Out Magazine, April 1998

Leading Lady Anne Heche is a winner. She's gone from tawdry soaps (Another World), to respectable indie films (Donnie Brasco) to big-budget Hollywood action-adventure movies (this month's 6 Days, 7 Nights). She's also a passionate lover who's romanced stars from Steve Martin to Ellen DeGeneres, and, if you believe the tabloids, Vince Vaughn. Truth is, we all know who she's with-- but who, exactly, is Anne Heche?

Getting undressed while a dozen people watch. Making love to someone you just met. Waking up in a stranger's bed. If you think it's tough being gay, try being an actor, when your professional life is filled with riches of embarrassment. Unless you're Anne Heche. When she had to kiss Joan Chen in a long-forgotten 1995 film called Wild Side, it was so not a biggie. When she held her boyfriends willie while he tinkled in the 1996 indie hit Walking & Talking, it was her idea. And when Harrison Ford -- the dashing actor from Star Wars, the first movie she ever saw -- sticks his hand down her pants in June's "romantic action-adventure comedy extravaganza," 6 Days, 7 Nights (Buena Vista), Heche played it for laughs. "Better not catch you smiling," she growls at Ford. Now imagine how nerve-racking it might be to walk into a TV studio and tell Oprah, and hence the world, that four weeks ago you met the love of your life, and she's America's funniest woman. And that your Christian choir-director father was a closeted homosexual who died of AIDS. For Anne Heche, it was a piece of cake. "I've lived my life in truth always," she has said.

This is Anne Heche: Free spirit, herstory-making movie star, accidental advocate for freedom of sexual choice. Forget for a minute--as if--that she is also the self-proclaimed wife of Ellen DeGeneres, and consider this: Long before she became the outest, proudest lesbian Thespian on the planet, Anne Heche was a fierce and fearless young actress. She wasn't even a teenager when she helped support her family by appearing in musicals at a local dinner theater. By the time she graduated high school, the Gemini actress had been playing good and evil twins for four years on Another World, snagging a daytime Emmy in 1990.In 1993, she re-located to Los Angeles and worked steadily in cable-TV dramas, network shows, and local theater productions. Three years later, Heche wowed the indie film world with two Sundance Favorites, Pie In The Sky and Walking & Talking, and lit up the Demi Moore-Alec Baldwin thriller The Juror, playing Moore's doomed best friend. Last year, she won the National Board of Review's Best Supporting Actress prize for her emotionally charged work as Johnnie Depp's long-suffering wife in Donnie Brasco and critically acclaimed, crisply sardonic turn as a presidential spin controller in Barry Levinson's Wag The Dog, a role originally written for a man. She raised goosebumps as a crazy hermit in 1997's teen-horror-cash-in I Know What You Did Last Summer, and wrote, directed, and starred in her self-financed directorial debut, a short religious parody called Stripping For Jesus. Then there was Volcano, a satire about Los Angeles after the riots masquerading as a disaster movie. It was Heche's first big-budget starring role (opposite Tommy Lee Jones); she played a no- bullshit seismologist who saves LA and Mr. Jones teenage daughter from a nasty lava flow. Early in the film, her associates, a short-haired specs-wearing female (a dyke semaphore) bites the volcanic dust, falling--get this--into a fiery crack in the earth.("That's the thing about Hollywood," Anne observes. "If you're a strong woman you're either borderline lesbian or a bitch.")

All of these potentially embarrassing situations pale in comparison to the Spaghetti Dinner Incident.
The cast: Anne, her lover, and her Mother-in-law.
The setting: A tiny little restaurant in LA's Larchmont Village. "We were in the window booth and I started feeling warm," Anne recalls. "So I went to take off my sweater, but I ended up taking off my entire shirt just as three women were walking by and staring at us. And since I never wear a bra, it looked ike I was flashing these three girls to bring them on over to our side."

