1. L.A. STORY

Rose McGowan tries to be nice. Really, she does. But the 23-year-old actress, best known to mainstream audiences for her star turn in Scream, and to a growing cult of indie fans for her role in Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation, among other flicks, finds that Los Angeles is not a city that repays kindness in kind. Which is a City-of-Angels-related irony that the often-ironic Rose fully appreciates.
"Yeah, I don't know," says Rose, stretched out on the floor of a little alcove just off the bedroom in her boyfriend's Laurel Canyon house (more about him later), playing with her dogs, Bug and Fester. "I just rescued a dog the other morning, it was really funny. It was in the middle of Melrose -- this poor little fluffy dog, the kind that never gets outside unless it's a total accident. I ran into the middle of the street -- it was almost getting hit by every single car and no one was stopping. I'm not saying 'Oh, I'm Mother Teresa,' but ... so then I was going around in like a mile radius and asking every person I saw walking by, which, this being Los Angeles, wasn't many.
"And finally someone said, 'Oh, I saw a bald guy walking it this morning. I think he lives in one of these apartment buildings.' There were like four apartment buildings in a row. I go into one, doing my little super-sleuthing. I walk down the hall and I see this S&M flyer stuck to someone's door and I think: bald guy. So I knock on his door, and I hear this 'Fuck you!' Knock knock knock. 'Fuck off!' 'Oh. Well, I was just trying to see if you recognize this dog?' 'Yeah. It's mine. Leave it!' 'Umm, I'm not gonna leave this dog with you unless you open the door and show me that you even know what dog it is.' So like this hand comes out, grabs the dog, throws it back in. But then someone came down from upstairs saying 'Yes, it really is his dog, and the guy's just psychotic.' So basically I get told to fuck off and have the door shut in my face."
For trying to be nice, I suggest.
"Well, whatever," replies Rose. "I was being nice to the dog, not to him, I guess."
"And then you wonder if it was even the right thing to do, giving it back to him."
"Exactly. Oh dear Christ, what are you gonna do? You know the fruit sellers on the side of the road? I always give money to them. They're actually out there working. Even if you don't want their fruit, they're out there busting their ass, you know, dawn till dusk. I don't think I have white person guilt or anything, I just think it's how I was raised, very service-oriented. I just kind of have a hard time.... [The movie business] is a very 'me' industry. I think that factors into it, but I think it's also just probably my nature. Probably to like a fault of maybe helping people who don't want to be helped. Now I am sounding like I'm Mother Teresa"
No, not at all.
"I'm a shriveled up little troll ball," she insists. "I actually didn't like Mother Teresa. She creeped me out. I bet if you took off her little hat she'd have like big huge furry blue hair. Like a troll."
Whatever her other talents, Rose isn't terribly good at self-description. Even dressed down, in a blue top and what she describes as "pajama pants," her hair pulled up and secured by what look like Mardi Gras beads, she doesn't resemble a "shriveled up little troll ball." She looks like a movie star, albeit one without portfolio, at present. You recognize her face even if you haven't seen one of her ten or so (mostly obscure) movies: These days, as the public face of the clothing company Bebe, her vampish features have been plastered on ads over bustops, billboards, and magazines. She's recently finished a couple of new movies, too: Jawbreaker, a black comedy directed by Darren Stein, and Southy, which recently won Best Picture at the Seattle Film Festival, but whose release date is uncertain.
None of which helps explain what she has against Mother Teresa.
"She was helping people," Rose adds helpfully, "which, granted, is nothing to sneeze at, but, because of the Catholicism, not giving them any birth control. And in a Third World country, with women dying because of having given birth to 12 kids, you give them birth control. It's obviously a huge problem, much bigger than one person ... but you're just putting Band-Aids on everything. The problem is overpopulation, essentially. And that's how they get, what? Poisoning of their water systems with cholera and every other sort of thing. Granted, I have never been to Calcutta. But I have been to Beverly Hills."

