayside, fear that I can't do my job. When you work with Harrison, you'd better at least come up to par. If I didn't have the body and foundation of work that I do, I would have never been hired. It's not like I woke up one day and someone said, 'She can't act.' No one was speaking negatively about my work, because my work didn't matter." And what if she was a straight woman playing a lesbian? "Did it in The Wild Side [in 1995, with Christopher Walken and Joan Chen]. No one batted an eyelid. They thought, Wow, that's kind of sexy, we can fantasize about that."

After finishing work on 6 Days, Heche fully expected to be benched from acting until the public expressed its approval or disapproval of her life in the form of box-office receipts. Surprisingly, an offer came to the table rather quickly for Force Majeure, opposite Vince Vaughn. "Getting the movie with Vince has been a blessing," she says, "because its shown me there are some people in this town who don't operate on fear and it gives me hope that my career can be everything people expected of it. So I'm not the fantasy they made out in their head, their fantasy isn't my fantasy of who I want to be."

ANNE & ELLEN, ACT II
Anne: Honey, would you please come here and listen to this noise at the window.
Ellen: I don't hear too much.
Anne: It's been a hell of a lot noisier. It's just calmed down. What do you think, the pipes?
Ellen: And it's only at this window?
Anne: There, hear that?
Ellen: Honey, do you know what? See that cement mixer across the street? It's the guy across the street.
Anne: Oh, you mean that big, big, noisy cement mixer across the street?
Ellen: I love you, but you're no Angela Lansbury.
Anne: So many things can break down.
Ellen: It's an old house, so sometimes we think we might have a ghost.
Anne: That time I didn't think it was ghosts. We do have ghosts, though.
Ellen: Great, now it's a bunch of them.

Any other actress in the world would have scripts thrown at them right and left after doing a movie with Harrison Ford, not even by being good in the movie, but just by being in it," says Heche, explaining her current state of limbo. "But that's part of the discrimination I've encountered and part of my learning and understanding." Though Disney did give her the part in 6 Days/7 Nights because "I was the best actress for it," the studio, parent company to ABC, the network that airs "Ellen", has backed away from DeGeneres, leaving the series in the sure-to-be- canceled zone for months without so much as a phone call. Disney has been alternately supportive and critical of the women taking home their mouse-eared paychecks. First Anne was out and Ellen was in, then Ellen was out and Anne was in. And when Heche is asked whether or not the dumping of "Ellen" is discrimination, the answer "absolutely" falls flatly from her mouth. Her recent experiences with discrimination have given her a litmus test for whom she will work with in the future. "Believe me," she says, "I have a list of everyone who literally stepped back when they saw me coming. Some are already apologizing. You didn't want to work with me then? Guess what? I don't want to work with you now." It's a luxury she can now afford, with the prospect of a hit movie in what she calls "an ass-kissing town."

Of course, if Heche truly was hated by everybody, she wouldn't have gotten the role with Disney. The hating of Heche is most attributed to an appearance on Oprah, during which she stated that she was a straight woman who fell in love with Ellen, a lesbian woman. Ellen took the more popular belief that she's been gay since birth. Both the heterosexual and homosexual communities were up in arms over Heche's statements. How could she be straight one moment, then gay the next? If she wasn't born gay, what could she say to an entire gay community who felt that they were, and explain the feelings and turmoil of their lives if homosexuality is a choice and not mere genetics? The Oprah fiasco was turned into a skit on Saturday Night Live, and Heche was buried in an avalanche of press--almost all of it overwhelmingly unfavorable. Nevertheless, the Anne-as- publicity-hound theory was hatched.
 "Who has ever come out and said they were gay and it catapults their career to stardom?" she asks with apparent sincerity. "Yep, say you're gay and watch those career doors fly open. It's never been done before, so, if I'm the first, I must be pretty damn brilliant. The whole question of this being a publicity stunt is absurd--on one hand I'm told I'm going to lose my career, on the other it's for publicity. It's like, How dare she. How dare she be somebody I can't put away neatly in a box with a label.

"Look at my track record," she continues. "Anytime anyone has ever said 'do this and it will help your career,' I went screaming the other direction. They told me when I moved to L.A. that I would work because I was blond. What did I do? I dyed my hair black. They told me to get a nose job. Forget it. I have always put obstacles in my way and never taken the easy route." Which leads us back to that thing called her career. The thing that got lost in the post-coming-out shuffle. Remember, The girl on the brink? "They've been talking about that brink for 10 years," she tells me, with more then a tinge of sarcasm in her voice. "Guess what" There is no brink. I've always been on the brink of something someone else has an idea of. There was the Volcano brink, the Donnie Brasco brink, the Walking & Talking and The Juror brink, I'm on the brink of what's going to happen the next day, and that IS the brink."

ANNE & ELLEN, ACT III
Ellen: OK, know what?
Anne: No, I don't know, what?
Ellen: OK, there's a plane above our house. OK, it's not really just above our house, because it's in the sky, and the sky is big, so it's also over other people's houses. It's writing question marks in the sky. What do you think that means?
Anne: Why?
Ellen: Because I'm curious.
Anne: No, why?
Ellen: OK, now I see what you are saying. Come on, I'm lonely. You've been away too long.
Anne: Dale just asked the "are we going to have a baby" question.
Ellen: You talk about our baby. I have to go feed the baby. When the baby gets hungry, the baby gets a little cranky. (She leaves the room, mocking a crying baby down the hall.) Here I come, little Anne and Ellen's baby.

They both have Emmys, but if this is a performance for my benefit, they both deserve Oscars. Genuine affection? Most likely. They both say this relationship is for life, and even if it isn't, it wouldn't be the first Hollywood love affair to fall off the back of the truck. In official response to the baby question, the answer is no for the time being, but they haven't ruled out anything in their lives.

Before Ellen, Heche was known as the woman who broke Steve Martin's heart. "I know, I know. I think I might have, but sometimes we need our hearts broken to go on with life's journey," she says, with the first bit of sadness I've seen all day. "We weren't a perfect match. And I wanted that perfect match." Everybody needs a broken heart? I wonder if Ellen's has ever been broken, and ask Heche about her supposed affair with her Force Majeure co-star, Vince Vaughn, a story making the latest rounds of Hollywood's unsubstantiated-rumor mill. "Oh, I've heard," she says, rolling her eyes as if she knew this was coming. "I don't respond to anything like that. We've heard the rumors and it's so, 'It's five o'clock,' know what I mean? Oh, i's been a year, it's time for Anne to have an affair with a man. Gee, we didn't know THAT rumor was going to start. It's literally like tick-tick-tick-- -ding! Anne is still heterosexual. The only surprise is that it happened a few days before we expected it."

So is Anne really in love? If not, most people would kill to be this not in love. Will she have a career? The box office is still out, but don't doubt her. And most importantly, why is Anne Heche hated by so many people? She explains in the doorway of her mansion--her gardener buzzing away at the grounds outside, her dogs, Murphy and Trevor, playing in her yard. "Look." she says. "Go for it all. I did. You CAN have it all--you just have to be willing to give up what you already have." I leave the estate with all the security and high walls, looking for the missing picket fence. Everyone doesn't hate HER, everyone hates a damn picket fence.
(Reprinted without permission)