Ridiculous as it was, Volcano opened #1 at the box office on Memorial Day, 1997. But it will forever be remembered for one reason: Anne Heche's date at the premiere. She met Ellen DeGeneres at an Oscar party thrown by Vanity Fair. "It was so queer," Anne laughs. "Because it was like the room faded and everyone there became these strange celestial beings figures disappearing." Anne, who has never really had much use for a TV, had never seen "Ellen". "I had no idea she was some gay icon," she shrugs. Not that it mattered. "I took her hand the first night we met, and as we're walking out into the press she's saying, 'You can't do this.' She had never held hands with a woman in public." The two ended up at Ellen's that night. "I hadn't been sexually involved with a woman before, so I was a little nervous about that," Anne recalls. "But then we kissed, and that sealed the deal." They were together each night thereafter, and on the fourth day, Anne gave her an antique diamond ring and popped the question. Ellen freaked. There was so much to consider: She had been there and done that with straight girls who were experimenting. "Since I was supposedly straight," Anne explains, "She had to be thinking, was I really telling the truth? Was this something she could count on? She had just come out and certainly didn't want to be with somebody where she'd have to go into hiding again." Oh, it gets worse. Anne was high up in the running for the starring role in 6 Days, 7 Nights; her advisors, including then-manager Doug Robinson told her not to go to the Volcano premiere with Ellen.
"It was ugly to see such fear and homophobia," Anne remembers. "It really made my priorities clear in a second. When you're surrounded by people who supposedly know you, and they're telling you everything you've worked for is going to be taken from you, and the only thing you have to fall back on is the fact that in your heart you've never felt so complete, you're willing to give up anything." Including, she decided, Robinson, and managers Keith Addis and Nick Wechsler. (Anne has since returned to Creative Artists Agency with Bryan Lourd, who made waves in Hollywood a few years ago when he left his wife, Carrie Fisher, for a man.) "People really think you should give up everything to become a movie star,"Anne exclaims indigently. "I've had so many people tell me what to do. And I've mostly done the opposite and made that my truth, which always got me back on track. And," she laughs, "A lot of therapy helped. I doubt I would ever be this public about my life and love if it weren't doing what I know it's doing for the world, and for the idea that you'd give up everything for love." But in the end, she didn't have to give up a thing. She got the part. And the girl. And the star on the dressing-room door.

Which brings me to her gate on a fine, early spring day this past March.
It's the day after the Academy Awards--and Anne and Ellen's first anniversary. (I bring them an ivy topiary in the shape of a heart; they gave each other poems....and diamonds.) Anne swings open the wrought-iron door and beckons me into the vast tower-shaped foyer. She's barefoot, not pregnant, wearing a sleek copper and navy dip-dyed confection (Is it a slip? Is it a dress? Only her costumer knows for sure.) Her short pixie cut looks a bit like she feels, a little hungover. Last night she and Ellen had watched the Oscars at home, "then we got all dolled up" and went to the Vanity Fair party at Morton's where they met last year. Ellen's dogs, Trevor, a golden lab, and Murphy, a kissie-face mutt with canine halitosis, bound around Anne as we head into the kitchen for a Diet Coke. Anne shows me around their newlywed nest, a recently remodeled Mediterranean house in one of LA's toniest old neighborhoods. It's an impressive little sanctuary with large, high-ceilinged rooms handsomely decorated with European antiques, valuable rugs and tapestries, and whimsical touches of Moroccan design. She leads me upstairs to an enormous air master suite (The fine bed linens still in their morning tangle), complete with a terrace that overlooks the postcard-perfect pool, a double-size bathroom with hers-and-hers sinks, and an enormous handcrafted walk-in closet. She leads me back down the winding staircase past an enormous antique chandelier dripping with crystals. We head for a dining room table on the patio outside the kitchen, and Anne immediately fires up a Camel light. It won't be her last.