2. ROSE-COLORED GLASSES

In Jay McInerney's latest novel, Model Behavior, his protagonist is a jaded "entertainment writer" for a big women's magazine. Said writer had determined over the course of his career that there are really only two types of actor. One is the Solipsist, who "speaks only of himself, not believing in the existence of anyone else." The other, the Seducer, has the opposite problem, insecure regarding his own existence, and who thus "has to seek verification from every possible fan ... working it like a politician ... trying to seduce us all one at a time."
I'm having trouble trying to fit Rose McGowan into one of these two slots. In truth, as much as it might be cliché to say that an actress subverts clichés about actresses, Rose does resist characterization to an unusual degree. Preconceptions exist (wild-child-with-a-mile-wide-dark-side, basically), but these prove worthless as yardsticks for determining as much of her "true" nature as you're ever going to discover in the course of a magazine profile.
She's friendly, sure, but not overly so -- there's a reserve, a line she draws, over which you dare not step. But she doesn't seem very concerned with actorly things like "status" or "career" either. You get the sense that, for all her relative youth and the ambition often attendant on that condition, she could take or leave the movie business. Her extant work has hardly catapulted her to the heights of celebrity (though paradoxically, despite her slimmish resume, she's better known than most "indie" actresses), but she doesn't seem in a hurry to boost her profile. Nor does it bother her that most of her work has been in independent films thus far.
"I've only been acting for three-and-a-half years," Rose explains. "And basically, unless you're on Party Of Five, or Buffy The Vampire Slayer...."
I like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I offer weakly.
"You might want to keep that to yourself. I mean, I'm sure they're fine shows, and, if I was smart, I would just go get myself hired on one, and then immediately I could be like making big studio pictures. But I also think that might be a shorter term approach, and I'm perfectly okay about [where I am] anyway, since I came into this whole thing kind of accidentally anyway. I'm just kind of wandering through -- I mean, I work very hard, but at the same time, it's not like there's a plan that you can approach this sort of thing with, 'cause like with any freelance job, you have no idea what the hell's going on."
So your self-esteem isn't based on getting a particular part in a particular big-budget movie.
"I sort of try to keep it as a pie slice in my live instead of the entire pie. Otherwise, it'd make me completely insane."
Well, like you say, you didn't move here to do this.
"No, if I came here from Ohio or someplace and said, 'Goddammit, I'm gonna make all those bastards in high school realize they were wrong....' I mean, don't get me wrong, all the bastards in high school were wrong, but it wasn't my goal."
In fact, Rose didn't come from "Ohio or someplace," but from a bunch of someplaces, beginning in Italy, where her parents belonged to a religious commune, the Children Of God; the same one River Phoenix grew up in. Things got progressivley weirder. Rose has referred in the past to her formative years as "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" ("From the ages 13-16, I did a million-and-a-half strange, dangerous, wild things," she once said), but doesn't want to talk about any of that today. ("Boring. I'm an adult now, kind of. I've grown. Can't we grow together?") Suffice it to say that Rose has lived, and more intensely than most. she bears the emotional scars of her turbulent upbringing, which lend a palpable sense of repressed anger and pain to the roles she assays, most typically in her sardonic, bitter turn as Amy Blue in 1995's The Doom Generation.
Which was also her first movie, and moreover one for which she was cast without the benefit of previous acting credentials.
"I was visiting L.A., blah blah blah," says Rose, "there was this kid that I had known when I was 16, and then through weird coincidences, ran into him again, came down here to visit him three or four yeas later.... Anyway, he was in that gym on Beverly and Martel, butt row, the one with all the thongs, and the discount memberships, for having to look at that, I guess. And I was kind of standing outside, and he came out with Gregg Araki's best friend, this woman Eileen. I was like, no no no, my idea of actors is like Kirk Cameron, I'm not really into that. But thanks! But then I read it and it was just so much like, 'Oh, of course.' Although I still didn't understand that I had to translate that into doing it -- that was weird."
You wee how old at this point?