OUT: It seems Ivan Reitman, the director of 6 Days, was a bit of a nervous nellie about you at first. Now he just told USA Today "Anne will be a revelation."
ANNE HECHE: [After a pause, then evenly] It created some difficulty for me. I've never gone onto a set where somebody's been a little nervous about me. But I'm glad he was honest in the beginning. Because he gets to voice the opinion of every single person who would be nervous going to watch it:"Am I going to believe her? Is this going to work?"
OUT: In fact, it works like a charm. Because, initially, you and Harrison are at odds with each other, then, in the course of your swashbuckling adventures, you fall in love. And apparently Mr. Ford, who was very involved with the casting, was a true gentleman, telling USA Today, "I never comment on my co-stars' private lives."
ANNE: Private lives should stay out of the movies and out of television. The only thing that should influence people about whether to go see the movie is, do you want to watch these characters?
OUT: Do you think moviegoers will have difficulty believing you could fall for Harrison Ford?
ANNE: The whole thing is so absurd. [A tad exasperated] I mean, the guy's married. Does it mean we should question if he could be in love with me? We still fantasize about him. Whether he was a man or a woman on screen, would he all of a sudden not be Harrison Ford? We don't go through all that hullabaloo about him.
OUT: And now you are going to be the test case for whether a gay person can play a straight character. That must really work your nerves.
ANNE: My entire year should have been celebrating the fact I got a movie with Harrison. Any other actress would get tons of offers afterward. But fortunately this director, Joe Rubin, who really could have given a shit, had he courage to say, "I don't want to wait to see what happens. I want her in my movie." Force Majeure. It's a superserious drama about Malaysian drug laws.
OUT: And your co-star is Vince Vaughn, with whom, it's been rumored, you're having an affair.
ANNE: Oh, yes, it was SO predictable. Everybody so badly wants it to happen. [Ferverantly] "Please let her be a heterosexual again.

The first time I met Anne Heche, a year and change ago, she was gay-friendly, but straight. She had already ended her two-year relationship with comedian Steve Martin, 24 years her senior (an affair he recalled as "torturous"). and had broken off a romance with actor Billy Cusack (Yes, those Cusacks). She'd done her time in the Hollywood dating pool, and found it exhausting. ("My fantasy was knowing I was in love," she now says. "And if I wasn't going to have it, I was willing to be alone.") We had coffee at the not-as-hippie-as-it-sounds Urth Caffe in West Hollywood. Anne arrived in a sweater and sparkly vintage pajama bottoms, fresh from a yoga class. "So," she said with a smile, "forgive my stench." (She didn't have one.) She was energetic and soulful--peppering her conversation with words like "journeys," "gifts," "blessings," "finding the positive in every situation"--the language of seven years of therapy and New Age spirituality. Raised by devout Christians, she had learned to redefine the world and her place in it.
"Religion controls your sexuality and your relationship to God," she told me. "It's about rules. Spirituality removes the rules and lets you connect with yourself. Hey, if we can get enough people believing sex isn't shameful, we're going to be set." But it was a long journey out of poverty, blind obedience, and fear for Anne Heche. She was born May 25, 1969, in Aurora, Ohio, the youngest of Donald and Nancy Heche's four children. By the time she was 12, her family had moved 11 times. "My father led a double life, an ugly lie," she says, matter-of-factly. "He was constantly running away from home to be with his lovers. He kept going away saying he was going for a job. So then we would move to where he was running. And then he'd run from there. And eventually we were kicked out of our last house and were on the streets." It wasn't until she was 12 and working in a Trenton, New Jersey, dinner theater, making $100 a week, which the family badly needed, that Anne met other gay men. And then it just clicked, she recalls, "I got who my dad is.But we were so shrouded in religious crap that it was not an appropriate thing to bring home. And when I confronted my father with it, he lied. And I did have anger." Donald Heche died of AIDS in 1983; he was 45, Anne barely 14. "I didn't cry for five years. I had to get through high school, where I was a total misfit, a weirdo, and never dealt with one fucking thing. I didn't really have anyfriends. It would have been a very easy path into, perhaps, self- destruction, but I had already witnessed that." Her estranged sister, Susan Bergman, wrote a book about the family's experience, Anonymity (Warner, 1995). But Anne took another route; therapy was essential--and acting was therapy. She worked hard to crawl from the wreckage of her past and learn forgiveness. "I bless my father because his lack of honesty is what made me so filled with honesty. I decided to try something completely new: To say what I think all the time." Six cigarettes and 12 ounces of Diet Coke later, Anne is still smoking and thinking and talking.