"Probably about 20. Nineteen and a half. It's funny -- and it's cute -- but I always have people saying, 'Oh, gosh, the whole Hollywood chapter, is that the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you?' I'm like, 'God, no. I wish.' I'd be on fucking easy street. And not that it's been only apples and oranges since -- there's been some strawberries, too. It's just a chapter. Who knows how long it'll go on for, and that's perfectly fine. It's like one of those situations where you know what you're capable of and you just have to keep chipping away at that damned glass ceiling until you can let it all come out. I know that I have so much more in me that the stuff I've been able to let it out in, per se. But you do what you can, you try to do your best with what's available. Besides the fact that the chips are really stacked against you, just being a woman in this industry, and I know that's like a really cliché thing to say, but it's true, the odds really are against you. But I think, dammit, I'm gonna have my Oscar and eat it, too. (laughs)
"If I had a wish for my career I'd like to bring back a Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon crossed with your Barbara Stanwyck/Eva Gardner kind of thing, sorta mix it all up, but basically that crazy thing of actually looking like, to a certain extent, a movie star, and being able to act, too. 'Cause they're really not synonymous right now. There's like one or the other. And I just think, well, okay, since basically people gravitate toward people who look a certain way to be in movies, why does that have to mean that a lot of them suck? And I'm not saying everybody does, there's some fine actresses out there right now, but I really think that so much of this stuff, like hiring people from TV -- not all TV shows, 'cause basically I just realized that I did a movie [Scream] with two people from TV shows that are hugely successful, and I don't mean them, they're extremely nice. Courteney Cox and Neve Campbell. They're so sweet, and I don't mean them, because I think they're both very good. Now that I've stuck my foot in my mouth, let's go somewhere else."

3. THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

We're walking up the steps to the Laurel Canyon house where today's interview will take place. It's a lovely place, with a little goldfish pond out front and a pool with deck in back; I tell Rose as much, and she says, "Thanks, but it's not mine. Although I don't really want to talk about whose it is, if you don't mind."
The house belongs, in fact, to Rose's current boyfriend, Marilyn Manson, and I suppose it's understandable (if disappointing) that she doesn't want to talk about him. She's worried that the focus will shift to her more famous boyfriend, or that the sensational aspects of Manson's persona will influence the tone of the article and overshadow her own considerable gifts and accomplishments. But even though I don't get to ask such potentially fascinating questions as "Who does the dishes?" or "Who spends more time in the bathroom getting read?" small leaks spring from time to time in Rose's wall of silence. These are due partly to her evident pride in and affection for Manson -- whom she will only refer to as "my boyfriend" throughout the course of our time together -- and partly to the fact that we're conducting the interview in the guy's goddamn house -- more or less in his bedroom, for that matter.
For the record: The house, while sloppily maintained in the best hoary rock tradition, shows little evidence of the touted outré tendencies of its owner. Guitar cases are stacked in the hallway near the front door, the kitchen is stocked with junk food ("This is the land of preservatives," quips Rose), and the upstairs windows are uniformly covered in what look like bedsheets -- most likely in deference to Rose's sun-sensitive Irish-derived skin rather than from any vampiric tendencies.
"That was quick," calls a voice (belonging to someone apparently under the impression Rose has finished her interview already) from a room off the hallway as we walk through the front door.
"Hi, Twiggy," replies Rose, motioning me to keep quiet. "Yeah, I told them to fuck off and they left," she jokes. She picks up a parcel sitting on the floor near the stairs that lead to the second floor. "I'm more or less obsessed with Howard Stern," she confides. "Well, obsessed is too strong. Someone sent me the videotape of his spot on the Magic Johnson show." Gestures toward the box. "I can't wait to watch it."
Upstairs, she ties back one of the "curtains" with a bra lying handily on the floor, laughing at her ingenuity, and shovels more debris around the room with her feet. Bug and Fester, her two-year-old pug-like pets, follow her perambulations slavishly, until she settles on the floor with a cup of yogurt. Rose dotes on her dogs, which are cute and vaguely grotesque, in a way that's both genuine and self-aware of the actress-with-dogs rote; at one point she pulls out a pair of remarkably accomplished watercolors that "my boyfriend painted" of the two creatures. He seems like an extremely talented fellow.