She tells me about a children's story she's been writing, Adelaide, God's Fairy (which began as a series of faxes to Ellen while Anne was in Hawaii shooting), and the one-hour drama treatment she and ex-boyfriend filmmaker Jonathan Craven (yes, THAT Craven) are co-penning, potentially for Ellen. She's also optioned Robert Antoni's 1997 novel, Blessed Is The Fruit, which she hopes to develop into a movie for herself and Jada Pinkett Smith. Her enviable ability to see the silver lining of every cloud (and boy, has she seen stormy weather) and her boundless enthusiasm make talking with Anne Heche an agreeable way to spend an afternoon. Before we know it, the sun begins to set, and the evening air turns a bit chilly. Suddenly, the dogs, sensing something, barrel to the end of the manicured lawn. Mommy's home!
"Hi, sweetheart," Anne coos, breaking into a wide grin. "David, this is Ellen." Underneath the baseball cap, the woman in the white tank top, and dragonprint Stussy shorts is indeed Ms. DeGeneres. "Can I eavesdrop?" she asks. "Hey," I reply, "it's your house."
We move inside to what they call "the love lounge," a long, cozy Moroccan room with overstuffed beige couches and handcrafted wooden tables facing a stunning antique fireplace. Anne slips on a blue sweater and a pair of big floppy socks that make her look like a little girl, throws a few logs on the fire, and curls up next to Ellen. They're each other's little lambs, Mary, and wherever one is, the other's sure to go. Trevor jumps up on the sofa and nuzzles Ellen's hip. It's a Norman Rockwell moment.

OUT: The only thing missing is children. Do you want them?
ANNE: I don't rule out anything. [Laughs] Obviously. I'm up for whatever messages I get from the universe. But I feel no biological clock; I feel timeless in all ways. When I was a kid I had to be such an adult. Now I'm living in a storybook, which is my reward.
OUT: Now that the two of you have been together a year, do you think the world is more accepting?
ELLEN DEGENERES: Relationships in the beginning are hard anyway, much less with the kind of scrutiny and judgement we went through. If we didn't love each other so much, I think it would have torn us apart.
ANNE: Maybe in 15 years, they're still going to be speculating that we did it for something other then our love. But we don't really care any more what anybody else says. [Suddenly lapsing into baby talk] And how could you when she looks so cute? We try to see the enlightened side, that this is something the world has to digest, and its an honor to be a part of this new consciousness. But it gets hard to open the newspaper and read about yourself, have friends drop off the face of the planet because they don't know how to deal, and see family members turn into different people.
OUT: Is there anything you'd like to say to the National Enquirer?
ANNE: Yes--"Shut up!"
OUT: And to your mother?
ANNE: We're actually not speaking at all, but I'll always leave the door open to her. My mom has a very difficult time with this--we've had a strange history with gay people in our lives. In order for her to accept me, she's going to have to give up a great big belief system, because we've been taught it's OK to discriminate against gays.
ANNE: I was not coming out with the baggage of shame; I was coming out with the bliss of having fallen in love. I think the fear behind coming out in any form is worrying that "If I am who I am, I'm not going to be able to get what I want." Now it's starting to seep into the consciousness that you can.
OUT: Weren't you concerned about bias?
ANNE: Most people think they're sympathetic to gays, but until you're on the receiving end of it you don't really understand discrimination. It's an insidious disease in this country. It even affects us. Ellen and I were in Santa Barbara, walking down the street. I went to hold her hand, and she pulled away. "What's that?" I asked, and she said [Whispers], No, it makes people uncomfortable." I said [Righteously], "Well, it makes me uncomfortable that you won't hold my hand. Don't discriminate against me."
ELLEN: I was still dealing with the internal homophobia that I'd been living with for 20 years. I was still ashamed. And she had none of that. She was just this innocent child, like, "What" We love each other. What?"
OUT: Your appearance together at a White House dinner with President Clinton caused quite a stir.
ANNE: The truth is, I had no idea I had my arm around Ellen in front of the president. It's just how we are; we're like magnets. And then people started spreading rumors that we were kissing, which we never were. We don't make out in public. [Beaming at Ellen, who is beaming back]. That's just for us. And how awful that in this country we think we shouldn't show affection in front of the president. We should be saying to him, "Why don't you have your arm around your wife?" Well, now we probably know why.
OUT: I'm sure you can sympathize with them. After all, the whole damn world is also talking about your relationship.
ANNE: When I first went on Oprah, it was because we wanted to stop the rumors. And people just slammed me for it and said I was a bimbo. Nobody believed that I was actually in love. Yet the next week we turn on Oprah, and she's doing an entire show based on me: [In voice-over mode] "Does sexuality need to be defined?" It's a lot easier for the Religious Right to say, "oh, they're born that way"--it makes straight people feel safer, like gays have a birth defect. And I think that's kind of encouraged in the gay community. A lot of gay organizations don't understand me at all. And when I came into the picture, it also really threatened male sexuality. They're like, "Oh my God, women can just go and be with women and this is OK now? Then what's a man's purpose?"
OUT: To take out the garbage?
ANNE: [Laughing] People, and children especially, need to know that there aren't any rules about what you should feel safe to explore in your own heart. I don't consider myself to be straight. And I don't consider myself to be a lesbian--though I'm by no means ashamed of it. Yes, I'm gay. I'm in a gay relationship. I just don't like any terminology.
OUT: Why do you think straight men are so titillated by lesbians?
ANNE: Men have this fantasy of two women being together. But the truth is, when men can't be involved in that sex, it's just as negative to them as two men having sex.
OUT: What did you think of the film Chasing Amy?
ANNE: Look at that message; "I was a lesbian, but now I found the right guy." [Thinks a moment] But you know.....I could say the same thing, like I was straight and then found the right girl. So it's all blurry, it doesn't matter.
OUT: Even though the character goes back to women, it's still a straight-male fantasy: Yes, lesbianism is curable.
ELLEN: They're thinking, "I'd like to see them kiss--as log as she needs my penis."
ANNE: Are you trying to get on a soapbox during my interview? [Sighs] It's unbelievable. She won't do this in her own articles, but then she comes into mine, and she's like, "Blah, blah, blah. If they only need a cock..."
OUT: OK, you two, break it up.
ELLEN: Last night this photographer was trying to take our picture. Melissa [Etheridge] and Julie [Cypher] were with us, and he said, "Come on, boy/girl, boy/girl." We were like, "Huh?" And Julie said, "Don't you mean butch/femme, butch/femme?"
OUT: So which of you is which? Anne, you're wearing a little gloss. You must be a lip-gloss lesbian.
ANNE: I know, and it's coming off. I'd like to put some back on. I do like wearing gloss--And I like wearing dresses more then Ellen.
ELLEN: Oh, we're everything. Today is Tuesday, and I have a baseball cap on that says "Tuesdays Are Butch Days."
OUT: And you say Friday is your "date night." Is that like a Blockbuster evening?
ANNE: It's anything we want. And if we're apart or in different cities, it's still our time together-- we'll just spend five hours on the phone.
OUT: So how are you going to celebrate your first anniversary tonight?
ANNE: I'll probably cook and open a bottle of wine, and we'll sit in the Jacuzzi and play with the dogs.
If ever I've heard an exit cue, this is it. As we head to the door, Anne jumps into Ellen's embrace and wraps her legs around Ellen's waist. (Like I said, it's their house.) Which leaves me with just one question:If you're this happy at home, how does it affect your work?
ANNE:"You mean," Anne, who doesn't miss a trick, clarifies, "if I don't have any neurosis, then what?"
OUT: Exactly.
ANNE:"Well, there aren't a lot of parts I want to play. I really am very, very picky. And my life is so fulfilled, it's real difficult to find a project that's going to take me away," she explains. "I still love acting, but now I feel like the parts I choose should be about what I want to teach--and what I want to give to the world."
(Reprinted without permission)