A bookshelf in the bedroom alcove offers little further evidence of her boyfriend's dark-side-related interests: a bunch of Philip K. Dick novels and the collected works of Edgar A. Poe, both of which items can also be found in my bookcase. A cursory glance at a pile of CDs on the floor reveals His Satanic Majesty to be a Eurythmics fan. On the wall is an oversized poster for The Doom Generation. (In his autobiography, Manson includes a diary entry where he moons over McGowan while watching said movie; he's of the pre-meeting-her opinion that because of her disorderly childhood, Rose would probably be able to understand him.) Revealing stuff. Later, during a brief bathroom break, I am confronted by a dizzying array of makeup arranged around the sink. I resist an ur ge to catalog the many colors.
As we talk, Rose's dry humor and unflinchingly irreverent take on life in general and her business in particular is balanced by her well-developed sense of realism about, uh, life in general and her business in particular.
"Everybody thinks that people in the movie industry are these evil assholes," she opines, "which, you know, they are, but in any job there are -- in any world or office or anything that you're in ... it's the same set of high school problems that people just like to relive over and over. I've been lucky. I really set out to .... I have some really cool people working with me that are -- if it doesn't sound too retarded -- like the most soulful that I could find. And I'm really lucky, 'cause they're great. But it depends on who you attract. There's that thing they say, the healthier you are, like that's who you'll attract. Or the sicker you are: I used to attract some really fine specimens, in all kinds of ways. Friends, boyfriends, whatever. I was definitely a lot more messed up. Although then again, look who I'm attracting now. Something to pause and ponder. (laughs)
"Bug and Fester, you love me, don't you? (in funny dog voice) 'Yes we do!' Oh my God, I'm turning into one of those actresses who go, 'I just like to stay home and hang out with my dogs and take walks in the hills.' For the record, I don't like walking."
Well, you moved to the right place. No one walks in Los Angeles.
"Everybody rags on L.A. for that particular reason, but I actually really like it here. It's been very good to me."
Still, for someone with an independent, not to say contrarian, bent, the movie business must be occasionally frustrating.
"Just anybody being in a creative structure and having different ideas about stuff...." says Rose. "It's not like I'm Akira Kurosawa over here. Actually I am, with breasts. (laughs) I have a lot of issues to work out. Dammit, you guys are free therapy."
I thought the process of acting was what you people used for therapy.
"The process of acting...." she muses. "I don't know what it entails. I don't really believe in The Method, per se. But whatever floats your boat. It's hard when you work with Method actors, because they do it to you. To me, it's not necessary if you're playing an asshole to be an asshole to the person who brings you water on the set. See, I have a whole lot of pain stored up, and I can access it easily. So that generally helps." (laughs)
That tends to be reflected in the characters you play, I suggest.
"To a very small part, to be honest, because a lot of my stuff is comedy, or black comedy, I should say, which certainly fits in line with my sense of humor."
Well, sarcasm is deflected anger...
"...And anger hides pain, so there you go. I think if I walked around crying all the time, life would be better. People would be nice to me, they would thank me for bringing their dog back...."
Things aren't that bad, surely. At least you're working.
"I've been pretty lucky," agrees Rose. "I've achieved a lot of visibility in a short time. But at the same time, where do you go from there? I'm not a character actor. I'm not gonna work constantly. There's your Joe Pescis, and then there's your Robert Refords. Hey, I'm Robert Redford. (laughs) Lucky me. I just watched Three Days Of The Condor, that's probably where that came from. And maybe the Joe Pescis work a lot more often, because there's more roles available for them. And the other side is more specific, and it's rare that there's anything I would be attracted to that they would be attracted to me for. But if they were smart...."

If you ever have the bad luck to find yourself required, for whatever reason, to attend a magazine photo shoot, here's a tip: bring something to read. Photo shoots rank second only to drummer-based rock soundchecks as totems of tedium in the entertainment industry. Rose spends the first three or four hours in makeup, as various photo assistant types, stylists, fashion and photo editors, and other hangers-on (me) wander through the Pacific Palisades home chosen by the location scout for its '50s, space age bachelor pad vibe.
Browsing the bookshelves in search of a palliative for my boredom, I stumble upon a copy of Eros magazine, which was a sort of higher-toned Playboy coeval back in the martini-soaked Eisenhower years. Artful pictures of semi-undressed women are accompanied by coy essays about French ticklers. What strikes me about the magazine is its air of refinement and sophistication regarding erotic matters, very much absent in today's overly-graphic, sex-crazed cultural environment. What's missing in the febrile present is subtlety, and art, and glamour, all three of which Rose would like to see revived, preferably through her own efforts.
Toward which end she's enlisted famous makeup guy Paul Starr, responsible for helping create the "look" for glam giants David Bowie and Boy George, as well as having worked with actors like Sherilyn Fenn (he created her Twin Peaks look), Sophia Loren, Bette Davis, Cameron Diaz, and on and on. (I also recently worked with Marilyn Manson -- Rose's boyfriend, although I'm not sure I'm supposed to say that.") "For Rose, we're trying to update a '50s, Marilyn Monroe sort of thing -- classic, but sexier," explains Starr during a break from his labors. He first met Rose on the set of The Doom Generation, and the two have remained friends since.
"She's intelligent, she's funny, and she's beautiful," enthuses Starr. "Her acting is real -- it comes from the soul; I think in that way she's similar to someone like Christina Ricci. I don't know why no one's thought of putting those two in a movie as sisters. That would be amazing."
Later in the day, as the assembled crew sets up a shot in front of a bright pink wall, I overhear Rose telling a story.
"I was once in jail," she offers nonchalantly, as if everyone's been in jail (she was only there for one night, it turns out), "and supposedly just before that they did a study where hot pink was supposed to soothe you. So the walls were painted pink. But I found it very annoying."

4. ROSE MADDER

"I think to a certain extent I probably screw myself over, when I get too, uh, raucous." Rose is worried that her sarcastic humor won't translate well in print. Her publicist has warned her to tone it down a bit, but the girl can't help it. We discuss whether I should describe her frequent laughter as "hearty" or just "amused". Whichever, it might be better pegged as "constant."
Less easy to limn is the curlicued, involute pattern of her conversation, the sudden subject shifts along obscure fault lines, generally neuroses-driven. Rose boasts a good number of neuroses, by her own admission. There was the period, for instance, where she fell into the habit of repeating everything she heard or read backwards. ("It got kind of bad, where if someone wanted to introduce me, they'd say 'This is Rose McGowan.' 'Esor Nawogcm.' And they'd go, 'Okay, freaky.'") Or the year she developed agoraphobia, and would only leave the house once a week, and even then at three or four in the morning. ("I spent far too much time alone.") There's the addiction to crossword puzzles, the violent nightmares, the insomnia, the passing obsession with Grape-Nuts cereal that rendered her unable to travel without a backup supply.
And then there's fish.
"I hate, dislike intensely, fish," she relates, with a faint shudder of discomfort. "There was this carpet the other day I almost bought. It was this really cool orange color, and this cool print, it was from like the late '50s, and then they unrolled it, and it was shaped like a giant fish, complete with an eye and a smiling mouth, and I just couldn't get over it. I'm just not gonna have anything that had scales in my home."
Didn't I see some goldfish out front? I ask.
"Those aren't mine. I'm not into those at all. And I'm pretty sure they smell." Her hazel eyes glower with piscicidal intent.
"Are you a confrontational person?" I ask, visions of skewered goldfish dancing in my head.
"I'm pretty genial," replies Rose, "but if you just pulled my dog's ear off or something I'd probably put my foot through your face. I'm just very protective. I had one boyfriend that I kept in a closet for five hours. And I don't even remember it because I was so angry. I was gonna like kill him with this broken bottle that I had."
You locked him in?
"Well, he was scared to come out."
Don't blame him. Ever feel like maybe you need to talk to someone professionally about ... you know, your issues?
"Probably. I also think it's just fine to deal with things in the subconscious. When I'm not awake. (laughs) I have better things to do during the day, dammit! I've gotta avoid fish! You know, whatever."
I guess avoiding fish somehow feeds into your acting ability in some weird way.
"I have no idea," says stumped Rose. "In this movie Southy, I play this alcoholic, who's totally having a breakdown through the whole movie, and I'm like sobbing for12 or 14 hours a day in front of a hundred people. It's very intense, very personal work. How do you do that? I don't know, I just can. I just am gone. I know what I'm capable of, I know what I can do, and I can't wait to get to do it."
Neither can we, Rose. Neither can we.